Paris bulletion 9 2012

After my Thursday lunchtime concert at the Louvre I usually stay in the museum and, with my small sketch pad and my pencil case, I go wherever the mood takes me – this week it was northern European sculptures, last week it was the monumental cour Marly.  I find that if I spend even only a quarter of an hour looking hard at a lump of marble or a piece of wood and trying to get it onto the page, I remember it in its finest details in a way I never can by ‘just looking’.  The end result may not be up to much but the figure I’ve been with has found a place inside my head and stays there. 

The Louvre has lots of benches for weary visitors but few of them are well-placed for the sketcher. You can sit on the floor of course, and look upwards, or you can stand. Either of these options has its limitations. Some of the serious sketchers bring their own folding stool but mine is in Scotland at present. I decided therefore two weeks ago that I ought to show some initiative.

The Louvre has not yet gone in for that most delusory of marketing tools, ‘the customer suggestion box’. (Please do not write and tell me how many outstanding ideas have come out of customer suggestion boxes. I am as attached to my prejudices as anyone and for me, customer suggestion boxes are only one notch up from empty banalities like ‘have a nice day’ and ‘your opinion matters’). I went therefore to the information desk and explained my idea to the man behind the counter.

“Lots of people come to the Louvre to sketch. Don’t you think it would be a good idea if you kept some folding stools for hire?”

“But, Madame, we already do,” says your man with a slightly supercilious smile, ‘And not for hire, simply to borrow.”

“You mean without even a deposit?” I ask, amazed at the foresight and generosity of the museum administration.

“Exactly. No deposit required.” I had finished drawing for the afternoon but I went away well-pleased and determined to put the offer to the test the following week.

Of course it couldn’t be true.

The next time I am there I ask to borrow a stool and I find myself back in the France I know. The young woman on duty is bored and unhelpful.  I have that other man’s word for it though, so I do not give up. Finally she thrusts a leaflet at me, ‘Règlements concernant les conditions de travail des artistes copistes dans les salles et galleries du musée du Louvre’. (regulations regarding the drawing or painting of copies of works of art in the rooms and galleries of the Louvre). Thus it is that I learn the truth: while there are some perfectly serviceable tabourets pliants, tucked away in a cupboard nearby, I can’t have one without an authorisation in writing from the Bureau des copistes. The leaflet explaining all this starts as follows:

“Le présent règlement est établi en application des dispositions du décret no. 92.138 du 22 décembre 1992 portant création de l’Etablissement public du musée du Louvre, et de l’arrêté du Ministère de l’Education Nationale en date du 14 octobre 1946, portant règlement des conditions de travail des artistes ....” and so on - without a word of a lie - for another five lines.  I won’t bother you with a translation. You probably get the picture (so to speak). I’ll also leave it to you to imagine the documents an ‘artiste copiste’ has to submit to prove s/he’s not going to deface or make off with one of the items on display. I’m in the clear with my sketch pad though – ‘croquis à main levée’ (roughly speaking ‘quick sketches’), can be done anywhere, provided other visitors are not inconvenienced and the sketch pad measures no more than 40 cm square.

So I’ll go on drawing standing up until I come back from Scotland. Imagine though, if I could have borrowed a stool, no forms to fill in, no pièce d’identité to hand over – how disorienting would that have been, to uncover a hole that large in the tight fabric of l’Administration française.

I’ve been having other brushes with French bureaucracy this month. The taxe d’habitation demand came in. When I contacted the tax office to enquire why my bill was more than twice as high as a family living in the same building and occupying double the space I own, the kindly fellow at the other end of the line told me to read the detail on the back page. All would come clear. To some perhaps but not to me – a page of unintelligible legal jargon, and boxes with what look like random letters and figures inside. I’ll pay up though. Experience has taught me that, however illogical it seems, the règlements will have been followed. It doesn’t feel fair but it’s probably ‘right’.

We have been living through the farce of the UMP leadership election this past week. I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of that but it does remind me to mention what feels like the most important exhibition Paris has staged in a very long time: l’Art en Guerre, France 1938 – 1947’ at the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, until 17 February. If ever there was a reason to come to Paris for the ‘culture’ this courageous, balanced and hugely informative exhibition is it. There are some marvellous Picassos in among hundreds of other works, including some done in the harshest of conditions by interned artists and writers, many of whom were later deported to the death camps.

The exhibition feels particularly timely. The curators couldn’t have known that November 2012 would find the so-called moderate or centre Right tearing itself apart. What they might have predicted, based on history, is that le Front National would be loving every minute of the drama, counting the corpses and preparing the ground.