Paris: city of art, romance, foul smells, history, fashion, inequality, learning, light, trash, cuisine, architecture, grumpy Parisians, multiculturalism, individuality, crowds, uncomfortable seating at overpriced restaurants, liberty, oppression, pedestrians, traffic ... a glorious mess of contradictions.
It’s a city that you feel you know without even visiting it, and a city that you realise you’ll never really know, even after many visits.
What was a part-time arts critic to do, having washed up on the shores of this clash of cliché pictures, places, stories and songs? That was the pleasing conundrum I faced last week, with just a couple of hours to explore the city after spending three days hunkered down in Parisian libraries and archives. I decided to lean into cliché and climbed the steps to Sacre Coeur cathedral and the promise of la vie en rose in Montmartre.
Before long I was in the crush of Place du Tertre, where artists of all stripes gather to sketch, draw and paint en plein air. It’s a tourist trap, but there is nevertheless something wonderful about the sheer amount of art generated within one small city square. Mostly portraits of course — for sitters who are by turns earnest, vain, bashful, in blissful reverie or quietly long suffering. There are also countless attempts to depict the Eiffel Tower anew, or to render a quaint Montmartre corner somehow quainter.
Paris doesn’t so much resist this iconic over-familiarity as thrive on it. Perhaps one could even say that Paris the global city — as a physical space but also as an idea — is, in fact, constituted by these much-loved, frequently cited, eternally recycled images and their wide-ranging associations. Much of this is a British-American countercultural perspective (fin-de-siècle, the Lost Generation, Modernism, the left bank, the Beats) distributed to and appropriated by the rest of the world over the past 150 years.
The city has gained fresh energy and an expanding identity through immigration, from Africa and Asia in particular — a function, largely, of France’s colonial-imperial past. But this has not yet been incorporated into the narratives that draw tourists in their droves to Paris.
The thing about well-worn tales is that, like well-worn shoes, they are comfortable. You have to keep checking on them to make sure that they are fit for purpose; there is a fine line between well-worn and worn out. Slipping into them gives you a sense of adventure, a kind of nostalgia for the roads already travelled mixed with the anticipation of what lies ahead. There are worse companions on a journey far from home.
My other French arts indulgence was a brief stay in Auvers-sur-Oise, the small town on the outskirts of Paris where Vincent van Gogh spent his last few months. Like many an idée fixe, this combination of person and place was embedded in my consciousness when I was a teenager. I vividly remember being introduced to Henning Pieterse’s poem Van Gogh the Auvers by my high school Afrikaans teacher, Mevrou Malan.
The poem was prescribed for exams, which is ordinarily a condition that precludes any pleasure or insight in a literary encounter. But Mevrou Malan had other ideas. In a darkened auditorium, she played us Don McLean’s song Vincent as slides of Van Gogh’s famous paintings flashed before our eyes. We were a class of irredeemably precocious adolescents, too cool or too clever to immerse ourselves in the beauty and sadness of it all. But when the lights came on and we saw Mevrou Malan wiping the tears from her cheeks, we recognised a moment of deep pathos.
There was something almost inevitable about my visit to Auvers; I walked the streets and fields with McLean’s voice constantly in my ears, thinking sometimes about Van Gogh and sometimes about Mevrou Malan, and catching myself crying not only for Vincent and his brother Theo and Doctor Gachet and the Ravoux family but for all who have known melancholy, loneliness and a longing for greatness. And for my family. And for my younger self.
There is much to be said for familiar stories — and cherished memories, and even artistic clichés. As George Eliot asked, “What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
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