Here I am again, back in Paris after an interval of 5 months in mostly sunny Scotland. I am told Paris has had un été pourri (a lousy summer) so I look back gratefully on the long hot days in the Dumfriesshire countryside, with short spells in Kilmartin and on the Mull of Kintyre.
One thing is for sure – wet summer or not, Paris has thrown off its battened-down feel. The restaurants are full and cafes have spread well beyond their terrasses into other previously unclaimed pavement spaces. Masks and the regulation ‘passe sanitaire’ are constant reminders that covid hasn’t gone away but the talk is more about the climate crisis, the coming presidential election, the grim evidence of abuse within the Catholic Church and the on-going poster campaign by ‘les colleuses’ to draw attention to the deaths of women at the hands of their husbands and partners.
It’s a lot to take in after such a long absence. To begin with all I can manage is to dash out to the shops and back in again. There is just too much going on right outside the door downstairs – and I don’t mean the one onto the street. I get back as Paris Fashion Week is underway. The immense hangar at the back of the courtyard is hosting Raf Simons. The music thuds out and the courtyard sprouts a gazebo which is full of young people speaking several different languages, drinking tiny cups of black coffee and hanging out.
When I get through this phase and venture out properly I am struck first by the hectic swirl on the rue Marx Dormoy and then by the numbers of people squatting to sell servings of hot food, mostly rice, dumplings, lentils and crepes, from makeshift containers. There must be twice as many as when I left at the end of April and they aren’t short of customers. Add them to the women selling roasted corn out of shopping trolleys, the wobbly stalls of fresh fruit and herbs, the ever-present crowds of young cigarette-sellers and there’s not a lot of space left for the ordinary pedestrian to go about his or her business. By the mid-evening when the street is quiet again the pavement is littered with sheets of cardboard and upturned boxes where the selling went on.
I sign up for a drawing class with Pierre-Louis who taught us remotely throughout the pandemic once the musée d’Orsay was closed, and for an atelier d’aquarelle with Olivier Figueroa from the same collectif, ‘d’un atelier à l’autre’.
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Arion assis sur le dauphin - Ernest Hiolle |
The watercolour class takes place in a studio on the rue de l’Arc de Triomphe just off the Avenue Carnot at Etoile. That is how I happen to see the Christo-Jeanne-Claude wrapped Arc de Triomphe. When I climb out of the metro, there it is rearing up in the night, like a high-shouldered, white-shrouded spectre with the cars whizzing roundabout it like so many insects.
By the time I go to the second class a week later the wrappings are off again, except in the archway itself. This in itself is remarkable – that such huge effort and expense should be expended for just a few days’ exhibition. The wrappings have gone and they won’t be back but the record is preserved in hundreds of thousands of videos and photos on peoples’ phones, mine included.
There is too much of every type of cultural activity as the Festival d’Automne gets underway. To give you a flavour, here’s a tiny sample of the art exhibitions randomly chosen: Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine at the musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme (until 30/10); Botticelli artiste et designer in the musée Jacquemart-André (from 9/09); Chaim Soutine/Willem de Kooning, la peinture incarnée; David Hockney, a year in Normandie, both of those in the musée de l’Orangerie; Henri Cartier-Bresson ‘Revoir Paris’ in the restored and enlarged musée Carnavalet (until 31/10). Not forgetting the Louvre of course: Paris – Athènes, the birth of modern Greece, on until mid-February next year, so plenty of time that for that one.
In the midst of these cultural excesses, I find my thoughts going back to a 2018 exhibition, work by Sheila Hicks in the Centre Pompidou which I wrote about a long while back.
It’s the material she uses that does it: wool, wrapped or knitted, woven or draped, in nets and webs; wool sheared off all kinds of animals, spun and dyed; wool for blankets, wool to wear for warmth, or simply to look at and admire. In early July I spent three perfect days working alongside Louise Oppenheimer in her studio in Kilmartin where she turns threads into woven landscapes of extraordinary complexity and beauty.
That could be the link, or perhaps it’s simply because the temperature is gradually dropping in the evenings. Les tricoteuses solidaires, a far-flung group pf women, have begun knitting hats again for those who come to the p’tits dejs solidaires breakfasts. Woolly hats aren’t needed yet but they will be.
