Heading up the rue Ramponeau, I came to the demolition site that is La Forge. This is a group of studios in a former key factory that used to be hidden behind a large apartment block. The main building has been replaced by a large gap in the street line that is one day destined to be filled with social housing.
On the wall of the building next door, the artists who now occupy La Forge have created a six-storey-high mural, a scene of urban degeneration, with blood, skulls, decapitation and what looked like a massive pair of hairy human legs using the apocalyptic landscape as a footstool. There was also a gorilla head and yet another mention of Belleville Zoo, so I asked the first artist I could find why this was. A reference to the urban jungle, no doubt? No, the painter told me, it is a homage to the song ‘Brooklyn Zoo’ by Ol’ Dirty Bastard. I looked this up on Google and found that it’s a cute little ditty in which the rapper boasts that he has never been ‘tooken out’ by a ‘nigga who couldn’t figure how to pull a f*ckin gun trigga’. Not an influence that one might expect in the city of Monet, Manet and co., but then some Parisians aren’t content to sit on their Impressionistic laurels. And it’s more than mere imitation—the urban French have always idolized American rap culture, and, by mixing in their own bande dessinée styles, they have created something profoundly Parisian.
In the dozen or so studios in the old forge buildings, I saw spray-painters, photographers, a collage artist, a modeller, and even a conventional painter, a man called Pierre Chandelier whose studio walls were covered in highly Parisian canvases—slightly naïve apartment interiors featuring the kind of wacky furniture that an artist might own, plus cats, potted plants and views of rooftops out of the open window.
‘The kids in the main studio call me the sous-Matisse’, he lamented—the ‘sub-Matisse’. He was clearly a disciple of the great Henri M, and his vivid Pariscapes were exciting a couple of visiting Americans, who seemed especially pleased that the artist had been canny enough to create several small canvases that would fit in hand luggage, and not cost much more than the suitcase that was holding them.
Sadly, however, the bickering about who was the coolest artist on the block went deeper than disagreements about whether to apply paint with a spray or a brush. At the time of writing, a group of artists who had recently received permission to manage the site on behalf of the city were in conflict with the people who had originally squatted the place and set up studios. Locks had apparently been changed, and some of the older artists were forced to move out of their original studios into smaller spaces. The only consolation is that there seems to be room for everyone, so with any luck the situation will not get any worse.
And meanwhile, the buildings themselves are clearly enjoying being put to active use, as well as benefiting from some sunlight after all those years hidden behind an apartment building—the passageway between the two wings of the forge is now a leafy alley of grapevine, and when I was there, it looked to be preparing a bumper harvest of fruit.
Overall, then, the studio open day was a fascinating way to spend an afternoon, and an excellent chance to get a glimpse of what Parisian artists do before they are sidetracked by media attention and/or huge subsidies.
Artists, a protected species
Not all Parisian artists are forced to squat, however. If you walk around certain parts of Paris, you can see physical evidence of art’s prestigious place in the city’s architecture. In many buildings along the Left Bank of the Seine, the top floors have immense windows—these were purpose-built artists’ studios. The same goes for apartment buildings along the boulevards around Pigalle, where gigantic walls of glass were included in the architects’ plans, giving artists not only soft northern light but an inspiring view of Montmartre. These chic ateliers were designed for artists with a bit of personal capital or a generous sponsor, but in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the city also built less luxurious studios.
An old friend of mine, a sculptor called Lélio, used to live in the Villa Mallebay in the 14th arrondissement, a tiny paved alley lined with garages on one side and artists’ studios on the other. Lélio’s studio, one of several in a row of low, glass-fronted buildings, was made of panels salvaged by the city authorities from the pavilions at the great Paris Expo of 1889. The little house was basically three walls and a roof propped up against the building behind it, and it should probably have been condemned as unfit to live in. Lélio had built the toilet himself and plumbed it into a pipe that led he knew not where (in the 1980s, when developers bought some of the surrounding land, they discovered to their horror that there was an ancient, uncharted septic tank at the end of the lane).
The living quarters, where Lélio had, for a few years in the 1960s, housed a wife and two children, consisted of two perilous mezzanine levels, one of them too low to stand up on. The kitchen was barely big enough for a sink and a cooker, the bathroom was a shower cubicle and the floor was a layer of concrete on top of Parisian soil. The whole thing was heated by a stove with a clanky metal chimney twisting up through the roof.
When I knew him, Lélio was living and working alone in the studio, gradually filling the building with towering totems of wood and clay until there was barely room for a bed and a table.
Needless to say, art magazines regularly used to come and photograph the place—he was the embodiment of a Parisian artist. And, even more regularly, property developers used to try and buy the row of studios, whispering in municipal ears that these artists paying a few francs a month would be just as happy (and have far better plumbing) in a new building in some distant suburb. To the city’s credit, it never listened, and Lélio worked in his studio literally until the day he died there.
The Villa Mallebay has now had modern houses imposed upon it, but elsewhere in Paris there are some unadulterated little villages of similar studios.
One of the best of these is the Cité Fleurie, on the boulevard Arago, a hamlet of thirty or so studios made out of building materials from the Food Hall at the Expo of 1878. Gauguin and Modigliani once lived here, but it was only protected from the developers thanks to a campaign by its artist residents in the 1970s. The Cité is now an historical monument, which explains the perfect upkeep—all the buildings are painted two shades of brown (mahogany for the door and window frames against a beige background), and with their rustic beams and tiny, tree-shaded courtyards, the cottages are enough to make even the least-talented dauber take painting lessons just to qualify for such perfect accommodation. Because even today, tenants of the Cité have to be artists, although one suspects, peeping through the windows at neat bookshelves and tasteful living rooms, that not all of them are quite as active as my friend Lélio was.
In similar places that have been sold off for private ownership, such as the equally picture-postcard Cité des Fusains in Montmartre, where Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec used to paint, any studio that becomes vacant is instantly snapped up by loft-hunters. The new non-artist residents then start complaining at the disturbance caused by a neighbour loudly sculpting wood or slapping paint on to canvas with too much expressionist abandon—while, of course, boasting to friends about how bohemian their new neighbourhood is. Parisian estate agents have a special label for the type of person who wants to buy an artist’s studio—they are clients looking for l’atypique (the unusual). And I should know, because I was one of them. I once tried to buy a small place in the Cité des Fusains, and would have done so if it hadn’t turned out to be a miniature rather than the large canvas I’d imagined it to be from the agent’s description.
This competition with non-artists for studio space explains why Paris now tries to help artists find a studio. They can apply to the city for a special HLM (habitation à loyer modéré—low-cost housing) with a studio attached. On the application form, the artist can specify which floor their studio should be on, and stipulate a minimum surface area.
The offer is open to painters, engravers, sculptors, photographers, plastic artists, video artists and creators
of installations. All they have to do is provide a CV, a portfolio, a letter of motivation (‘I need a studio or I’ll cut my ear off’) and proof that they have signed up to the artists’ social-security scheme (presumably, their medical cover includes testing for paint poisoning, marble-dust inhalation and feeling misunderstood). Every two months, a commission consisting of four city councillors and two artists meets to study applications.
No other professional body in Paris gets such preferential treatment for housing (except people like ministers, head teachers, firemen, and directors of institutions who might have to live at their workplace). There are, for instance, no special provisions for taxi drivers, bakers or waiters, all of whom contribute just as much to making sure that Paris stays Paris. There are none for writers, either, I should add, though we scribblers can apply for rooms in special residences, the only problem with them being that you have to live next to other writers, and there’s only so much conversation about royalties, word counts and the use of the semi-colon that a balanced human being can stand.
Parisian artists in search of something more temporary can also apply for six months’ free accommodation, plus a grant, to work in an artists’ community near the Gare de l’Est. And if they get fed up with Paris, they can go and spend their grant in partner residences in Budapest, New York and Buenos Aires.
Paris’s most prestigious lycées might do their best to force pupils to learn maths and physics and become engineers, but there are definite compensations for the kids who spend their time doodling.
Avoiding the museum queues
There are a dozen major art museums in Paris, the main problem being that there are slightly more than a dozen people trying to visit them. On a rainy day in spring or summer you can spend ten times longer queuing outside a museum than you will looking at the paintings. Even when you get inside, you have to join the crowds jostling to get a quick glimpse of a famous picture before the jabbing elbows and shoving shoulders eject you from your vantage point. An hour of waiting just to spend ten seconds in front of The Painting Made Famous by the Da Vinci Code.
Although it must be said that, thanks to Mona Lisa, some of the other picture galleries in the Louvre are relatively crowd-free. The French-painting rooms in the Sully Wing of the museum are often empty, and you can spend uninterrupted minutes exchanging doleful gazes with Watteau’s Pierrot (the white clown), or admiring the shapely buttocks of one of Boucher’s famous reclining nudes. There’s even a largely ignored group of Impressionist pictures in the collection, donated to the Louvre by a certain Victor Lyon, a Parisian financier who had a sharp eye for art investments, to judge by his Monet snowscape, his gorgeous bathing nude by Degas, and several wallfuls of Sisleys, Renoirs and other household names. Though this doesn’t, of course, save you the bother of queuing up to get in the Louvre.
There are, however, smaller museums dedicated to a single artist or genre where the crowds aren’t so intimidating—the Musée Gustave Moreau for lovers of Romanticism, and the Musée Guimet for oriental art, for example. Even the Musée Rodin isn’t always crowded, and has a large garden that is ideal for a picnic. But Paris can go one better than that—museums where there is almost no one, or where a short time queuing will yield unbelievable artistic rewards.
In the first category is one of my favourites, the museum dedicated to the abstract artist Jean Arp—or Hans Arp as he is sometimes known. He was born in 1886 in Alsace, which was then part of Germany, and came to Paris just before the First World War to work alongside rising stars like Picasso and Modigliani. When war broke out, Arp avoided conscription into the German army by having himself declared insane, and went to Switzerland to work with the artist who later became his wife, Sophie Taeuber, and the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. The three of them founded a new movement, the most modernist of all, Dadaism—its philosophy: to reject all previous artistic conventions (except, of course, that of claiming to reject artistic conventions). Arp, Taeuber and Kandinsky began to produce abstract art and nonsense poetry, exploding the rules as a comment on the real explosions happening on the other side of the Alps.
Abstract artist Jean Arp may not look like a bundle of laughs (he spent a lot of time in Switzerland), but if you go to his Parisian studio today, you will be invited to fondle his sculptures.
After the war, Arp and Taeuber came back to Paris and accepted the offer of another modernist artist, Theo van Doesburg, to build a house on a piece of land he owned in the suburb of Clamart, not far from Rodin’s second home in Meudon.
And it was there, interrupted only by yet another war, that Arp would live and work for most of the rest of his life. The house, designed by Sophie Taeuber, has now been turned into a museum that is one of the Paris region’s best-kept artistic secrets.
It’s not a deliberately kept secret—the museum would love to have more visitors. But it seems that hiding the house about 400 metres from the nearest suburban train station, even if that station is just outside Paris on the way to the slightly better-known Château de Versailles, discourages all but the hardiest art lovers.
I almost didn’t find it myself, and wished I had a phone with Satnav, because the supposedly helpful road signs didn’t help at all. When I got off the train at Meudon-Val Fleury station, the sign pointed to the ‘Fondation A R P’, as if the town didn’t know that Arp was a man. They seemed to think he was an institution like the Anarchistes pour la Révolution Perpétuelle or the Association des Restaurants de Poisson.*
I climbed the hill, past the modernist house of Van Doesburg himself, a cube like a 3D Mondrian painting, and then turned right, seeing absolutely no one and hearing nothing except the chattering of birds. It was eerie. This was a neighbourhood of stone cottages, on the edge of Meudon forest, and I felt as if I should be identifying different species of tree rather than looking for an art museum. But after just a couple of minutes I found another sign, this time with ‘Arp’ spelt like a real name, and sure enough, a few metres further up the hill, there was a house marked Fondation Arp.
To someone more used to Rodin’s palatial mansion near the Invalides or even Monet’s villa out at Giverny, this place came as a surprise. It was tiny, a cuboid version of the other cottages in the neighbourhood, made of the local Paris stone, with a façade that looks like lumps of brown coral set in concrete.
I rang the bell on the gate and the lady in the office looked at me as if she was astonished to be asked to buzz anyone in. When I explained that I hadn’t come to the wrong address or to read the gas meter, she called the guide, who clearly wasn’t expecting to be needed that day, and I was given a personal tour of the house by someone who seemed genuinely pleased that a visitor was taking an interest in Arp.
And there was plenty of Arp to see. The three floors of the house were crowded with small sculptures, paintings and engravings, wooden Dadaist reliefs, a carpet and a tapestry, all of them in Arp’s swirling abstract forms. It is highly unusual to see a studio so full of a famous artist’s own works—Giverny, for example, has none.
There were also some pieces of Sophie Taeuber’s furniture—homemade, primary-coloured units that were in effect Ikea fifty years before it was invented. And a small display of family photos included a picnic in the garden with James Joyce and Max Ernst, and some funny shots of Sophie and her sister in weird ‘abstract’ Dadaist costumes.
You don’t have to be an art historian to enjoy the place, but you do have to like abstract art, and especially Arp’s trademark blobby shapes. I do, and was not surprised to learn that the circular holes in his work are often supposed to be navels—he was a bit of a belly-button fetishist, apparently** Similarly, his sculptures often manage to be exactly like—and yet not quite like—thrusting buttocks, smooth thighs, arched backs and bulbous phalluses. They feel erotic, but you don’t know exactly why.
The eroticism came to a height when the guide got out a box of white gloves and invited me to caress the statues in the garden. This highly Parisian activity is, he told me, a
regular part of any tour of the studio. So I went ahead, feeling inexplicably embarrassed at running my hands over the curves and into the holes of the statues. Doing the same thing at the Rodin museum would have been outright pornographic, but here the statues are abstract, and any resemblance to the human form is in the imagination. Even so, it felt like touching up the Venus de Milo.
When I left the museum, there was still no one disturbing the peace of this tranquil neighbourhood, no crowds of art pilgrims trekking up from Meudon. On the guide’s advice, I walked up the hill to the end of the street, where there were some weird and wonderful modern houses—the weirdest of which had a façade of mirrors, with bright-yellow windows and doorframes, like a modernist Hansel and Gretel cottage. Close by, on a garden wall, there was a panel saying that the huge cedar tree nearby was a present from Napoleon’s Josephine to her art teacher. This place really is part of Paris’s art history.
Monet, Monet, Monet
Visiting Paris without seeing some pictures by the Impressionists would be a bit like missing out on croissants. The problem being that croissants are made fresh every morning, whereas the Impressionists stopped painting over a century ago.
This is why there are almost always logjams at the permanent collections, and if there’s a temporary exhibition—even something as sub-Impressionist as Painters Who Once Met Manet While He Was Out Shopping—the lines can stretch for a hundred metres. And that’s just to use the toilets.
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