A couple of years ago I bought a cheap copy of Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre), prompted by a Cezanne exhibition at Tate Modern. (Zola and Cezanne’s friendship ended because of what the latter perceived to be his negative depiction in the novel.)  And, inevitably, it slipped under a pile of other books and I’ve only just read it.

A few thoughts from the first couple of chapters:

1. Back in the days when Dan Brown was A Thing, I was far from the only one to point and laugh at his gauche telling-not-showing schtick, displayed most notoriously in the first bloody line of The Da Vinci Code when he told you that a character was a renowned curator by introducing him as “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière” (and then killing him). Does Zola do any better? Well, of course he does. After the first sentence introduces the central character, Claude, we get:

He was an artist and liked to ramble around Paris till the small hours, but wandering about the Halles on that hot July evening he had lost all sense of time.

(Il s'était oublié à rôder dans les Halles, par cette nuit brûlante de juillet, en artiste flâneur, amoureux du Paris nocturne...)

So you get the information, but there’s a reason, a context for your getting the information. Even if it relies on the stereotype of the artist wandering around the city at night, up to no good. Which may, in Claude’s case, be accurate...

2. Claude meets a distressed young woman and lets her stay the night in his studio. She is nervous about the situation, and he is annoyed by her nervousness, the fact that she thinks he might want to take advantage of her, but then:

In the hothouse heat of the sunlit room, the girl had thrown back the sheet and, exhausted after a night without sleep, was now slumbering peacefully, bathed in sunlight, and so lost to consciousness that not a sign of a tremor disturbed her naked innocence. During her sleepless tossing the shoulder-straps of her chemise had come unfastened and the one on her left shoulder had slipped off completely, leaving her bosom bare. Her flesh was faintly golden and silk-like in its texture, her firm little breasts, tipped with palest rose-colour, thrust upwards with all the freshness of spring. Her sleepy head lay back upon the pillow, her right arm folded under it, thus displaying her bosom in a line of trusting, delicious abandon, clothed only in the dark mantle of her loose black hair.

Good heavens, that’s pretty racy stuff for the 1880s. But what does Claude do? He begins to draw her still-sleeping form, and carries on after she wakes, gruffly overriding her objections. All sorts of modern concerns about consent and agency and surreptitious image-making come into play. But he doesn’t touch her little breasts, only draws them, so that’s OK (or at least Claude himself thinks that’s OK, but Zola stays out of it).

3. Claude and his chums are at the vanguard of something that may turn out to be Impressionism, but with the names changed, and he wants to present a sense of authenticity, as distinct from “the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure École des Beaux-Arts stuff”. But, in his mind at least, the logical end of this is the triumph of the mundane, familiar image that Warhol might have envisaged:

The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution!

And later, he comes close to precognition of Duchamp:

...a naked woman’s body with neither head nor shoulders, a mutilated trunk, a vague, corpselike shape, the dead flesh of the beauty of his dreams.

Tell you what, it’s better than Dan Brown, isn’t it?

On Radio 4 this evening, a newsreader helpfully glossed an item about the redesign of the Louvre with the information that the Louvre is a museum in Paris that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Now, I get that the BBC is desperate to broaden its reach to the younglings and as a result we might need to broaden our assumptions about canons of knowledge and what is or isn’t known, but if someone doesn’t know what or where the Louvre is, why might they care that President Macron is chucking some money about it. And why does this passion for inclusivity only apply to Radio 4? Does Radio 1 explain every few minutes who Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter might be? No, because the people who listen to Radio 1 are expected to know. 

Why are expectations so low at R4?

The Jesuit grammarian Dominic Bohours (1628-1702), quoted in Babel, by Gaston Dorren:

Of all languages, French has the most natural and sleekest pronunciation. The Chinese and well-nigh all Asian peoples sing; the Germans grumble; the Spaniards holler; the Italians sigh; the English whistle. Only the French can properly be said to speak.

I’ve been supping again from the well of Georges Perec, specifically his Je me souviens/I Remember. Inspired by the work of the American Joe Brainard (and in turn an inspiration for the Scot Gilbert Adair), it’s a list of memories, each prefaced with the words “I remember...” The point to the project is that although each memory is essentially banal (“I remember candy-floss at fairgrounds”), when read together they create something approaching a life, a personality. That said, if Perec didn’t have the imprimatur of literary quality bestowed by his role in the Oulipo group, would his book be any more profound than one of those interminable talking head shows in which fading celebrities pretend to recall Alvin Stardust or 9/11 or ra-ra skirts or the music for The A-Team?

I’m tempted to have a go, though. Watch this space...

A confession. When, several years ago, I ambled into the bookshop Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank and was growled at by the owner George Whitman (I think I interrupted his lunch), I thought I was following in the footsteps of Hemingway, Joyce, Pound and all the other expats who decorated Paris between the wars. Only now do I discover that there were two completely different shops, and that Whitman renamed his own in 1964 as a tribute to Sylvia Beach’s place on the rue de l’Odéon: she closed it in 1941, having refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer, which is a story in itself, surely.

Which is only a preamble to the news that you can now find out who made use of (the first) Shakespeare and Co’s lending library, and what they borrowed, on this fun site. And, connected only by being around at the same time, you can wander through Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas from the safety of your own lockdown.

While we're panic buying loo roll, sales of Albert Camus rocket in France. The secret of French élan? Existentialism and bidets.

— Isabel Rogers (@Isabelwriter) March 8, 2020

Everything that needs to be said about Notre Dame, and plenty that needn’t, has been said. But it does tie in, however loosely, with what I wrote here last week about whether the morals of the artist should have impact on our response to that art; more specifically, the addendum from Nick Cave, who argued that “art must be wrestled from the hands of the pious”.

Except that pious people do make good art, always have. Think of Michelangelo, Bach, Evelyn Waugh. Although the flames ripping through the cathedral prompted grief and despair in the hearts of many non-believers, Notre Dame is almost wholly the work of the pious. Pious people who were doubtless, by the standards of our own time, fervent sexists and homophobes; pious people who were vociferous in their support for Crusades against the infidels and Inquisitions against the heretics; pious people who killed women accused of witchcraft; pious people who sought to silence anyone daring to suggest that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that life on said Earth took a bit more than seven days to pull together. Ultimately, the combined sins of the people who funded and designed and built Notre Dame easily dwarf anything of which Michael Jackson or Woody Allen might be accused.

And yet, quite rightly, we all cried when the spire fell.

PS: And sticking with piety, a really good piece by Adiyta Chakrabortty about the billionaires noisily chipping in to rebuild the cathedral:

Not least among this litany of ironies is that it takes a Catholic cathedral to remind us that we have barely advanced an inch from the medieval buying of indulgences, when the rich could amass their fortunes in as filthy a fashion as they liked – and then donate to the Church to launder their reputations and ensure their salvation.

I was vaguely listening to a radio play about the Paris événements and Googled “Pompidou” to clarify some nugget or another; inevitably, the first thing that comes up is the art centre, rather than de Gaulle’s sidekick. “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” as Guy Debord said. Nice to see the old sod finally being validated.

(After all these years, I’ve only just noticed that the boa ate the elephant trunk-first.)

Still on a vaguely Gallic theme, I do have a degree of sympathy with the MEP Rachida Dati, who managed to confuse inflation with fellatio in a TV interview, something I suspect we’ve all done at some time or other. Her faux pas brings to mind an earlier French icon, France Gall, who in 1966 recorded the Serge Gainsbourg song ‘Les Sucettes’, apparently entirely oblivious to its, um, inflationary subtext; she remained in blissful innocence even after making this promotional clip. When someone (I bet it was Gainsbourg, the cad – I’ll never forgive him for what he said to poor, lovely, pre-crack Whitney Houston) explained what was going on, she hid in her bedroom for weeks, and never made a decent record again.

Next week: Ann Widdecombe attempts to warn us about the possibility of a double-dip recession, but accidentally starts talking about bestiality in the middle of the paso doble.

Le plagiat est nécessaire. Le progrès l’implique.
—Guy Debord (although Lautréamont said it first)

In an overpriced hotel in the 5th arrondissement, the concierge asks where we’re off to. The Museum of Modern Art, we tell him. “Oh, the Pompidou, you mean,” he says. No, the other one, we insist. He looks baffled.

It feels appropriate that an exhibition challenging our very definitions of art should take place in an art gallery the existence of which is a mystery even to well informed Parisians. Seconde Main (Second Hand) is an exhibition of lookalikes, pastiches and other responses in kind by artists to other artists. Rather than hive it off into a dedicated section of the gallery, the curators have integrated the exhibition into the main collection, putting the second-hand roses alongside the real thing, and making us question the identity and nature of both. In what feels like a loss of nerve, the lookalikes are identified with pink stickers – wouldn’t it have been braver to let us guess? – but the effect is still disconcerting and thought-provoking.



Part of this is due to the nature of the museum’s main collection. Although it contains plenty of big names (Matisse, Chagall, Dufy, Dubuffet, et al) few of the works themselves are instantly recognisable, the sort that you’d find on tea-towels or fridge magnets: this, presumably, is why concierges don’t know about the place. So you see something that looks primitive and jungly, and you just assume it’s a Rousseau, because if you know a bit about modern art, you know that’s that sort of thing that Rousseau did, even though you’ve never seen the painting before. And then you discover it’s not a Rousseau at all; it’s actually by some chancer called Ernest T, who takes the titles and dimensions of Rousseau’s lost works, and has a good guess at what they might have looked like, and paints his guesses.

Many of the works, though, are responses to works that are real and existent and very well known. Richard Baquié takes on Duchamp’s Étant donnés, an installation that requires the viewer to peer through a tiny peephole and immediately become a voyeur to a scene that hints at, but never explicitly announces itself as, the aftermath of sexual violence. Baquié disembowels the original, showing its workings, like Penn and Teller telling you how a magic trick is done. But it doesn’t destroy your respect for the original, because you know that without Duchamp having spent 20 years concocting Étant donnés in the first place, Baquié would have nothing to work with; just as Duchamp himself must have known when he doodled facial hair on the work of a previous artist, nearly a century before.

Indeed, many of the subjects (targets? victims?) of the artists here have already been responsible for (guilty of?) appropriating other works, so when Mike Bidlo responds to Warhol’s soap box or Manzoni’s can of shit, we can smile at the cleverness, but the same joke doesn’t bear repeating too often (as it is about Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Bridget Riley and plenty other Pop-ists and Op-ists). The Art & Language collective do something that could well be a Pollock drip painting; more effective is Gavin Turk becoming Pollock himself, emulating Hans Namuth’s images of Jack the Dripper at work. We can become tired of the art, he seems to hint, long before we tire of the artist. Well, Gavin *was* a YBA, wasn’t he?

The brochure namechecks Borges’ Quixote, and you (OK then, I) sort of expect/hope Baudrillard might get a mention as well, but this isn’t really about pure simulacra. The originals have to be present, indeed, have to be dominant, for the copies to make any sense. When Fayçal Bagriche spirits Yves Klein, Trotsky-like, out of his own Leap into the Void, it only makes sense if you know the original. Otherwise, it’s just a photo of a sidestreet.

Seconde Main demands of the viewer a basic working knowledge of the art of the past 100 years, a knowledge of who Pollock was and what Picasso did, for it to make sense. So not only can this exhibition only work in this museum, it can only work in this country, maybe only in this city, where they don’t worry so much about art being “accessible” and “inclusive”. Art’s just there; deal with it. If you can’t deal with it, here’s a book about it. But preferably not one by Dan Brown, whose baleful presence still hangs over the city.

That said, this is still a learning experience. Towards the end is the only piece that’s an actual fake, intended not just to provoke or confuse or amuse, but to deceive; an ersatz Modigliani by the forger Elmyr de Hory. And somehow, I spot it as a wrong ’un even before I see the pink sticker. I don’t think I’d have been able to do that before I came in.

A couple of paintings, new to me, that I saw in the Musée Carnavalet at the weekend:



Jean Touzé (1747-1809), The Jacobins in Hell



Jean Véber (1864-1928), The Parisians Pull the Devil by the Tail

Suddenly find myself in Paris for 48 hours or so. I won’t tell you how long it’s been since I was last here, but that time we flew from London. I know! The olden days, eh? It’s all the same, and it’s all changed. It’s still a bit shabby round the edges, but the piss-and-tobacco reek is mostly gone. Just as many dogs, but fewer with explosive diarrhoea. Most noticeably, waiters and museum staff seem happy to speak English, which is something a culture shock akin to finding a Bangkok taxi driver with a legitimate licence.

Of course, we stumble on in French, desperate to prove we’re not tourists. To prepare, I pick up a copy of Le Canard enchainé, the French equivalent of Private Eye. My O-level grade B, plus a bit of guesswork, means I understand about 80 or 90 per cent of it; but at the same time, I don’t really understand it at all, in the sense of knowing who all these strange people are. It’s a bit like that time we had to translate an article on French pop music, and my teacher explained who Johnny Hallyday was, but we didn’t really believe him. Checking out the hand-chalked menus at the bistros around the Garde du Nord, I have better luck. Rascasse is fish, I know that. But which fish? My main problem is that I can’t read the writing.

On to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in the Café de Flore, haunt of Sartre and Simone, only one person is properly rocking the existentialist look; a young Japanese woman, dining alone, smoking very precisely, exhaling from the furthest corner of her mouth. But no leather-jacketed philosopher sees fit to make a move on her, so she pays up and walks away in the rain.