Travels With My Shoes

DE PASO EXHIBITION UPDATE:
New dates for DE PASO in Santandar: October 9 – October 31

Paris.

It was raining in Paris when I arrived, so I took a taxi to Blvd. Malherbes 68 where Oscar met me. In this typical Parisian building Oscar had rented a chambre de bonne (maid’s room) on the 6th floor, 110 steps up. At first the steps were dauntingly aerobic going up, and a perilous experience going down the twisting structure. However, over the week I not only appreciated the hard-working bonnes who went up and down, but began to feel some strange pleasure in going up the mountain after a long evening eating and drinking, and knew I would miss them.
I do not know Paris at all. Oscar had planned for years to move there, knows the city well and we managed to spend most evenings together, the rest of the day I did some museum gawking, but mostly enjoyed scribble-sketching on a bench in the Parc Monceau.

First evening I found a café called Chez Bebert, (a song I have sung in my Bicycle Cabaret performances) but it was closed for summer -plus I was told that it is just a cous cous chain. So, on to Musee D’Orsay . Oscar recommended an exhibit that unfortunately had just closed.
Although this museum is considered a shrine by most people I find it difficult to navigate. I also found one of those maddening exhibits : Max Ernst Collages Une Semaine de Bonte. Originally in pamphlet form, someone had the ridiculous idea to exhibit each day’s pages in separate rooms. For me, after seeing just one wall, I jumped ship. The similarity of format created a tiring blur. I’m sure Max E. would not have approved.

I made my way to Jeu de Pommes Hotel sully to see Agusti Centelles’ Spanish Civil War Photographs, a small intense exhibit documenting the war and detention of Spanish republican fighters in France. The books relating to the show were attached to a table by wire that was in an incredible tangle, so if you picked up a book, the wire being shortened by knots, it almost pulled you onto the floor. We were all reading in strange positions due to this phenomena and I got into an interesting conversation with a Lina Wertmuller look-alike about this, who kept saying: “ Only in Paris, only in Paris…” A big book in the tangle of photographs by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s collaborator was extraordinary.

BUT the most stunning, numero uno, sin duda, art I saw, were the gargoyles on Notre Dame AT NIGHT. We walked up to the serene well-recognised façade, turned the corner and jutting out like lightening were the gargoyles. At different angles and lengths there was none of the symmetry of the façade. Like giant dangerous quills they appeared to spurt from the walls, their faces grotesque with malignant expression.

Lit by a full moon, they reminded me of the paintings by Francis Bacon of the Screaming Pope. After having had dinner at a simple Tibetan restaurant and enjoying watching groups of young folk hanging out and performing ad hoc by the Seine to see this was to turn a corner and hear screeching disaster. A powerful unexpected experience. A crack of the stockwhip in the middle of the night.

Anyway, after that wake up call, everything seemed tame. My final day I visited Bruce

Van Barthold and his family in Vaux Sur Seine. Bruce is the son of Prue V-B, my mother’s roommate in London before she met my father. Last year Prue, reminiscing with Bruce said “I wonder what happened to all those Pettus’s?” They found me and I visited Prue last year in Wimbledon and enjoyed a day with Bruce, who I had not seen for about 44 years, according to our calculations. I was sorry to have just missed his Dad by a day. He knew my mother as an au pair in Paris. We visited the house where Van Gogh had died, and his grave, where he is buried next to his younger brother Theo, recipient of all those amazing letters. I had always thought Theo was older .Theo took his own life the year after Vincent. I removed a nasty plastic sunflower from the grave.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 6:35 am