Category Archives: Paris Sights

Paris: Sin City 1900

One of the best reasons to travel to Paris is to take in the special exhibits. This past April, I loved the exhibit called “Paris 1900” at the very grand Petit Palais. In 1900, a huge exhibition occupied 500 acres along the Seine River, at the same time that the very first line of the Metro opened. The exhibition was a celebration of Paris as THE world center of art, innovation, technology, and above all entertainment. Entertainment in Paris 1900 ran the gamut from sublime theater performances to dance halls to houses of prostitution, tailored to all segments of society.

Annoyingly, all the exhibit captions were in French only. I had to call on my translating skills, which are pretty good but not great. There was an audioguide, but I was short on time. (When is there ever enough time in Paris?)

“Redemption,” Public Domain

A gorgeous large painting by Julius LeBlanc Stewart poignantly depicts the intersection of high life and low life in the fast-and-loose period known as the Belle Epoque. The title is “Redemption,” painted in 1895. Stewart was an American. Along with his fellow American, the more well-known John Singer Sargent, he made a nice living doing portraits of society figures. This is a genre painting, on the theme of the repentant prostitute.

A beautiful young girl, dressed in white, stands alone at one end of a dinner table–or rather, probably a table set for supper during a ball. Will this girl make an advantageous marriage? Or possibly she already has escaped her former life, and hopes she will not be found out. She looks vulnerable, ready to flee.

At the other end of the table, a portly gentleman is working on seducing a bare-shouldered woman. She holds him off with one hand–but for how long?

Join me next time for more explorations into the art and history of Europe!

A Woman Who Could Hold Her Own

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Among the hundreds and hundreds of stiff military portraits and battle scenes in Les Invalides, the military museum in Paris, this sturdy but friendly woman stands out. She was Madame Bru, one of the few respectable women allowed and even encouraged to follow the French army. She was known as the “cantiniere” of the 7th Regiment of Hussars. She and no doubt some other women like her organized mobile canteens which provided the soldiers with food, drink and tobacco. Many times, they also served as nurses. They were sometimes awarded military medals for their services. Madame Bru, painted in 1837, was no doubt a beloved figure in “her” regiment.

Join me next time for more explorations in the art and history of Europe!

Marguerite: Henri Matisse’s Feisty Daughter

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This past April at the Pompidou Center in Paris, I was charmed by this portrait: “Marguerite au Chat Noir,” or “Margaret with Black Cat.” The young lady was the daughter of Henri Matisse. He painted this portrait in 1910 and exhibited it in Berlin at the Secession show, and subsequently at the Armory Show in New York City in 1913. The portrait was considered radical and bold in its time; it still is, no less than its model. The artist kept this particular painting in his own possession, and his family has kept it since his death in 1954.

Marguerite was the artist’s only daughter. He portrayed her many times, no doubt thankful for every moment he spent with her. At the age of 6, she nearly died of diptheria. After that, she generally wore either high-necked clothing or a ribbon to cover the scar from the emergency tracheotomy during that illness.

Marguerite grew up to be a brave woman. In 1945, she was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo for her activities in the French Resistance. She somehow escaped from the train taking her to a concentration camp. She died in 1982, at age 87.

I wish I could have seen a show in Baltimore last fall, “Matisse’s Marguerite: Model Daughter,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A description of that show, by Tim Smith, is at touch.baltimoresun.com.

Join me next time for more explorations in the art and history of Europe!

Who is Buried in Napoleon’s Tomb?

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Last spring I finally got around to visiting the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides in Paris. I was hoping I might finally understand how the French see Napoleon. I’m still baffled.

Who was this man who now lies in solitary splendor under a very grand dome? Why do tourists pay actual money to gaze down at the marble sarcophagus? (It was covered under my Paris Museum Pass, so at least admission was painless).

I understand that Napoleon Bonaparte was a great military genius–that is, until suddenly he wasn’t. After conquering most of Europe, he led his Grand Armee into a ruinous march on Moscow–the subject of my very favorite novel, Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” The locals simply abandoned their city, when he got close. So instead of the customary obsequious welcome by those he conquered, Napoleon was greeted by deserted streets, empty warehouses, and a city ablaze. His troops died by the thousands as they retreated back the way they had come, through the frozen Russian landscape.

Napoleon certainly cut a dashing figure when he first appeared in Paris, after his early military victories. I understand why the French welcomed a strong leader able to restore order after the bloodbath of the French Revolution. I don’t understand why the French went to all the trouble of rejecting their hereditary line of kings, only to allow Napoleon to declare himself Emperor. I don’t really understand why a man who left the nation defeated and almost bankrupt is revered.

But then, maybe he is not so revered. Maybe his tomb stands, for the French, as a place of contemplation of national destiny–the failures as well as the successes. Napoleon is one of the most controversial of all historical figures. Maybe the whole point of visiting his tomb is to realize how little we really understand of history.

Join me next time for more explorations in the art and history of Europe!

Parisian Elegance

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The Musee des Arts Decoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Paris is actually in the Louvre complex. It doesn’t get the traffic enjoyed by the Mona Lisa, but anyone looking for a visual feast will be happy in its galleries. Among many other things, there is the reconstructed apartment of the fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin in Paris.

Jeanne began her career as an apprentice milliner, then trained as a dressmaker. She married a count at age 28, which brought her into higher social circles. Their only daughter, Marguerite, eventually took over the fashion business her mother had founded.

Jeanne began by making exquisite clothes for her daughter, which her friends wanted for their own children. Soon she was making dresses for their mothers, and she was on her way. In no time, she had her own boutique on the world’s penultimate fashion street, the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore.

Jeanne’s most famous creation was the iconic perfume “Arpege,” which was inspired by her daughter’s piano practice. “Arpege” is French for “arpeggio.” The bottle features a charming graphic of a mother and daughter.

The apartment, from the 1920s, is designed down to the square inch, all in the blue and gold featured on the signature perfume bottles. I can only imagine the rarefied life lived there.

Spring at Last

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I live in lands of ice and snow. You have to love winter to choose life in the mountains. Mid-April in these parts, big wet flakes are still falling and people are still digging out from the long winter.

People are putting away their skis and getting out their mountain bikes on days when the roads are clear.

Moose appear outside my window, searching for buds on the trees. Hungry bears have already been sighted near town.

But I’m off soon on a springtime trip to Europe, where (usually) the climate is a lot more temperate. This year I’m lucky enough to have a few days in Paris–in April! I’m already dreaming of the Medici Grotto in the Luxembourg Gardens. I’m dreaming of the flowers in the Tuileries, once the pleasure gardens of kings and queens, but now open to all.

Marie Antoinette: A Tragic Habsburg

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In various places in Vienna, I’ve encountered the proud features of Marie Antoinette, the Habsburg-Lorraine daughter of the redoubtable Empress Maria Theresa. Poor Marie Antoinette was packed off to France at the age of fifteen to marry the Dauphin who became the most unfortunate Louis XVI. We all know her story: wealth, power, frivolity, and finally the guillotine at age 37. I am always surprised that no one in Austria seems particularly sympathetic to Marie Antoinette. The captions under her images mostly mention only her name, and then only as “Archduchess of Austria.”

The Habsburgs held on to power by judicious marriages all across Europe, and Marie Antoinette was a pawn in this real-life “Game of Thrones.” Once she was sent to France, she literally became the property of France. In a biography, I read that when she was handed over, she was stripped of all her clothing and dressed in clothing provided by the French State. At the last moment, she had to leave her little dog behind, too. He was the only vestige of her happy childhood in Vienna. She never saw her home or any of her family again, except perhaps for a visit by one of her brothers. Her mother wrote her frequently, scolding her for laziness and urging her to work for Austria’s interests–as if she had any say in government.

In Paris, I’ve visited both Versailles and the damp, chilly cell on the banks of the Seine where Marie Antoinette spent her last months. The Conciergerie is still a terrifying place, even for a tourist today. It is all too easy to imagine the horror of being a prisoner there. In Marie Antoinette’s letters, she often expressed a wish to see her beloved home in Vienna again. From what I’ve read of Marie Antoinette, she deserves a little more sympathy than history has given her.

Join me next time for more explorations in the art and history of Europe!

From the Grand Tour to the American West

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In my last post, I mentioned the delightful book Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden. The subtitle is “The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West.”

Dorothy Wickenden, the executive editor of The New Yorker, found a treasure trove of letters written by her grandmother, Dorothy Woodruff, who with her best friend, Rosamund Underwood, answered an ad for teachers in a one-room schoolhouse in remote northwestern Colorado. The young women had graduated together from Smith College. They were twenty-three and had no intention of settling in right away to their expected life of marriage, charity work, and society events. So in the summer of 1916, off they went on the grand adventure of their lives.

Photo by Lawrence M. Sawyer/Corbin, from NYT review cited below

The schoolhouse was in an area so remote they had to live with a homesteading family and ride horseback to work every day, rain or shine. Their students had to do the same; in winter some students had to ski to school on makeshift skis made of barrel staves. Not surprisingly, the young women found themselves courted enthusiastically by local cowboys and also by educated men–including the one who had placed the ad, Ferry Carpenter. He was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had gone west to make his fortune.

The young women had lived lives of privilege; after college, they had been lucky enough to take the Grand Tour. They spent a year in Europe, studying French and seeing as much as they possibly could. They went out of their way to see art and experience theater and dance. They judged the women in Rubens’ paintings “beefy,” but loved most of what they saw. In Paris, they saw an exhibit by Matisse and Picasso. They were not impressed, especially after having spent a lot of time with the masterpieces in the Louvre. Dorothy thought Matisse’s work was “like that of a little child.” Many years later, she regretted passing up the chance to buy some of those paintings for a song.

They saw Nijinsky, then twenty years old, dance in Scheherazade, the most famous ballet produced by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. They saw Isadora Duncan in her premiere performance of Orpheus.

Dorothy and Rosamund toured France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland. All along the way, they wrote long letters home. They also collected postcards. Later, when they went off to teach in the one-room Colorado schoolhouse, they brought their postcard collection. Their students (and the parents of the students) eagerly studied the postcards as clues to the wider world. I’d like to think that many of them eventually went on adventures of their own, following the lead of these two remarkable young women.

There’s a review by Maria Russo in The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-nothing-daunted-by-dorothy-wickenden.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.