Wanderings in La Chapelle
MY first visit to Paris in three years, in October, 2009, was to attend a conference on the events of September 11th, the "War on Terror", and the erosion of liberties both in the West and in the Middle East. A guest there was Matthieu Kassovitz, whose La Haine (1995) had seen him awarded the Best Director accolade at the Cannes Film Festival. La Bellevilloise, 19-21 rue Boyer, was among the conference venues.
Originally founded in January, 1877, after the fall of the Commune, Bellevilloise was the first Parisian workers' co-operative built to offer everybody in the capital access to culture and to an awareness of the contemporary political climate. It proved a welcome antidote to a city scarred by recession, and from 1910 to 1949 Bellevilloise played a key role in the social and economic life of Eastern Paris. In 2005, the space was renovated to host media events, arts screenings, and meetings for the surrounding French Moroccan and Algerian community. Now, the venue is an attractively eclectic combination of seminar spaces, discussion rooms and a bar-cafeteria-dance floor area, the latter expressly catered to a young, bohemian clientele. Whatever involved debates may characterise the daily atmosphere at Bellevilloise, the relaxed evening mood made for the ideal backdrop to the conference socialising, participants able to chat in an informal yet absorbing setting. The dining room, the intimate restaurant La Halle aux Oliviers, is populated by olive and palm trees, and is open each Sunday. Served by the Ménilmontant (Line 2) and Gambetta (Line 3) Metro stations, Bellevilloise offers great cuisine and a fantastic selection of cocktails, making for a quietly sophisticated but friendly haunt.
The city, as always, was enchanting, and I was keen to stay in a part through which I had travelled on earlier visits, but had never fully explored, the Boulevard de la Chapelle. Served by Metro station Chapelle, and connected to the Gare du Nord, it marks the border between the capital's 10th and 18th arrondissements.
The elevated line 2 station was opened on January 31st, 1903, as part of the extension of that route from Anvers to Bagnolet, now called Alexandre Dumas. It is named after the Place de la Chapelle, itself derived from the Barrière de la Chapelle, a gate built for the collection of taxation as part of the Wall of the Farmers-General; the gate was built between 1784 and 1788 and demolished after 1859. The gate takes its name from a village annexed by Paris in 1860.
Boulevard de la Chapelle today, a heavily commercial and multicultural area.
I was fascinated to visit, on my first day, at 37 Boulevard de la Chapelle, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. An interior as substantial as it is aesthetic, the auditorium has seating for approximately five hundred. Founded in 1876, the Théâtre had such a troubled beginning that it seemed it may never achieve success as a public arena. In its first decade alone, the Théâtre had fifteen artistic directors, with its most infamous leader, Olga Léaud, absconding with the safe, following a failed production. Looking around me, I sensed this was a place with as dramatic a story to tell as those in the many productions it had staged over some 130 years. Indeed, it was not until the late 1890s that the Théâtre's fortunes genuinely began to improve, under the joint direction of Emmanuel Clot and G. Dublay. Early productions included Dumas' La Reine Margot and Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and The Master Builder. In 1904, the Théâtre was fully refurbished, and renamed Théâtre Molière.
A decade later, though, it was forced to close its doors, like all other Parisian theatres, with the outbreak of war. For the next seventy years, the site would be inhabited by a number of theatre companies, but none of which were able to finance the upkeep of the property.
In 1974, though, Peter Brook made the theatre the home of his own company. After six months' collaborative restoration by Brook and Micheline Rozan, the theatre re-opened on October 15th, with Timon of Athens. One of the comparatively few changes Brook and Rozan made to the performance space was that the stage walls were made bare. It was clear as I looked at the stage how pragmatically inspired that decision was - one could sense palpably just how immediate, naked, the emotion and the action would be against such a skeletal backdrop. The performers would be the centre of attention, and the plain background, far from being unremarkable or anonymous, would be instrumental in conveying the urgency and rich pertinence of the drama.
In 2008, Brook had announced he would hand over to Olivier Mantei, Deputy Head of the Paris Opéra Comique, and to Olivier Poubelle, a theatre entrepeneur specialising in modern music. Brook is seen here at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, discussing Hamlet in a new form:
La Chapelle is distinctively multicultural. To the South, one finds shops and businesses run by the local Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan population. To the North, the residents are pre-dominantly of Arabian, African, European and Indian origin. A wealth of restaurants, wine bars, clothing and textiles shops annotate the Boulevard, adding to the vibrant cultural tone of the area, with every language and circumstance among the people there. This is not to betray a cruder reality, of course. Barely had I exited the station upon my arrival than a Hungarian lady asked for change, a child in her arms who could not have been more than two years old. If this was the City of Light, then it was also Orwell's Paris, the warts and all survival amid the hedonistic living. I hardly needed reminding that, if the image of the city's infinite vitality is at times more popular than it is objective, then so, too, and inevitably, is the assumption of collective happiness in this hub of outward inspiration. If the Parisian vibe is immutable, then it is little wonder that some must reside on a silent periphery, their world an abject and sobering counter to the otherwise intoxicating, liberating potential.
A commercial and social spectacle, Marché Barbès runs along La Chapelle and Boulevard Roucheouart. This market, I discovered, is a veritable goldmine of cheeses, herbs and spices, fruits, wools, crafts, and freshly-baked African and Middle-Eastern breads. Open Wednesdays and Saturdays, it must surely be one of La Chapelle's most popular attractions, with something to appeal to everybody from the casual onlooker to the keen buyer. One really felt, looking round this market, that they were observing more than just simple purchasing and selling - it was a colourful, energetic interplay of consumers from all over France and from all over the world. There was something infectiously secular about the scene, no one kind of customer to the stalls, no one kind of curiosity excited by the array of goods. Meanwhile, La Chapelle is presently undergoing significant restoration, and appeals especially to those with an active interest in street art.
My penultimate day in Paris was spent in the Musée du Louvre. Situated on the Right Bank of the Seine, the Museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally a fortress constructed under Philip II during the twelfth-century. Remnants of the fortress are visible in the Museum's basement. The Museum was opened on August 10th, 1793, the majority of the works therein being royal or plundered church property. With a stupefying myriad of treasures among its collections, I resolved to see ten or so objects of personal interest, then explore more broadly, and discover pieces spontaneously. Although I was especially enthusiastic about, among others, Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix), The Coronation of Napoleon (David), Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (Raphael), and a number of Impressionist works, I knew, in practice, I would be just as taken with entirely new and unexpected discoveries. There would be invitations to find out more about so many artists with whom I was unfamiliar, as well as welcome opportunities to appreciate anew works I had long admired. The glass pyramid, completed in 1989, takes visitors into the lobby. If the anticipation was palpable, then evident, too, was the exhaustion of those departing, their experiences in this peerless house of art surely as demanding as they had been inspiring.
I went first, as popular duty required, to the La Giaconde Room, via exquisite classical marbles that adorned the staircase. The space in which Western Art's most notable, if enigmatic, human subject is exhibited, was already swarming. One felt, upon entering, as if they were visiting some holy site, countless pilgrims doing homage to this most celebrated product of the Renaissance Man's imagination. Though its renown and its size are wholly disproportionate - an inestimable reputation against an oaken panel scarcely larger than a broadsheet newspaper - it was, to be sure, something remarkable to observe. "She" who has been identified as, variously, the wife of a Florentine nobleman, as Jesus, and as da Vinci himself, gazes at the viewer from her much-guarded position. The psychology of the smile is as enticing as it is mysterious, purportedly twinning reticence and affability. Somehow, Mona Lisa seems as struck by our attentiveness as we are by hers. If the Cult of Celebrity in which the contemporary is saturated typically centres upon key, identifiable personalities, one wonders if that Obsession, Magnificent and Generational, has its origins in the form of this most elusive figure.
Having always been interested in the political machinations of the Tudor Dynasty, I was keen to see Holbein the Younger's Lady Anna of Cleves (c.1538-9). Seemingly around the same size as the Mona Lisa, the portrait by his court painter persuaded Henry VIII to make the German noblewoman his fourth bride. Their marriage, though, in early 1540, was reportedly never consummated, and annulled after six months. Whatever the licence or integrity of Holbein's representation, Henry felt the reality did not reflect the accounts he had heard. To some extent, one might feel compelled to question Henry's judgement, as there seems nothing innately unattractive in Holbein's image of the twenty-four old, known after her divorce as the "King's Beloved Sister". Although this is not the only surviving portrait of Anne - a canvas of c.1540-45 from the Cologne workshop of Barthel Bruyn the Elder is to be seen in the President's Lodge at St John's College, Oxford, and an after-Holbein engraving of 1739 by Jacobus Houbraken in the National Portrait Gallery - Holbein's is perhaps the most famous, artistry here impacting directly, and ultimately negatively, on complex political circumstances within which Henry sought male succession.
One paradox, I found, about taking the visit in my stride, was that one can move through the galleries in a slightly disorientated manner, astonished at the volume and quantity of what is there, yet to the point of looking but not always truly seeing. Registry of the works almost becomes involuntary, unconscious, if one's attention is not directed specifically at a given piece or pieces. That said, I was struck to find, in the long gallery just off the La Giaconde Room, two remarkable and associated paintings from 1796 by Hubert Robert, Projet d'amenagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (Design for the Grand Gallery in the Louvre) and Vue Imaginare de la Grande Galerie en Ruines (Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in Ruins). Respectively literal and figurative impressions of the hall in which they were displayed, the paintings create a tangible joint impression, blending Enlightenment and decay.
Robert, whose portrait by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, generally considered the most famous female painter of the eighteenth-century, can be seen in the Louvre, was born in Paris in May, 1733. After studying at the French Academy in Rome in the 1750s, Robert returned to Paris in 1765, where he became a member of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture. Following Robert's exhibition at the Salon of 1767, he was appointed, successively, Designer of the King's Gardens, Keeper of the King's Pictures, and Keeper of the Museum and Councilor to the Academy. The Salon was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and, from 1748 to 1890, it was the Western world's foremost annual or biennial art event. In Paris, he worked on images in the style of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-80). He also created views of Paris and of the destruction of houses on the Pont de Neuilly, Pont Notre-Dame and Pont au Change, and the fires at the Opera in 1777 and 1782. In 1784, Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billaderie, Comte d'Angiviller (1730–1810), effectively a Minister of Fine Arts, appointed Robert a guard of the newly-instituted painting gallery at the Louvre. Robert died in Paris in early 1808.
Imaginary View was, for me, the most arresting of the two works. The hypothesised appearance of the Grand Gallery following its "destruction" is as romantic as it is barren. The debris resembles the fragmented safeguard of a conservative yet fundamental intellectualism, the cynical dissolution of some traditional place of instruction. Crumbling walls and scattered icons record a disappointed classicism, leaving only the Athenian shell of a once oracular knowledge base. The painting seemingly evokes a muscular liberalism reacting against an artistic elite. An aesthetic canon has been comprehensively eroded, the daylight more invasive than it is incidental - an enclosed Palace of the Mind, however rich, has been stripped away, any creative idealism now answerable to reality, to Nature both benign and unyielding.
Equally, though, if the Imaginary View implies a certain rebellion against established principles, it also laments the decline of that humanistic ethos. On the one hand, the secondary, the created, has been swept away, the referential pulled down in favour of the basic, the innate. Amid the rubble, however, a seated figure, in red and with a flamboyant white collar, sketches the statue before him. The scene tells of chaos, of the removal of an old order, and yet he remains focused on this surviving remnant of apparently antiquated values - its arm is outstretched, as if orating, dictating, commanding attention, still arbitrating how it, the classical emblem par excellence, should and does continue to inspire. Art critic and philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-84) remarked that "The ideas which the ruins awake in me are grand". With such adulation, one can implicitly sympathise - for all the denegration Robert portrays, there is something wonderfully gothic about the scene. Whatever doctrine we see overthrown, there is a peculiar glory in the remains, an unshakeable majesty in the archaic.
As an aside, it is worth noting that probably the closest history has come to fulfilling Robert's vision of the Grand Gallery was in 1939, when Nazi looting of Parisian museums compelled the removal of paintings from the Louvre. They were placed in rural châteaux until the liberation.
The Design, meanwhile, shows the room in all its richness. Robert deftly conveys the length and depth of the Gallery, detailing distance as acutely as proximity. Those represented in the painting are no mere spectators - they are consumers of art, fully, enthusiastically and confidently engaging with what surrounds them. They are all observers of the Gallery, and each of them students of its content - canvases, porcelain, sculptures, furnishings. Robert celebrates human interaction with art, of how, in its manifold and complex forms, it fuels not purely emotion but a compulsion to act - ensconced in this temple of creative genius, the subjects feel insatiably moved to craft, to articulate afresh, a new and altogether beguiling resonance to individual accomplishment.
Through Robert, we see how art elevates the inanimate to the consequential, silent, inert objects speaking to us with a fundamental and prevailing clarity. In a letter to a friend, Joyce said of Paris "There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here". It is to this endeavour that Robert shows his characters devoted, a "spiritual" objective revealing artistic production almost to be a moral imperative. We create because we must. In the Louvre, we see represented wonder and horror alike, tones of reality we innately classify as good or ill. Ethical codes arbitrate such distinctions, and duly command our attention. So, too, does any aesthetic that illustrates the contents of those social categories. For Robert's figures, as surely for us, art is not merely a comment on "reality", the secondary innocuously appending the primary, but is itself an incitement to produce, to defer, to critique. Like circumstance and time, and the progress or tragedy necessarily bound within them, art obliges and enables our commitment to posterity the most poetic or abhorrent essentialism.
In the Louvre, we see instinctively, and sometimes reluctantly, just how far actuality and art are synonymous.
Walking by the Seine early that final evening, I began to appreciate the Louvre's affinity with the City, and our perception of their tantalising interplay. All around us in Paris, there are the realities we accept and the grace we intuit, absorbing both the raw and the ethereal qualities of that haunting place. For its diversity, its temptations, for its sublime contradictions, what could be more natural and more rational than love?
