Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
Black-and-white photos of the day don't do the fie justice. But Italian painter Giacomo Balla, who attended the fair (his work wasn't shown in it), captured the scene in his magical "The World's Fair at Night," on display here. Balla's dark human silhouettes and spinning carousels foreshadow his later work as founding member and leader of the Futurist Movement.
It's said the expression "Ville Lumihre" -- City of Light -- was coined at the Paris fair in the shadow of the Palais de l'Electriciti. Ville Lumihre became both the city's nickname and a self-congratulatory catch phrase still used today by Parisians to mean we are the spiritual and material beacon to the world.
In two oils by Camille Pissarro ("Boulevard Montmartre: Foggy Morning") and the now-forgotten Maximilien Luce ("The Sainte Chapelle"), you gaze upon a strangely familiar Parisian cityscape; familiar in its layout of cannon-shot, sycamore-lined boulevards with Haussmann-style apartment buildings, yet wonderfully, disconcertingly different, and not only because it wasn't choked with cars. In these and other paintings you sense the wild, outlandish energy of what was the world's first cosmopolis.
That energy brought mixed blessings, as hinted at by Pierre Bonnard's "Nude with Black Stockings," Edgar Degas' "Spanish Dance" and Pablo Picasso's "Moulin de la Galette" and "The Absinthe Drinker." Among these works' subtexts was prostitution: Servants, dancers, models and seamstresses routinely rounded out their meager wages by selling themselves to the paunchy men in tuxedos Degas loved to draw.
In 1900 relations between men and women stood at a critical juncture, as the first assault on patriarchal society was mounted. A favorite theme of male artists of the time was Salomi -- the devilish temptress -- and there are half a dozen renditions of her here, dancing or lustily clutching John the Baptist's severed head.
It was during the Belle Epoque in Paris -- a period stretching from the end of the Second Empire in 1871 to the beginning of World War I in 1913 -- that the upper classes in particular, frustrated by stifling customs, began experimenting with their sexuality. Orgies, Sapphism, pederasty and cross-dressing became fashionable not only with the so-called hors natures but also among straight women and men.
Absinthe, ether and alcohol -- as captured by Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and others -- were the drugs of choice in private and at the city's boisterous cafes, bars and music halls. Meanwhile other tuxedoed gentlemen fought duels in the Bois de Boulogne, and an average 100,000 starving peasants flooded into town each year to work in factories or in what we'd now call service sector jobs.
This explosive mixture infused the art of 1900 and somehow transformed Paris into a cosmopolitan crucible of creativity, a magnet for the world's greatest talents.
So, was 1900 a "crossroads," as the show's curators suggest? Well, perhaps more like a spider's web tossed over a thousand traffic turnarounds, with Ferris wheels and hot-air balloons galore.
By including hundreds of sculptures and paintings from the 1900 Paris fair, plus work by artists who were left out of it -- Henri Matisse, Paul Cizanne, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Maurice de Vlaminck and other greats -- the exhibition convincingly proves that the turn of the last century indeed embraced everything and its opposite.
"It's as if," said a Londoner friend I met at a pub after the show, "you had David Hockney's L.A. swimming pools next to Damien Hirst's split cows under formaldehyde. It makes perfect sense."
That pub -- a trendy place called All Bar One near the refurbished Covent Garden, now a shopping mall -- offered pseudo-French salads, faux Italian panini, cold German beer on tap and Chilean chardonnay. It was tasty enough and perfectly fin-de-sihcle 2000.
Later, as I perched at the faux-French brasserie atop Oxo Tower overlooking the Thames, I stared out at the crazy megalopolis and couldn't help thinking there might be parallels to draw. Could London in 2000, bombed and rebuilt, freewheeling in spirit, have anything in common with Paris in 1900? The city is indeed celebrating Y2K, but not with a world's fair. It has, however, spent a billion dollars on the Millennium Dome, put up the giant Millennium Wheel and has almost finished the spectacular Millennium Bridge, complete with Fie de l'Electriciti-style lighting. Along the river's south bank runs the new Thames Path, a hiking trail looping clear across town. The Tate Gallery has split, moving its 1900-onward art collections to the reconverted Southbank powerhouse. Somerset House and its magnificent art galleries, also on the Thames, will be reborn later this year.
There's certainly a buzz in the air, and it's not just the sound of a million dirty diesels.
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