Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [191]
Then, after you’ve made your round of the shops, take a stroll out into the garden itself, sit down on a sunny bench, and look up at the blank windows of the apartments lining the garden. Try to imagine the lives past and present within them. Think what it would have been like to inhabit the gardened landscapes so carefully traced and ever present in the novels of Colette. And let your mind take wing on this quote from the period of her life when she lived in the Palais Royal and no longer had a garden of her own: “Vous n’avez pas de jardin? Moi non plus. Aimons celui que nous inventons.”—You don’t have a garden? Me either. So let’s love the one we imagine.
Paris/New York
“Between the world wars, no two cities engaged in a more fertile conversation than Paris, de facto capital of the nineteenth century, and New York, its twentieth-century rival.” So states Susan Henshaw Jones, president and director of the Museum of the City of New York, which in 2008–2009 organized a terrific exhibit, Paris/New York: Design, Fashion, Culture 1925–1940. An accompanying book by the same name and edited by Donald Albrecht (Monacelli, 2008) is a worthy guide to this fascinating relationship between the two cities. It’s filled with gorgeous color and black-and-white photographs, drawings, and reproductions of artworks; these include some wonderful period photos of Art Deco masterpieces in New York’s Bonwit Teller department store and in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and (my favorite) one of Nelson Rockefeller’s apartment, complete with a fireplace mural by Fernand Léger. The Paris Exposition of 1925 and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 were enormously influential in linking the two cities.
Though the United States didn’t participate in the 1925 Paris Exposition, thousands of American tourists visited the fair during its six-month run. Additionally, then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover named an official commission to inform him “of ideas that would be valuable to American manufacturers,” sending three commissioners and more than eighty delegates to represent American arts and architecture in Paris. The 1939 World’s Fair, whose theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” featured various pavilions and exhibitions celebrating America’s industrial and corporate might. France, in contrast, sent its great ocean liner Normandie to New York—referred to in the book as “France afloat”—and its pavilion featured a first-class restaurant on the top floor that “brought haute cuisine to New York and would prove to be the training ground for the city’s renowned post–World War II French restaurateurs.” When Paris was invaded by the Nazis not one year later, the close links between Paris and New York were severed. “The relationship between America and France, New York and Paris, had already shifted into a new phase as Paris’s role in world political and cultural affairs diminished and New York’s expanded.”
RECOMMENDED READING
ART DEALERS
As much as I enjoyed the many art history classes I took in college and the many art museums I continue to visit, I find in many cases that even more interesting than the lives of artists of years ago are those of the dealers that represented them. When you see a painting in a museum, for example, there is usually a brief description of the work that includes the date it was completed and perhaps a lengthier story about it. But visitors are not typically informed of the work’s provenance—who has owned it over the years since it was painted and how it came to be in the museum’s collection. I am utterly fascinated with the provenance of artworks, and dealers are of course a big part of an artwork’s journey. Just a few reads about legendary dealers are:
An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler, 1884–1979, Pierre Assouline (Grove/Atlantic, 1990). Daniel-Heinrich Kahnweiler formed the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris and represented, among others, Picasso, Braque, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck. The twentieth century had more than one great art dealer, Assouline notes,