Paris, rewound

September – October 2019

13th October:
Earlier, we’d walked through the collection, feeling paintings pulsate, and now, as I go through my camera roll, I see them with the dancers humming and shaking before them. From 2.30 to 3.30, they inhabited the space. A case of beautiful timing in every sense. A fortunate stroke of serendipity and dream.
(@liquidloft)

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“In painting, everything must be right: the lines, curves, forms, angles and colours to form an image that can last ... that is the definitive expression of a phenomenon, of an emotion. ... For me, the pleasure of living is mixed up with the pleasure of painting. When one has dedicated one’s entire life to painting, when one has tried to go always further, it is impossible to stop.”
— Hans Hartung
A retrospective of Hartung, by way of the market out the front, on a Saturday. Feel for the description of yellow’s meaning, pure colour, lithographs to illustrate the worlds of Jean Proal — “a question of death. ... I knew what was being expressed there” — watercolours and drawing-writing, and a ‘staged’ workshop.
“Several design and interior decoration magazines published articles on ‘Hartung at home’, illustrated with photographs of the living and working space. Hartung welcomes his guests in a workshop with large white walls. It is in fact an impeccable staging, this place being dedicated solely to the promotion of the artist. It was on the fifth floor, in a smaller studio, that the pictorial activity took place. The art critic Jean Clay has, from 1963, understood the set-up and felt the painter’s “distrust”, which protected his real workspace from competition and the market”.

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And stayed for You, with the sculpted and sonic resurrection of a Walking Whale from 50 million years ago, a Hell Pig from 25 million years ago, and a Mammoth Imperator from 4.5 million years ago (within Marguerite Humaeu’s The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures), and Michel Blazy’s polluted water drip-drops.
(You presents a selection of works by French and international contemporary artists from the 330 pieces in the Lafayette Anticipations Collection — the Moulin Family Endowment Fund. @museedartmodernedeparis)

14th October:
One hire car, to fly around the Arc de Triomphe like a local, and to pause in small villages like Limetz-Villez and Bennecourt where, incidentally, importantly, we met a talkative white cat. A day trip, a swell squealing day trip, with @pasadenamansions, and Louise (expertly, fearlessly, as ever) behind the wheel. I’d once asked Louise if there was anything daring she still wished to do, and renting a hire car whilst we were in Paris was it. And did it we three did. With apologies to the cyclist who dodged us driving the wrong way down a one way street at Gare de Lyon.

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Inside, only to go outside. Where the “light constantly changes, and [in doing so] alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute” (Claude Monet).

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Listening to birds fossicking and noting the busy and fuzzy pollinators in gardens orchestrated to delight in change. Making plans to move in.
“Everything is prudent, even the exuberance; everything is prepared, even that which seems wild.”
— Édouard Mortier, Duc de Trevise

14th October:
Driving around the Arc de Triumph and down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in a hire car — the one route everyone said not to take, but the route the GPS directed us to without our noticing — was the very stuff of dreams. ‘We did it! Hurrah!’ It was the ‘sod you’ Louise wished also to give to her years of chronic post-surgical pain. And from the high of this moment to the low of our GPS then directing by a route which we believed was held by the Extinction Rebellion. The bridge at Pont au Change is no longer held by the rebels and we drove through an area where previously there had been tents, hope, and a call for action, not more talk, and now. The only sign of the XR at the centre point of Paris, a line of police vehicles to rival the length of a boulevard. We also felt the weight of our own footprint, driving, flying, and using single-use plastics.
@extinctionrebellion: “If not you, who? If not now, when?⁣ This is an emergency, this is now. The choice is ours, extinction or rebellion?
The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me.
A paper published in Nature shows that we have little chance of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless existing fossil fuel infrastructure is retired. Instead the industry intends to accelerate production, spending nearly $5tn in the next 10 years on developing new reserves. It is committed to ecocide.⁣
The ideology of consumerism is highly effective at shifting blame: witness the current ranting in the billionaire press about the alleged hypocrisy of environmental activists. This individuation of responsibility, intrinsic to consumerism, blinds us to the real drivers of destruction.⁣
It’s the system we need to change, rather than the products of the system. It is as citizens that we must act, rather than as consumers.⁣”

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Claude Monet to Thiébault-Sisson:
“I have painted a lot of these water lilies, modifying each time my point of view, renewing the subject following seasons of the year, and therefore, following different luminous effects engendered by these changes. The effect besides varies incessantly. The essential of the subject is the mirror of the water whose aspect, at any one time, changes itself thanks to the expanses of sky which is reflect in it, and spreading life and movement. The passing cloud, the freshening breeze, the threatening and falling rain, the sudden gust of wind, the light failing and shining again, so many reasons, elusive to the profane eye, which transform the tint and disfigure the body of water.”

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, with the title borrowed from Claude Monet.
Monet to Georges Bernheim and René Gimpel:
“Ah gentlemen, I don’t receive people when I work, no I don’t. When I work, if I am interrupted, I lose all inspiration, I am lost. You understand easily, I am chasing a band of colour.”