What’s Hot, What’s Not

Expositions in Paris, Summer 2021 part 4

Before I tell you about the clutch of exhibitions I have just seen, I offer this brief public announcement about the Hotel de la Marine. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I visited the HdlM with a group of press people and a ‘live’ tour guide. I wanted to see what the headphone tour was like so I could report back to you. I chose the ‘Grand Tour,’ in English. It was less high tech than I expected. No hologram wandered around with me. Just a rather nice English chap, talking into my ears, occasionally accompanied by a lady with a lilting French accent and sometimes music, mostly classical. The commentary moved along at a congenial pace with the headphone tour guide sometimes waiting for me and me sometimes waiting for him. Now I can definitely recommend that you put the HdlM on your short list of places to visit in Paris when you get here. Which should be soon because, why not. Yes, a thousand reasons why not, but they don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world as Bogie would say, did say.

Public announcement #2. If you plan to visit a museum, you really must book online, otherwise you risk being turned away at the door. Even then, with your ticket on your phone, you will still have a ‘gauntlet’ to run. First, the Vigipirate, the security part which is anything from a guard asking you to open your purse / empty your pockets to walking through a metal detector. You are familiar with all that. Next you must prove that you have been vaccinated against Covid, with a QR code on your phone which will be scanned. Finally you will be asked to show your ticket. Three hurdles and then you’ll be good to go.

This is what I have been up to the past few days. I saw an exhibition on photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson (CB) at the newly reopened Musée Carnavalet. I went to the Bibliothèque National de France (BnF) to see another exhibition on Cartier-Bresson. Since La Fab, agnès b’s art museum and gallery, is just across the street from the BnF, I went there, too. The gallery’s exhibition was, Viva l’Afrique !! . Finally, I stopped at Magnin-A, the art gallery down the street from my apartment that I discovered (no, it wasn’t lost, I just didn’t know about it) after all the art museums closed last fall. They had two exhibitions, one on photographs by agnès b., the other, photographs by the Senegalese photographer, Fabrice Monteiro.

Now I can answer one question, at least in regards to these exhibitions. Does familiarity breed contempt or comfort? In this case, definitely comfort. Or, if not exactly comfort, then enhanced appreciation. By which I mean that seeing the same photographs by the same photographer in several contexts was like coming upon the face of someone you know or like or maybe even love or admire and which, on looking at again, gives you pleasure. (Figure 1)

To begin. My first trip to the Musée Carnavalet a month ago, was to see the renovated museum itself. This time it was to see an exhibition of Cartier-Bresson photographs of Paris that the Fondation Cartier-Bresson lent to the Carnavalet. It was the perfect inaugural exhibition to celebrate the re-opening of the museum of the history of Paris. (Figure 2)

The exhibition, entitled, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Revoir Paris (Paris Revisited) unfolds chronologically as well as thematically. A note explains that around some photos there is a black line border. It represents the actual photograph C-B took. Not cropped, not edited. The full image. He insisted on the black border so the viewer would know that what you see is the photo he took. He didn’t hide behind after the fact manipulations of the image. He didn’t even use flashbulbs. The photo either worked or or didn’t - with one exception (maybe more, they only show one). I’ll tell you about it in a moment.

C-B was born in 1904 into a wealthy family (on his father’s side, textile manufacturers, on his mother’s, cotton merchants) from whom he distanced himself when his sentiments became more pro-Communist but from whom he continued to accept an allowance which permitted him to worry less about money and more about art. Lucky fellow. He initially studied with a Cubist painter. He became increasingly interested in photography, specifically the photography of the Surrealists. For a camera, he chose a lightweight Leica. Which he held all the time, except, he explained once, while he was shaving.

C-B spoke of his photographs as sketches. Sketches maybe, but final products, too. A combination of chance and timing, as well as a preconceived notion of what the scene needed if it was going to work. And that preconceived notion was based upon geometry. That is, he would come upon a scene and see an assortment of permanent artifacts, like buildings, fences and statues and ephemeral ones, like a poster or a puddle. These needed only the arrival of the transitory, like a person, to be transformed into a photograph-worthy scene. He might have to wait a long time for everything to come together, but he had to be ready when it did. Wait, then hurry up, snap the shot at exactly the right moment, or lose it altogether.

C-B’s photo of the man jumping over the puddle behind Paris’ Gare Saint-Lazare is exactly that combination of permanent, ephemeral and transitory. (Figure 3) The man leaping across the water echoes the movement of the dancers leaping on a poster on the wall behind him. The ripples in the puddle around the ladder mimic the curved metal pieces in the water nearby. With that man’s puddle hop, C-B saw all the components come together and clicked the shutter. The image became the quintessential example of C-B’s “Decisive Moment.” His lyrical term for immortalizing a fleeting moment of time, for all time. According to one critic, C-B’s style was fast, mobile and detail-obsessed, his images, masterpieces of form and light.

Another photo is called, ‘On the Banks of the Marne’. ((Figure 4) I see C-B, with the strap of his little Leica dangling from his finger, walking along a gravel path, pausing here and there to take photos of picnickers and sunbathers. These two couples have definitely not wandered out of an Impressionist painting. No, these folks have more in common with the people who populate the paintings of the American artists working at the beginning of the 20th century, the Ashcan School. (Figure 5) Those painters depicted the boisterous folks who crowded into New York City’s Central Park and Coney Island on weekend afternoons. Mostly poor, often immigrants, escaping from the sweltering heat of their airless apartments. C-B’s foursome enjoy a respite from their jobs, and probably from their tiny walk up flats, too. Interesting fact: the year 1938, the year this photograph was taken, was the first year that workers in France were awarded an annual paid vacation. It is hard to imagine that the month between July 14 and August 15 that Frenchmen and women consider their vacation birthright has been a ‘right’ for a little over 80 years!

The exhibition includes portraits of famous people C-B was commissioned to photograph. Ezra Pound, Colette and Matisse, among others. (Figures 6, 7, 8). He didn’t ask them to pose, there were no props. He would sit with them and as unobtrusively as possible, take a few photographs and that was that. Another photograph, this one of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, one of several he took, is quite unlike his standard portraits of famous people.

C-B’s photograph of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti walking across the street in the rain, his coat over his head to keep him dry is an amazing Decisive Moment photograph. (Figure 9)

C-B traveled the world as a photo-journalist for French and foreign publications. He photographed Gandhi, for example, an hour before he was assassinated and then stayed to cover the funeral. When C-B was back in Paris, his photographs documented moments of public significance in his own hometown. Like the crowds who gathered for the Liberation of Paris in 1944 and those who witnessed the end of the Fourth Republic in 1952. He documented the funerals of the Charonne victims in 1962 (a massacre of probably hundreds of demonstrators protesting the Algerian War, beaten to death by the police or thrown into the Seine to drown) (Figure 10) and the student revolts of May, 1968. (Figure 11)

The second C-B exhibition that I saw this week was at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF) called Le Grand Jeu (the Great Game).

Both exhibitions make much of the fact that C-B stopped taking photographs, changed course, in 1968, at the age of 64. He was ready to move on, or more accurately, move back, to the pencil and the brush which he had abandoned years earlier. No longer would he have to wait for hours for the right moment to take a shot. Now he would look out his window at the same scene for as long as he wished, drawing or painting it as many times as he chose.

Nobody knew that at 64, he still had a 1/3 of his life to live. By then, he had been a photographer for half of his life. That was the ‘known’. That he would live another 30 years, that was the ‘unknown’. Ironically, his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, who was 30 his junior, died just 10 years after he did. She was 74. None of us know our expiry date. Message? Maybe follow or retrieve your passion whenever you can? Never too late? (Fig. 12)

Back to our story. In 1973, the wealthy (obvi) collectors, Dominique and John de Ménil, friends of C-B, suggested that he select, from amongst the thousands of photographs he had taken, his favorite or his best 365 (one for each day of the year?), to become his ‘Master Collection’. C-B eventually selected 385 and entrusted his favorite printer to make 5 copies of the set. Which he gave to various cultural institutions, the Ménil Collection in Houston, the BnF in Paris, the V & A in London, the University of the Arts in Osaka. He kept a set for himself, now at the FCB. Most recently, the collector Francois Pinault obtained a 6th copy. How? I don’t know. Money can’t buy you health or happiness but it sure can buy you stuff.

The exhibition at the BnF is a version of one that was held earlier this year at Pinault's Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Perhaps to celebrate M Pinault’s acquisition of a 6th set. The guy is on a roll at the moment, his gorgeous Bourse de Commerce modern art museum here in Paris has finally opened. And this fabulous exhibition, in which he played more than a passive role.

So, exactly what is this exhibition, this Grand Jeu ? This. Five people were selected as co-curators, each was asked to select 50 or so prints from the 385 of the Master Collection to create an exhibition. The title of the exhibition, Le Grand Jeu reminds us of the idea of chance, so dear to the Surrealists and to which C-B was drawn as a young man, when he first decided to become an artist. Each of the five exhibitions is independent. None of the co-curators knew what prints the others had selected. Each had complete liberty to display the photographs they selected as they wished. The scenography, the framing, the color of the picture rails, all these elements were left to the total discretion of each curator.

The five co-curators are collector François Pinault, photographer Annie Leibovitz, author Javier Cercas, film director Wim Wenders and BnF Curator, Sylvie Aubenas. Each brought to the task their own particular sensibility. Each mini-exhibition begins with a curator’s statement, an explanation of what C-B’s photos mean to them. There was lots of overlap in the photographs selected. Which is understandable for the iconic photos that we all know even when we don’t know who took them. Other photos, less iconic ones also popped up. The repetition in different contexts was especially pleasing.

My two favorite curators were Annie Lebovitz and Wim Wenders. Somehow, their responses were more soulful, even one might say, more heartfelt, as they explained their selections and showed us how to look at C-B’s work through their eyes. Wim Wenders made a video, a short film in which he looks at some of the photographs he has selected through a magnifying glass, and marvels at certain things, and we begin to, too.

Annie Lebovitz (Figure 13) explains how seeing C-B’s work as a young art student convinced her to become a photographer. She recounts a time when she contacted C-B to see if she could meet with him. She was coming to Paris and wanted to take his photograph. He didn’t respond. She tracked him down and waited outside his studio. When he finally appeared, she began taking his photo. He was furious. He explained that if his face became known, he wouldn’t be able to move around the city as freely, take candid photos as easily. People would see him and pose. It reminded me of Ruth Reichl, her wigs and disguises, her quest for anonymity as the restaurant critic of the New York Times. C-B told another interviewer that he didn’t want to be photographed for being famous. If you are in Paris now, there is simply no excuse for not seeing these two C-B exhibitions NOW!

The BnF is just across the street from agnes b’s La Fab and galerie du jour. I have written about agnès b., her art collection and her art gallery here: La Fabulous. The current exhibition is of paintings, photographs and textiles by artists represented by Andre Magnin, the owner of the eponymous Magnin-A, art gallery down the street from my apartment which specializes in (mostly) contemporary African art. (Figure 14) Agnes and Andre Magnin have been friends ever since Andre Magnin curated an exhibition on contemporary African art at the Centre Pompidou in 1989. Agnes b fell in love with African art and has held numerous exhibitions of it, some, like this one, in conjunction with Andre Magnin. The artists whose work are on display now include several of those I discussed in my article on the contemporary Senegalese photographer, Omar Diop, which you can find here: Patterned Perfection. Those artists include Seidou Keita, Malick Sidibe and J.D. Ojeikere. I was happy to see these artists’ works again after having written about them over 9 months ago. The fabulous textile designs of Ana Silva, a new artist (for me) are here, too. (Fig. 15)

At agnès b’s galerie du jour, I learned that this exhibition was kind of a ‘swap’. That is, while she is exhibiting artists represented by Andre Magnin in her gallery, he is exhibiting her work at his. Not work by artists she represents but rather photographs that agnès b took, using her iPhone, during the first confinement here in France, Spring 2020. (Figure 16)

Like so many other creatives, David Hockney and Sarah Moon, to name just two, the enforced stay at home, except for the reasons for it, was a gift, a time outside time which agnes b devoted to creative pursuits without distractions.

Agnes b’s starting point for the 80 or so photographs on exhibits here are two bust portraits of her, painted by Claire Tabouret, (Figure 17) a young (is 40 young?) French artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. One portrait of agnès, shows her with blond hair. Her make-up reminiscent of the experiments of a young girl with her mother’s lipstick, her mother’s rouge. The lipstick doesn’t quite follow the contours of the lips, the rouge is big red circles on her cheeks. The other portrait is more somber. Agnes with dark hair, subdued.

Holed up at home in Versailles, agnès began pairing the bust portraits with different outfits in her closet. (Fig 18) It reminded me of paper cut-out dolls I played with as a young girl.(Fig. 19). Agnès’s gorgeous blooming garden was the setting. The props were whatever she had around - from her garden furniture to her art collection. The clothes are an eclectic mix of vintage and recent styles. Some of which I recognize since I also have a considerable collection of agnès b never wear out, never go out of fashion, classic clothes myself. The title of the exhibition, Drolesses is what agnès’ father called his three daughters, all born in the first four years of his marriage to agnès’ mother. It is a great exhibition, filled with colors and patterns and clothes and whimsy.

Figure 19. Paper dolls.

I would be amiss and agnes would not approve if I did not tell you about the other exhibition at Magnin-A. Photographs by a contemporary Senegalese photographer, Fabrice Monteiro. The series, entitled Signares is of beautiful, mostly young, black women, elegantly attired in European clothing, inhabiting European style domestic spaces that are in the process of decay. (Figs. 20, 21)

Figure 20. Signares.2011, photograph, Fabrice Monteiro

Figure 21. Signares.2011, photograph, Fabrice Monteiro

The title of the exhibition explains what the photos are about. Signares were the daughters of African women and French fathers who lived on the island of Gorée off Senegal. During the 18th century, the island became a regional center for the slave trade. Male European traders entered into marriage-agreements with African women who could help them negotiate contracts, etc. Female children of these marriages came to be known as Signares, who, when their time came, entered into their own marriage-alliances with European traders. Europeans described these Signares as extremely beautiful women who wore distinct clothing—conical hats of bright scarves and long, flowing, and colorful gowns made from imported fabrics. (Figure 22)

Figure 22. La Signare de Gorée et ses esclaves (The Signare of Gorée and her slaves)

The feminist in me wants to applaud these women who negotiated a difficult terrain and found both profit and power. But all of me recoils from anyone involved in the slave trade. Anyone, black or white who made the choice to enslave another human being. I am reminded of Henry Louis Gates’ weekly PBS program, Finding Your Roots. There is always the big reveal - whose ancestors were slaves, whose ancestors had slaves. Gates’ guests, descendants, must come to terms with, must navigate that information, which is often new to them, at least for the white slave owner descendants. Signares - eerie photos of beautiful women evoking a curious time and troubled moment in African history. Just to remind you, Art IS history.

Copyright © 2021 Beverly Held, Ph.D. All rights reserved

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