Paris 1937-1957: An Elegy

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Pompidou Center documents a drama of cultural history

"Paris-Paris," which fills a floor of the Pompidou Center in Paris until Nov. 2, is--so to speak--the fourth panel of a triptych. When "le Pompidoglio" opened in 1977, it started a series of exhibitions meant to show, in detail, how the capital cities of modernism had reacted to one another in our century. These were "Paris-New York" (1977), "Paris-Berlin" (1978) and "Paris-Moscow" (1979). The emphasis would be on painting and sculpture, but other wells of memory were also tapped--period rooms, reconstructions, photos, slide displays and documents. In the archaeology of the recently vanished present, as in some Middle Eastern dig, no evidence can be jettisoned.

The success of these shows varied. "Paris-New York" was marred by sloppy curatorship, and "Paris-Moscow"-- which depended largely on loans from the Soviet Union--was intellectually crippled by the Russian cultural apparatchiks who wrote its catalogue, although much of the art itself was, in either case, extraordinary. The best of the three was "Paris-Berlin," although one needed the stamina of a goat to traverse the screes and piles of evidence it presented. But in all three shows there was the lure of epic subject, rightly presented by Director Pontus Hulten and his staff as one of the great dramas of cultural history.

"Paris-Paris" does not begin with this advantage. It is an elegy, haunted by a sense of loss. The period it covers, 1937-1957, was precisely the time when the queen city began, like some Venice of modernism, to slide into debility. It is a simplification, but not a wholly unfair one, to say that during those 20 years Paris felt, interpreted and amplified all the historical tensions of its time except within the visual arts. The moral triumphs of the period, in France, belong more to literature than to painting or sculpture.

This note is struck at the beginning of the show, which tries to describe the reactions of French artists to the Spanish Civil War. Spain was the test of political alignment for artists and intellectuals. It inspired the most famous political image in modern art, Guernica, and evoked some remarkable images from Spaniards other than Picasso, such as Salvador Dali and Joan Miro. Guernica could not be lent to this exhibition, although one gets some hint of the fervors from Miro's design for a poster, Aidez l'Espagne, and from Dali's hallucinated Cannibalisme d'Automne. But most of the work by French artists in support of the Republicans and the Popular Front now seems pedestrian; French painting had no equivalent to Malraux's Espoir or Georges Bernanos' Les Grands Cimetieres sous la Lune.

In wartime, the old masters of the School of Paris kept working: Matisse and Bonnard on their chosen imagery of Mediterranean delight, Picasso at his distorted, edgily claustrophobic figures. But with the galleries closed, censorship rampant and the choice of death or exile staring at so many artists, what "art world," as a system, could survive? The surrealists left en masse for New York; in the words of the English critic Cyril Connolly, it was "closing time in the gardens of the West."

After 1944--commemorated, in this show, by one of the most moving political posters ever made, Paul Colin's image of La France with crucified hands, staring into the future, her tattered dress suggestive of bombed cities--the artists began to regroup. "Paris-Paris" is exceptionally good on the postwar years--the moment of existentialism, with its pervasive sense of harsh meagerness, its starting from zero, its purging of conventional "humanism" from the human image. One almost forgets, at this range, what a widespread set of conventions it produced in painting and sculpture. Yet there they all are: the early Bernard Buffets, gray, spiky still lifes, mournful and oppressively style-ridden; the even earlier works of a virtually forgotten artist, Francis Gruber, whose ravaged landscapes and etiolated figures `a la Jacques Callot seem to have given the much slicker Buffet most of his ideas. In sculpture there were the post-Hiroshima-style images, all spikes and burnt dribbles of welded iron, by people like Germaine Richier and Cesar.

If it all looks like a period style, and a rather thin one at that, one needs to remember that the '40s and early '50s saw the emergence of the last major artists that the School of Paris would produce. The show has a fine selection of Jean Dubuffet's work from that time, the scrawl-and-cow-flop portraits, subway figures and fat nudes that elicited reams of indignant protest from the guardians of le beau et le bien. Quite properly, Alberto Giacometti's wiry bronze isolates are given a room to themselves, and it is the most august room in the show. Yet there are surprises--notably the suite of "hostages" by Jean Fautrier, human presences rendered down into a thick anonymous protein of paint, which were exhibited in Paris just after the Liberation (with a catalogue preface by Andre Malraux) and are still among the most striking images of pathos and mute, intractable survival that the war evoked from the West. The monochromes of Yves Klein, a curiously underrated compound of Duchampian dandy and body artist from the '50s, prefigure much that would happen on the conceptual fringes of the art scene in the '70s.

Such men stand out against a near wasteland of postwar French abstraction. Even the best talents involved in it, like Nicolas de Stael (1914-55), now look somewhat mannered and superficial; no wonder that the paintings of the New York School had such a traumatic impact on their aesthetic environment. Nothing could be tamer than the late-cubist scaffolding, the tidy compartmenting of the surface that provided the formal recipes of artists like Serge Poliakoff and Maurice Esteve. Then there were the "religious" abstractionists, like Alfred Manessier, with their mock stained glass; and the gestural painters, like the appalling Georges Mathieu. By the mid-'50s, most of what Paris could offer a painter was concentrated in the museums; there was little enough life in the studios.

In their effort to convey the texture of life and literature in those 20 years, the curators have strained the exhibition format till it creaks. It is overloaded with documents that cannot be read because their pages cannot be turned: case after glass case of books, letters,feuilletons. This is literature-as-curiosity, a travesty of reading. Often the catalogue is much more rewarding than the rooms it annotates. Many of the photographs, by Robert Capa, Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson, are of great documentary interest and poignancy--and they are not, for once, presented like precious little rectangles of market rarity. But the souvenirs: Beaubourg curators have a passion for them, and the show is so full of memorial objects from ration cards to a prototype Citroen 2CV that one expects, at any moment, to encounter a plastic shrine containing Albert Camus's cigarette butts or half of Petain's mustache. The fact is that "Paris-Paris" was a good idea for a long documentary film. It might even have been the cultural equivalent of The Sorrow and the Pity. But as an exhibition it seems disjointed and patchy, because its contents will not surrender their meaning to the conditions of museum display. One may lament or applaud the fact that not everything can be assimilated by the museum; but it is still, apparently, a fact.

By Robert Hughes

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