Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  For the many rejected from the Salon, the Refusés, having their paintings seen was so important they sometimes arranged their own shows. The so-called Impressionists, painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Claude Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and the American Mary Cassatt, despite occasional acceptance at the Salon, still chose some years to exhibit separately. After visiting their 1877 show, American painter J. Alden Weir had written home, “I never in my life saw such horrible things. . . . It was worse than a chamber of horrors. I was there a quarter of an hour and left with a head ache.” Cassatt had shown with the Americans in the 1879 Paris World’s Fair, but this year she was recuperating from a bad fall from a horse. Hawkins had heard that a few of the Impressionists—notably Claude Monet—had been accepted into the official French fair exhibit.

  Three days after Whistler decamped with his works, the beleaguered General Hawkins was sitting in his office when three female American journalists known to write about art scurried past and closeted themselves with Commissioner-General William B. Franklin. There had been a great deal of complaint among the American artists whose works were rejected for exhibit at the World’s Fair. Sensing trouble, Hawkins knocked on the door and invited himself to the gathering. As he listened to these “three prying scribblers” bemoan the injustice of the juries, he could barely contain his temper. When the women asked Franklin, “Could you do something for the many [rejected] painters and sculptors who are suffering?” Hawkins leapt up and barked at them, “As long as I can help it, no revision will be made in the work of the American Art Jury!” General Franklin, more the diplomat, spoke soothing words all around, assuring the ladies that he “was well aware that much distress had been created . . . and he would do what he could to right affairs, if any wrongs had been perpetrated.” True to his word and to Hawkins’s chagrin, Franklin tried to keep peace in the American colony by reinstating a few refused works of art.

  At times, General Hawkins had wondered if there would be space to display any art. Finally, in late April, mere weeks before the fair was to open, he secured two spacious rooms for the American painting exhibition, the largest at the fair after the French, but he was now at wit’s end in his attempt to get them properly prepared. The French fair commissioners insisted that Hawkins accept the Parisian workmen they had assigned and none other. “These workmen lagged and loitered and loafed and lounged in a perfectly incredible fashion; appeals to their pride, their pockets, their sympathy with the great trans-Atlantic republic—all alike failed. It was not permitted to beat them. . . . [O]bjurgation, entreaty, epithet, and reproach all left them unmoved.”

  The general watched with actual tears of rage in his eyes as once again “these white-bloused idlers” departed work to get a drink. May had arrived, and still the American exhibition rooms were not close to ready—nor, for that matter, were anyone else’s. A week before the fair was to open, a New York Tribune reporter described “the finest exhibition ever seen of packing cases, empty showcases and machinery not in motion. No exhibition ever was ready at the appointed date. This will be the unreadiest of all, and if justice is to be done, Frenchmen will award themselves a gold medal of the highest class for unpunctuality.”

  For weeks, Gustave Eiffel had been basking in the wild success of his monumental tower. “Paris is going into raptures about the Eiffel Tower,” reported The New York Tribune, “which is one of the greatest successes as a wonder of the world that the world ever wondered at . . . a grandiose symbol of the march of progress since 1789.” But while the Eiffel Tower might appear finished, workmen were still laboring around the clock in two twelve-hour shifts, night and day. The tower was crawling with painters coating the wrought-iron sections with a bronze red that lightened in the higher reaches almost to a yellow. As for the elevators, the galling truth was that the machines were still not operational, as all three elevator companies continued to work frantically to get their machines running smoothly. The Otis representatives were irritated because they were not allowed to use American-made Worthington pumps to get the water up to the reservoir on the second platform, nor was the water reservoir covered as they thought necessary. Consequently, when they tested their elevators, they operated below expectation, a failure the company insisted was not its fault.

  Gustave Eiffel, meanwhile, had endeared himself to every trinket maker and seller in Paris. Shopkeepers along every boulevard and street sold “Eiffel Towers of every size, devoted to every purpose, from tiny charms for watch chains to large clocks for halls. . . . If a tall woman goes down a street, the gamins run after her, shouting, ‘Mme. Eiffel! Mme. Eiffel!’ ” This being Paris, a clever dressmaker in the rue Auber was soon selling a ladies’ dress, Eiffel ascensionniste, whose several ascending collars would be just the look when one visited the tower. The world of la mode was already referring to “Eiffel red.” Out in the suburbs, gardens sprouted Eiffel Towers complete with little flags.

  The Americans and English, meanwhile, maintained a churlish attitude toward the French achievement. “As an enormous and skillful monument of metallic construction,” sniffed a New York Times correspondent, “the French admit its originality and value, but they deplore its ugliness and regret that the time and money were not given to something of more picturesque art, and au fond, they are not proud to show this gigantic iron structure to strangers. . . . [T]hey vote it an abomination and eyesore.”

  The editors of the London Times persisted in referring to the “monstrous erection in the midst of the noble public buildings of Paris.” In an editorial, the paper conceded that the Eiffel Tower “has a certain symmetry of its own, and as a mere effort of engineering, never equaled in its own kind, it deserves high praise, if not all that its author has claimed for himself and his fellow-workers. Yet we are bound to remember that the beauty, the excellence, the grandeur of great engineering works consist in the perfect adaptation of means to ends, while in the case of the Eiffel Tower there are no ends at all, useful or ornamental, except in the idle ostentation more worthy of Chicago or San Francisco than of Paris.”

  As opening day for the Exposition Universelle neared, the City of Paris was in a “fever of festivity. . . . It has been repainted and regilded, and the grime of ten years has been scraped off many vast buildings of Caen stone, which are blazing in this May sun as if just whitewashed. Bouquets of tricolor flags are hung along many a street. . . . [T]here are signs of coming illuminations. The faces of the people are illuminated already. . . . The one thing that surprises all beholders is the Eiffel Tower. The upper part, light and graceful as if it had grown there with only Nature for its architect, looks severely down on the wilderness of edifices below, some of them business-like, some fantastic, all of them, like the tower, intensely modern.”

  In this Paris, ready for any and all adventures, every day, it seemed, there popped up more gigantic posters of a huge charging buffalo superimposed with a handsome Col. William F. Cody proclaiming, “JE VIENS.” What, the Parisians wondered, were these garish hairy beasts plastered on every kiosk and fence? What were the posters advertising, and who was coming? Soon enough the newspapers explained. But as the images became ubiquitous, some French commentators began to complain. Albert Wolff of Le Figaro asked, “Haven’t we had enough of this Buffalo Bill during the last fifteen days?”

  The opening day of the Exposition Universelle, Monday, May 6, dawned cool and pale blue. By noon, the American editor of The Christian Advocate was among the jostling crowd of two hundred thousand who had paid three francs (triple the usual admission price) to attend the fair’s inaugural festivities. “We were there early,” he wrote, “but had to struggle with the crowd for forty minutes before reaching the gate of entrance.” At two o’clock President Sadi Carnot and numerous ministers paraded in, heralded by breastplated cuirassiers and blaring trumpets. The French president pronounced (at length) suitably welcoming remarks before processing through the Gallery of Fine Arts, as yet unready for visitors. There he pressed several electric
al buttons, causing the magnificent series of fountains in the three reflecting pools at the foot of the Eiffel Tower to burst into silvery life—their waters of vertical and crossed parabolic jets shooting skyward, tumbling and foaming down, and spraying back up again and sideways over the statues. Outside, the crowd unleashed a delighted roar and then began dispersing among the 228 acres of marvels.

  Conspicuous in their absence from the opening ceremony was the entirety of the British and European diplomatic corps. “[British ambassador] Lord Lytton found that he had family engagements in England,” related The Tribune’s man in Paris. “Count Hoyos was wanted in Austria. The Russian Ambassador’s health required him to take the waters at Aix, which is thought more annoying than if he had gone to St. Petersburg. General Menabrea is improving his knowledge of French scenery. Count Munster is visiting his estates in Hanover. Such is the final response of monarchical Europe to the French Republic invitation to join in celebrating the overthrow of monarchy. The French are vexed, which is natural, if not reasonable.” The ambassadors of more distant realms in Asia and Africa were in attendance in all their native sartorial splendor. The retiring American minister, Mr. Robert Lane, was noticeable for the very plainness of his black suit, undecorated by medals or military honors.

  The American editor of The Christian Advocate stood and looked around as best he could through the happy assembly. The Eiffel Tower loomed overhead, its industrial presence a foil to the dancing fountains and the 195-foot-high bronze and brilliant turquoise blue rococo Central Dome, surmounted by a thirty-foot-tall statue of the female incarnation of France. The domes of the flanking palaces of Liberal Arts and Fine Arts shimmered in complementary blue-green faience splendor. The editor moved with the throngs through the verdant, flowering grounds artfully landscaped with ten thousand full-grown trees and shrubs, including thousands of rhododendron just bursting into iridescent pink bloom. Colorful banners fluttered in the breeze as he walked toward the exhibition halls on paths graced with bronze and marble statuary. He felt adrift in a dreamscape from the Thousand and One Nights.

  In the Palace of Fine Arts he found the French were still hanging their hundred-year retrospective of French artistic genius from Fragonard to Rodin. On the east side, the Palace of Liberal Arts would soon be filled with impressive republican exhibits on education, photography, music, medicine, and books. The editor found “the exhibits in an imperfect state . . . the articles of others not even having arrived upon the ground.” Here at its Exposition Universelle, the French republican administration intended—when all the exhibits were actually installed—to serve up a carefully constructed vision of La Belle France after eighteen years of their governance: “humanistic, philanthropic, opening its arms to all of humanity. . . . The Republic in 1889 would present two faces to the world: one as educator, benefactor, and distributor of light and bread; the other as champion of France’s imperial mission purveying the same benefits abroad through the division of Africa and the conquest of Indochina.”

  The first fairgoers were delighted to find so many exotic cultures in such convenient proximity. The American editor could barely believe the fantastical pavilions of the South American nations, above all the “palace of the Argentine Republic . . . perhaps the most beautiful building on the grounds . . . [a] glittering mass of incrusted gold and flashing crystals, with color upon color like the fairy dreams of childhood.” At the Egyptian section he strolled down the rue du Caire with its many open-air shops and coffeehouses. “There are fifty or sixty Egyptian donkeys with genuine donkey boys. Yonder is a company of Moors from Morocco and Algeria, living, working, eating, sleeping, dressing, just as we have seen them in those countries. The East Indian soldiers were there on guard in their peculiar dress; the Chinese, in their native costume, are painting and decorating their houses.”

  The American editor now followed the crowds along the Left Bank of the Seine and found himself perusing pavilions devoted to agriculture. As he noted, “France, of course, has the largest display, and the department of wines, the exhibition of the varieties of vats, wine-making, and preserving machinery gives a stupendous idea of the ingenuity, capital, and labor of the business, and shows most depressingly the terrible forces in the way of universal temperance.” The bitter fact, for the French, was that their vineyards (and thus their wine industry) had been under siege from the phylloxera aphid, an alien pest traced back to plants imported from the United States. It was little solace to French farmers watching their ancient vineyards wither that the solution seemed to be replanting with American grapevines.

  And of course there was the Eiffel Tower, always drawing back visitors like a lodestar: The editor was properly awed by this “most extraordinary triumph of energy, industry, and engineering skill. . . . The various engineers and artists who opposed it, and the general public who called the projector a ‘barbarian’ or a monomaniac, with one accord acknowledge it to be graceful, practical, useful, and ornamental. . . . It is in one sense a veritable tower of Babel, for amid the crowds walking about at the base I recognized twenty-eight dialects and languages besides considerable jargon which I could not identify owing to my ignorance.” The milling public could not know it, but up on the tower, one of Gustave Eiffel’s worst fears had come true—the Eiffel Tower was not ready for the public on the day the World’s Fair opened. And so, the visitors wandered about below and craned their necks to admire this edifice they could not yet ascend. Overhead, they could hear and see busy workmen.

  Opening day with so many wonders ended for the editor of The Christian Advocate with “an amazing display of fireworks. . . . From the sound it would have been easy to believe that the city of Paris was being bombarded, and from the spectacle that the whole heavens were in a state of recrystallization . . . at 10 o’clock on Monday night as a loud explosion was heard, the [Eiffel] Tower blazed from base to summit with red Greek fire, and then was crowned by a shower of green Roman candles.” The first World’s Fair ever to be open at night, thanks to Edison and his electrical inventions, the illuminated Exposition was a lovely sight. “The next morning,” wrote the editor, “all Paris went to work as though nothing had happened, but I felt as one might whose eyes had seen and whose ears had heard the nineteenth century in a day and a night.”

  Alas, as the editor had learned, few of the actual exhibits in any of the Champ de Mars buildings were properly installed, much less open. The monumental glass-and-iron Gallery of Machines had a jeweled exterior shimmering with colored glass, mosaics, and ceramic brick. Inside, however, the colossal fifteen-acre temple to engineering and industry was largely a litter of unopened crates and half-assembled machinery. Soon enough it would be devoted to “all aspects of French industry, ranging from machinery for agriculture and food processing to equipment for clothmaking, papermaking, woodworking, construction, and generating electricity. Pumps, dynamos, transformers, engines, hydraulic elevators, and even windmills [would be displayed].” Traversing it all overhead was a welcome novelty for weary fairgoers—a moving walkway.

  The shining exception to the tardiness in the Galerie des Machines was the Edison exhibit, which was up and running from the very first day. “The Exposition has been opened a week and is an assured success,” reported William Hammer to Edison. “On the day of opening (last Monday) we were in better shape than any exhibit in the Machinery Palace, and the only place that President Carnot and his party stopped in the building was in front of the Edison Department to examine the ‘Big Lamp,’ Edison’s bust and picture, and we had two phonographs with loud records one singing the ‘marseillais’ [sic] and ‘America’ and the other shouting, ‘Vive Carnot, ’ ‘Vive la France,’ ‘Vive la République.’ . . . Incidentally I will remark that the U.S. Commissioners have been more bother than assistance to us here and the complaints of their inefficiency and lack of attention are general, however, they did not get away with us, though they have tried to cut up our space and take some of it away on various occasions.”

  There
were many American journalists at the Paris World’s Fair in these early weeks. One reporter, Harold Frederic, was determined to review his country’s painting exhibition, its best prospect for cultural glory, even though it was not yet open. He found himself sneaking past a policeman and squeezing through a boarded-up doorway. In the rooms beyond, he found but half of the 341 American oil paintings actually hung, while the rest were stacked against the walls amid a jumble of construction debris. As he poked about the mess, examining the offerings, Frederic had some severe opinions. Why, he wondered, had Henry Bacon sent “as his solitary picture a cheap and trivial daub”? And why had Walter Gay and Alexander Harrison contributed eleven gigantic canvases “with scarcely one square foot of good painting”?

  But when Frederic entered another room, the gallery of the expatriate painters, he came upon the works of John Singer Sargent, whose six large portraits of women and girls proved him “easily the most distinguished and original of American artists abroad. . . . He does not know how to be commonplace or conventional.” Sargent, an internationally acclaimed painter at thirty-three, had relocated his studio from Paris to London in 1884 to escape the scandal surrounding his Salon painting Madame X, which depicted the American beauty Virginie Gautreau in a black evening gown with one strap suggestively slipping off her chalk-white shoulder. To his and her surprise, the work was vilified as a debauched portrait unworthy of a married woman. His current paintings, while masterful, were unlikely to ignite outrage.