City of creativity

THE title of this beautifully illustrated volume is a significant mistranslation of its original French title, Paris 1919-1939: Art, Vie et Culture.

Clearly a labour of love by its two authors, Vincent Bouvet and Gérard Durozol, this intelligent and acute look at art, life and culture in the French capital during the inter-war period, now re-issued by Thames and Hudson, is actually everything that the title in English does not suggest.

Indeed the gulf between the intention and inspiration of this work, and its marketing to English-speaking readers, reinforces the argument that the French state should persevere in its efforts to preserve ‘la Vie Francaise’ from encroachments of Anglo-Saxon bowdlerisation.

It’s not that there is not glamour aplenty, nor a dash of craziness, in this chronicle of one of the world’s great capital cities, but the real strength of Paris during these two decades between the wars was based not upon ephemeral qualities, but on a strong industrial and design base, a good balance between socialism and capitalism, a willingness to work and play hard, and a huge enthusiasm for marketing and retailing.

Add to this a degree of racial and sexual tolerance unknown in other European cities, and an overarching belief in the power of art and culture to transform lives, and some understanding of the magnetic influence of Paris begins to emerge. There was also a good deal of naiveté in these years, and as the clouds of war gathered, the French government embarked on a worldwide cultural propaganda drive, based on the premise that the world would not stand idly by and see such a bastion of cultural freedom destroyed by totalitarianism.

In fact, the world didn’t do much when Nazi tanks crossed into France, and the most significant British action, apart from the evacuation at Dunkirk, was the cynical annihilation of the French navy in the Mediterranean, with the loss of over a thousand French sailors.

When the Allies finally liberated the French capital in 1944, Ernest Hemingway awoke to find the corridor outside his apartment crammed with GIs in sleeping bags, come to pay homage to the great writer who had made Paris his home. The same injection of creative energy had also come in the years immediately after World War I, when black GIs, many of them musicians, preferred to stay on and play jazz in the nightclubs of Paris, rather than return to a segregated United States.

Bars such as Harry’s New York Bar, or The Jockey, flourished in the 1920s, with the help of Americans escaping Prohibition. Celebrities such as Coco Chanel, Sinclair Lewis and Jack Dempsey rubbed shoulders with sports personalities, millionaires and actors such as Jean Gabin.

All of this began to change gradually in the post-war period, as France embraced the European Union and the consequent work permit restriction on one of the key ingredients in its life-blood — American idealism and energy — signalled the end of the glory days of Paris. Tellingly, in the United States, this book has been issued by Vendome Press, under a title that respects its authors’ intentions more accurately: Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939, Art, Life and Culture.

Much of the energy of Paris during the interwar period was provided by Picasso, Man Ray, Eileen Grey, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. All immigrants, they chose Paris as a home. The 600,000 French soldiers who died in World War I, had left a city without enough men. Through the 1920s, Paris drew much of its strength from other European countries and from the Americas, from refugees who flocked to the French capital, fleeing economic deprivation or oppressive conditions in their own countries.

Evelyn Waugh was unimpressed with the result. “No one can feel a foreigner in Monte Carlo,” he wrote “but Paris is cosmopolitan in the diametrically opposite sense, that it makes everyone a foreigner.” Nevertheless, Waugh’s pen pictures capture the atmosphere of the city — and his description of nightclubs with ‘shady young men in Charvet shirts’ cannot but evoke a memory of Charles Haughey’s visits to that same clothing shop on the Place Vendome.

Apart from Waugh, there were English aplenty, including Duff Twysden, the model for Hemingway’s Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. They congregated at La Dome, Le Deux Magot or La Coupole, where artists from Montparnasse had decorated the interiors.

Two of the most important writers came from Ireland: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett had fled a narrow-minded Dublin, and did much of their best work in Paris, helping to make it a centre of world literature, while Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett studied Cubism under Andre Lhote, in preparation for an effort to haul Ireland’s conservative art world into the 20th century.

The architecture of the city also forms a key chapter in the book, with photographs of Modernist buildings such as the Citroen car showroom at Rue Marboef, completed in 1927.

Much of the pleasure in Bouvet and Durazol’s book lies in its seeming lack of ideas, or rather the way the ideas that inspired it are kept in the background. The writing is informed by relational aesthetics, but this is understated. The pictures tell their own story, while the text provides a steady and compelling narrative, telling of the work and leisure hours of the three million or so inhabitants who made Paris a centre for arts and culture through the first half of the 20th century.

There is little moralising or sentimentalising, although the descriptions are sometimes harrowing. The authors have delved into newspaper and photographic archives, as well as museums of fine and decorative art, and come up with a host of wonderful images. There are photographs of dances and parties, fashion icons and café life, streets and shops. Coco Chanel holds court in her Ritz apartment, while the incomparable Josephine Baker gives a dazzling smile.

Nowadays, apart from a handful of artists — not least Seamus and Malachy Farrell, sons of the late Irish painter Micheal Farrell, who settled in Paris in the 1970s — Paris lives on in a sort of intellectual half-life, attracting some twenty million tourists each year, but presenting, for the most part, a nostalgic look at past glory days. Complicit in this process are the Musee D’Orsay, Louvre, Pompidou Centre and a host of other state-funded institutions.

Attempts in recent years to generate the sort of street-cred culture that defines London and New York have led to efforts such as the re-branding of the Palais de Tokyo as a centre for youth culture. Parisians themselves are more interested in preserving pension entitlements than in recreating the magic of ‘Kiki de Montparnasse’ or Josephine Baker’s jazz dancing.

Perhaps the tide is turning however, and this year, Paris seems to be re-entering the international art world in a meaningful way, with affirmation coming through such initiatives as the opening of the new Gagosian Gallery near the Champs Élysées.

Peter Murray is the director of The Crawford Gallery in Cork city.