The Musée d’Orsay is the usual must-see for the Impressionist fan, and it does have some spectacular masterpieces, such as Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette, Cezanne’s card players and (to stray even further into Post-Impressionism) Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles. Strange, then, that in 2002 the Orsay’s then director Serge Lemoine was quoted in a magazine interview saying that ‘I am one of those who thinks that Impressionism is overrated.’ It was a bit like a Pope expressing doubts about the Immaculate Conception, and Lemoine has now been replaced by a new director who says that Monet, Renoir et al. are ‘ambassadors of our culture’ and who markets the museum shamelessly as the ‘temple of Impressionism’.*** The only problem, of course, is that it has so many worshippers.
Giverny, Monet’s house just outside Paris, is another Impressionist-lovers’ pilgrimage spot. Personally, I was disappointed by my visit there. True, the house has a strong period feel, and Monet’s collection of Japanese prints was gorgeous. And yes, walking around the lily pond, it was easy to imagine him daubing paint on to his huge canvases in the tranquil dampness, but my overall impression (no pun intended) was, ‘OK, cute house, but where are the Monets?’ I’d always assumed that they’d all been sold off and re-hung on the walls of every major art gallery in the world. In fact, though, all the paintings that Monet kept for himself at Giverny were donated to a small museum on the western edge of Paris, which now houses the biggest collection of the artist’s work in the world. This is the Musée Marmottan (or Marmottan-Monet as it calls itself in an attempt to draw attention to its star resident), in the 16th arrondissement. And the Musée doesn’t stop at Monet—there are also wonderful paintings by Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir and my own favourite Impressionist, Berthe Morisot.
The pictures are housed in a small château that was once the hunting lodge of the Duc de Valmy, one of Napoleon’s generals. When it was built in the early nineteenth century, it was way out in the forest, but the huge 16th arrondissement has caught up with it, and the lodge is now a few minutes’ stroll from the métro station at Muette. After a period in the possession of the Marmottan family, who were politicians and art collectors, it was turned into a museum in 1934, apparently in an inheritance-tax deal. Since then, other collectors have followed the Marmottan family’s example and donated their art to the museum, which is now eclectic and yet wonderfully focused.
A new exhibition area has been built to house the Monets, which include some of the old man’s most famous works. I was astonished to stroll around the museum one weekday afternoon, almost untroubled by other visitors, and come face-to-face with the very painting that started the whole Impressionist movement—Impression: Soleil Levant. It’s still a startling picture, with its bright-orange blob of sun that looks as if Marilyn Monroe had tried some lipstick, decided it was too bright and stubbed it out on the canvas. It’s not surprising that the realism-addicted critics laughed. In its day, it was as daring as Lady Chatterley having sex with a servant. It just wasn’t done.
And this is far from being the only masterpiece in the collection. There are some decidedly insulting views of London in the fog as well as plenty of lilies, a Japanese bridge and one of the painter’s trademark haystacks. In the main house, there is also a small but wonderful Berthe Morisot room that feels like a family lounge decorated with priceless paintings, and a Napoleon room (Paul Marmottan was a collector of Napoleonic memorabilia) housing pictures from early in Boney’s reign at the turn of the nineteenth century. These include a portrait of the legendary Josephine—a sultry, fiery-eyed beauty in a thrustingly low-cut dress, to whom no one in their right mind would say ‘not tonight’.
All in all, even a northern Parisian like myself, for whom an excursion into the depths of the 16th arrondissement is something akin to crossing the Gobi Desert, can feel that a trip to the Musée Marmottan is worthwhile. It was totally crowd-free, except for one coachload of schoolkids who stuck together like a shoal of wide-eyed mackerel and were therefore easy to avoid. And I probably got there and back in no longer than it would have taken me to queue up at the Musée d’Orsay and get squashed into mackerel pâté.
Owning a piece of Parisian art history
Today, if you feel like buying a signed work of art by a famous Parisian like Arp, you can do so for around a thousand euros. It’s not exactly cheap, but this seems a relatively small price to pay when you see the ludicrous sums spent on signed prints by people like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. And even if you don’t have thousands to spend, there are still some excellent ways of taking home a piece of genuine Parisian art history.
The rue de Seine in the 6th arrondissement begins at the river that inspired its name and, after a meandering start, heads straight for the boulevard Saint-Germain. All along the street, there are small art galleries. Admittedly, some of what they sell is (to my taste, anyway) horrifically ugly. In one shop window, I recently saw a five-foot-tall bronze bull that looked as though it had been in a head-on collision with a train. Mostly, though, these galleries deal in tasteful and often very affordable pictures. The dealers inside can look a little snooty, but as Edina Monsoon pointed out in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, they’re only shopworkers, so there’s no need to be scared off. And they’re usually very courteous—after all, it’s not as if they sell dozens of pictures a day, and they have central-Paris rents to cover.
I went to the rue de Seine to hunt for affordable Parisian art, and began in a gallery that was running an exhibition by one of the best-known French contemporary artists, Ben. He’s not a Parisian (he’s from Nice) but he has a very Parisian wit. He’s known for writing cryptic messages on canvases in his characteristically curly, rather old-fashioned, handwriting, usually in white paint on a black background.
It turns out, though, that as far as prices are concerned, he takes himself more seriously than I thought. A canvas inscribed chef d’oeuvre inconnu (unknown masterpiece) was listed at over 8,000 euros. It was the same price for another, in red writing on white canvas this time, saying ironically beau et pas cher (beautiful and not expensive). And it would have cost only slightly less to acquire c’est quoi l’idée? (what’s the idea?). Like I said, it’s very Parisian—cheekily denying the importance of art while trying to sell it at whacking great prices. All good fun, though, and a signed print at 100 euros might actually have been good value. If not, a black Ben pencil case at 5 or so definitely was.
Next, I went into one of the small galleries specializing in prints, and said I was looking for something Parisian. The woman showed me a view of the Eiffel Tower.
‘Not quite that Parisian,’ I told her, adding that I was interested in anything by artists who lived in Paris.
She laughed. ‘Well, they all lived here at one time or another.’
She showed me a postcard-sized photo of the Pont Neuf when it was wrapped in fabric in 1985 by Christo (a pseudonym for two people, Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat). The card was framed, signed by Christo (presumably the man) and came with an authenticity stamp on the back. It was as Parisian as you get but, at 350 euros, it seemed to me to be a bit expensive for a postcard.
The dealer left me to browse through her folders of prints and I quickly found some pictures that were much more to my taste. A series of black-and-white engravings of ballet dancers—slightly more realistic than Degas’ drawings of the same subject—by Auguste Brouet, a late-nineteenth century Montmartre artist. They were all signed, and cost about 200 euros each, rather less than a Degas. There were also Arp-like abstracts by lesser-known artists, and various Parisian views drawn or painted between the early 1900s and the 1960s, all for a hundred or two. And in places like this, you can always haggle—subtly, of course, this is art, not a second-hand car.
I moved on to one of my favourite Parisian art galleries, Paul Prouté, in the section of the rue de Seine on the other side of the boulevard. It’s an unfortunate name—in slang it means ‘Paul farted’, and the poor owner must go through hell whenever he reserves a ho
tel room by phone—but it’s one of the best places to buy old art in the whole of Paris. The gallery was founded more than a century ago and feels as if the sales assistants have been stuck in a time warp ever since. Young or old, they’re all quiet and pale, as though they never get out into the real world.
The walls are lined not with pictures but with wooden racks of folders, all stuffed with art. You can go in (you have to ring the bell and wait for a green light, so it’s probably best not to go dressed as a punk or a samurai) and ask for whatever you want—they have everything. You’re looking for sixteenth-century religious engravings? There’s a file. Or nineteenth-century Italian water-colours, modern abstracts, English caricatures—it’s all there.
As in the previous gallery, I asked for views of Paris—rather a touristy question, I thought, but it was welcomed with just as much courtesy as if I’d asked to see their signed Manets. And the three fat files I was given were a veritable goldmine, or inkmine. There were some fascinating seventeenth-century engravings showing Paris with sandy riverbanks and the Seine awash with boats of all sizes, at a time when the Tuileries ended in open countryside. There were also views of the Bastille when the prison was still standing proud at the gates of the city—a smallish medieval castle that would become world-famous only when it was knocked down. I also found nineteenth-century pictures of the shabby, shady Marais full of brothels and absinthe dens rather than gay furniture shops, and scenes of Montmartre as a real village, its windmills grinding out flour rather than can-can music. My favourites, though, were some large, hand-coloured eighteenth-century prints of palaces and gardens, including a rustic-looking view of the Élysée, now the presidential palace, with some soldiers gazing rather threateningly at the artist. Revolution in the air, perhaps.
And all these slices of Parisian art history cost around a hundred euros, little more than a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Personally I’d opt to have a sandwich at the corner café and buy the art.
Oh, and I did find an Arp on my travels—a beautiful little signed engraving, showing (I now know) a couple of bulbous navels. And from what I saw, Arp’s prices are going up. Art collectors have been warned …
A bid for glory
Another typically Parisian place to buy a picture or sculpture, and a relatively cheap one, is Drouot, the complex of auction rooms near the grands boulevards. It’s a sort of Galeries Lafayette for everything secondhand—the difference being that you invent your own price. This is where most of the city’s art and antique dealers buy, and where ordinary Parisians can acquire art at wholesale rates.
It’s a bizarre place—a mixture of attempted modernity (the ’70s glass building, the small escalators between floors) and old-school tradition (the red carpets, the armies of porters and the constant feeling that you’re looking at the contents of Balzac’s house), and gives off an air of impenetrability. Until recently, its workings were something of a mystery, but the walls of secrecy were torn down in late 2009, for a wonderfully Parisian reason …
At the time, Drouot’s porters, responsible for moving all the objects for sale or pre-sale valuation into and around the building, were instantly recognizable by their black uniform with a sliver of red at the collar. They were nicknamed Savoyards because, for over a century, they were just that—in 1860, as a welcoming gift to the state of Savoie, which had just joined France, the Emperor Napoleon III made a rule stipulating that only people from that region could work as porters at Drouot. After 1980, non-Alpine natives were allowed to don the red collar, but their working practices still included some historical quirks—jobs were allocated amongst the Savoyards by a roll of the dice. Get a six and you were moving jewellery. Throw a one and it was wardrobes.
Their job was not confined to shifting things around—they were also responsible for making inventories of incoming lots, and this was what caused their downfall. In 2009, it was alleged that some of them had been unable to resist the temptation to make certain valuable objects go ‘missing’, including a Courbet painting. Such scams were especially easy, it was said, when houses were cleared and their contents put up for sale to pay death duties. Grieving relatives had usually helped themselves to the best items, so they weren’t going to notice the disappearance of grand-mère’s antique clock, her silver candlesticks or (apparently) her pre-Impressionist painting.
According to an article in the Figaro newspaper, a group of Savoyards were also accused of a much more subtle scam—when a load of furniture arrived, they would take the doors off a wardrobe or the cushions off a chair and then buy the incomplete object at auction at cut price. The wardrobe or chair would then be reassembled and sold, in perfect condition, for a hefty profit.
Their whole operation was foolproof, the Figaro said, because if a complaint was made, the missing item or parts would instantly be ‘found’ and all suspicions quashed.
At the end of 2009, eight of the 110 porters were tried for theft, at which point the French media pounced upon the story with unrestrained glee. Here was one of Paris’s oldest art establishments being forced to wash its dirty lingerie in public. It was reported that, by holding on to fraudulently acquired objects for six months and then selling them at Drouot via a ‘friendly’ auctioneer, some of the Savoyards were doubling their already ample salary of 4,000 euros a month.
In August 2010, a judge ruled that the Savoyards were collectively answerable to a series of highly imagistic charges—association de malfaiteurs en vue d’un ou plusieurs crimes (frequenting wrongdoers with a view to committing one or more crimes), complicité de vols en bande organisée (conspiracy to commit organized-gang theft) and recel de vols en bande organisée (receiving stolen property as an organized gang)—the kinds of accusations usually aimed at Corsican gangsters. The Savoyards’ reign had come to an end, and they have since been officially disbarred from working at Drouot, and replaced by polo-shirted newcomers.
The auction house has also appointed, for the first time ever, a director general who is not an auctioneer—he’s a manager and, effectively, security man in chief.
Despite the scandal, the auction house’s Zola-esque frenzy of activity hasn’t slowed down. Look at the calendar of upcoming sales on their website, drouot.com, and on almost any given day (including Sundays) you can find sales of anything from nineteenth-century drawings and vintage haute couture to clocks, coins, books, militaria, and (in the week I am looking at now) buttons, oriental art, carpets, wine, perfume bottles, picture frames (‘ancient and modern’) and Armenian paintings.
Drouot has more than a dozen sales rooms, and it is fascinating to wander in, browse the objects laid out for pre-auction viewing, and then drop into a sale that is in full swing. There is nothing to stop anyone going in to watch, and there’s little danger of buying anything by accident, even if you have the most violent nervous twitch, because if you’re not a regular, you really do have to wave energetically and catch the auctioneer’s eye to bid.
Even so, ordinary members of the public have as much chance as the professionals of picking up a real bargain. Dealers will usually stop bidding for an object once the price reaches half of what they think they can sell it for, and they won’t buy anything they’re not sure of getting rid of, so if you see a faded painting in a battered frame and can be bothered to wait for its number to come up (lots go at a rate of about one per minute), then you have an excellent chance of winning the auction.
And it really does feel like winning a Parisian game. The object you covet is solemnly carried forward by a porter, the auctioneer reads out its description, and then you quickly find out if anyone else has taken a fancy to it. If they have, and put in a low bid, you can have the satisfaction of seeing their surprise when you pitch in with a higher offer. After that, it’s like poker—a matter of nerves. You have to decide your maximum limit and play to it. Hold out, and your opponent might give up. If not, and you go beyond your limit, you can end up with a serious case of post-adrenalin depression. You ‘won’, but at what co
st? Did you really pay 100 euros for that dust-encrusted mishmash of paint and its cracked square of peeling wood? Weren’t you planning to spend no more than 20? And was that a glimmer of disdain in the auctioneer’s eye as his hammer came down?
Well no, it probably wasn’t, because Drouot, rather like one of Paris’s old bordels, is a place where all tastes are equally valid. One man’s coffee stain is another man’s abstract masterpiece, and as you carry your prize away, you are on an equal footing with the person who has just bought a Louis XVI commode or a Louis Vuitton suitcase. What’s more, these days there’s no danger that you’ll see a sly grin on a Savoyard’s face as he recognizes something that had ‘gone missing’.
Painting by numbers
If you do decide to try your luck—and your nerve—at an art auction, it is essential to practise oral recognition of French numbers, because there are some very different numbers that sound alarmingly similar. Make a simple mistake, and you could end up bidding rather more than you bargained for. For example:
vingt-quatre = 24
quatre-vingts = 80
cent deux = 102
deux cents = 200
cent trois = 103
trois cents = 300 (etc., up to 109/900)
mille cent = 1,100
cent mille = 100,000
mille deux cents = 1,200
deux cent mille = 200,000 (etc., up to 1,900/900,000).
Though one would hope that if you suddenly caused the bidding to jump from, say, mille deux cents (1,200) euros to trois cent mille (300,000), the auctioneer would stop and ask for confirmation.
And if you win the bidding, you’ll hear the auctioneer call out, ‘Adjugé!’—sold. At which time you just have to hope that you got your numbers right …
Paris Revealed Page 23
