Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Two exhibitions, one in London, the other in Paris, offer clashing views of "Paris 1900" -- and 2000.
Mar 29, 2000 | To the contemporary imagination, riotous Belle Epoque music halls, sinuous art nouveau styles and debauched fin-de-sihcle fantasies seem as natural to Paris in 1900 as they were alien to Victorian London or turn-of-the-century New York. Yet all three cities are holding exhibitions this millennial year on 1900 themes -- art and architecture, sexuality, decadence, nostalgia and optimism on the brink of modern times.
Paris' show, at the 100-year-old Grand Palais, itself the centerpiece of the 1900 Exposition Universelle, is titled "1900." Its curators clearly state that "this is neither an evocation of the splendor and misery of the Belle Epoque nor a commemoration of the exposition of a century ago with which Paris wished to astound the world, nor an homage to Art Nouveau and its master practitioners."
By contrast, London's offering, "1900: Art at the Crossroads" (co-produced by the Royal Academy and New York's Guggenheim Museum) seeks to assess "fin-de-sihcle artistic crosscurrents" by evoking Paris' 1900 Exposition Universelle through artworks shown at the fair or excluded from it.
Why these museums didn't team up to produce a bigger and better traveling show is an enigma wrapped in fin-de-sihcle tendrils. This is more than a tale of feisty Frogs versus Rosbifs and Yanks, however, and begs several questions. For instance, why have Paris, London and New York decided to feature 1900 instead of focusing on Y2K? And what do the "splendor and misery" and the "artistic crosscurrents" of a century ago tell us about our world today?
These and other queries jostled me as I rode the high-speed Eurostar train from Paris' 19th century glass-and-iron Gare du Nord to the ultramodern Waterloo International. You barely have time to read Le Monde and The Guardian before Paris' sprawl of 11 million gives way to the even more sprawling 14 million of London. It's indicative of these cities' perennial rivalry, though, that the British named their Eurostar station for the battle marking Napoleon's defeat and the end of France's European Empire.
From Waterloo to the Royal Academy it's a pleasant half-hour walk through a resurgent cityscape. The postwar jumble of concrete south of the Thames reminds you that London was half-destroyed by Nazi rocket-bombs, then hastily rebuilt. There's none of Paris' symmetrical, tree-lined beauty here. Emerging from Waterloo you cross the Thames in view of the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and the Millennium Wheel -- the world's tallest Ferris wheel. As chaotic and polluted as the streets knotted on either side of it, the wide tidal river is alive with tugboats, barges and tour boats.
Depending on your route, you either pass Downing Street and the Horse Guards in their silly helmets, or St. James' Park and The Mall. Nearer the Royal Academy you're likely to encounter several unmistakably English sights -- the Royal Automobile Club, Christies, Fortnum & Mason -- in the hodgepodge of sublime and ridiculous urbanism that characterizes the city as a whole.
Half the culture-seekers lining to get into "1900: Art at the Crossroads" were French fresh off the Eurostar -- apparently they'd taken the tube from Waterloo to Piccadilly and beat me. Greeting us as we swept up the stone staircase loomed a series of giant photographic blow-ups from the 1900 Exposition Universelle.
Here was the Eiffel Tower hedged by countless gimcrack domes, pagodas, globes, colonnades and minarets, with two phallic brick chimneys belching out black smoke. Through the pall a Ferris wheel turned and lights winked. The atmosphere crackled with electricity -- literally.
As the exhibition and catalog make clear, electricity was still a novelty in 1900, an authentic technological wonder and metaphor for modernity's positive elements. It became the theme of the exposition, which drew 50.8 million visitors to Paris in a mere six months. The fair's lighting and machinery were powered entirely by dynamos housed in the gaudy Palais de l'Electriciti -- the origin of most of the black smoke in the photos. This hulking colonnaded Wurlitzer glowed with 5,000 multicolored "Fairy Lights." Its crown, the Fie de l'Electriciti (the Spirit of Electricty), rode in a chariot showering colored sparks and flames.
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