The lilacs have flowered, the
bunches of muguet (lily of the valley) traditionally given on 1st May, have
been sold in their thousands on the streets of Paris. Now it's time for the
2012 Monumenta exhibition in the Grand Palais. Last year Anish Kapoor
took on the challenge of that huge vaulted space of glass and iron. This year
it is Daniel Buren’s turn and he has achieved something pretty marvellous too.
(www.monumenta.com) The
exhibition is called ‘Excentrique(s) Travail in situ’.
Anish Kapoor has been busy
elsewhere this past year, one of his projects being the Orbit Tower in London’s
Olympic Village, a spiralling metal construction leading up to a viewing
platform (which won’t be open to the public until 2014). The re-elected Boris
claims it’s ‘more interesting than the Eiffel Tower’, adding, in that
poisonously ingenuous way he has, that he’s not being chauvinistic saying that.
Paris is, as usual, bursting
with good exhibitions: Matisse at the Pompidou ,‘Paires et Series’; at the
Louvre, a series of drawings and other documents around Leonardo da Vinci’s
‘The Virgin and Saint Anne’, one of his greatest masterpieces and now on show
in its newly restored glory. (That’s just one of around five temporary
exhibitions you can see in the Louvre at present, including ‘les belles heures
du Duc de Berry’, a rare chance to see some forty-seven pages of that work
before they go back to America to be rebound in book form once more).
They have finally closed the
Robert Doisneau exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville after keeping it open for some
extra weeks. If you’re after something more political and engagé there’s always
‘Crumb, de l’Underground à la Genèse’ in the musée de l’Art moderne de la Ville
de Paris, or in the same building, ‘Resisting the present: Mexico 2000 – 2012’.
In fact Paris is buzzing, and
dripping too – a wet May so far, following a wet April. The spring grass has
never been so deep or so lusciously green. Any day, any hour practically, I can
watch the pigeons and sparrows splashing about in the puddles on the flat roof
opposite my kitchen window, (you don't get much variety in the bird life in
this part of Paris, although I did see a kestrel over the Jardin d'Eole the other
day and the blackbird population is definitely expanding as we get more green
spaces).
It might have rained on the
evening of Sunday 6thMay, but it didn’t. So thousands went, by metro
and bus and on foot and bikes, to sing and dance at the Bastille. I was among
them, for an hour or two. We went by metro, line 5, from the gare du Nord,
every train packed to the roof and every compartment roaring slogans, singing
the Marseillaise and generally being noisily happy at the presidential election
result.
Since then France’s own change
of president has been overshadowed by events in Greece. No-one quite knows what
Hollande plans to do. He has promised lots more teachers but everyone knows
that the big questions are in the economy and that, although the education
system needs reform, it can’t provide the answers to the most pressing
problems, like how to find useful work for the thousands who are marking time
in discontented, aimless clusters on street corners and parks.
Next up anyway, are the
‘élections législatives, first round on 10th June, second on 17th.
Marine Le Pen (extreme right Front National) will stand for deputé in the Pas
de Calais, facing Jean-Luc Mélanchon, leader of the Front de Gauche. Her party
took 30% of the vote in that area at the first round of the presidential
elections. Living in Paris where the Front National scored only 6%, it’s easy
to forget what a following Le Pen has in certain departements and among certain
categories of French voters. The legislatives are France’s next big test and
will determine how much a of a domestic ‘marge de manoeuvre’ Hollande really
has.
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