Room for Love
Mees Salomé’s Higher is playing while we enjoy cheesy omelette on the terrace of Le Deli’s on Rue du Mont-Cenis watching the competitive joggers beat the gradient. It’s all about being above and beyonders, top performers, brand champions, role models, best of the best, on the frontline. We’re getting high. A spiritual high. A romantic high. A physical high. A Paris high. Adoring Montmartre. Sleaze (Boulevard de Clichy) turns to class (Rue Cortot) in direct correlation to altitude. So it’s onwards and upwards to the Montmartre Museum which is so much more than its name suggests. The museum is a summit situated collection of spaces set in the shadow of the towering roofscapes of Sacré Coeur and Château d’Eau de Montmartre. One a monument to spiritual health, the other a monument to physical health. This urban composition at the highest topographical point of Paris oozes up at heel bohemian charm.
“Modern Paris exists largely because of one man – Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, otherwise known as Emperor Napoléon III, nephew of the more gifted Napoléon I. It was he who conceived a compact Paris tied together with wide boulevards, and hired the man who made it reality,” explains John Baxter in Montmartre Paris’s Village of Art and Sin (2017). “To create these thoroughfares and the buildings that lined them, the Emperor appointed ‘Baron’ Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a town planner sufficiently far seeing to visualise a modern Paris and ruthless enough to realise it.”
Montmartre, or at least the hill itself, was never quite Hausmannised and developed more organically in picturesque clusters of development. This peak of the 18th Arrondisement was of course the pinnacle of civilisation in the 1920s. “Paris. No word sounded sweeter to me!” the artist Marc Chagall recalled in his 1957 autobiography My Life. Artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Maurice Utrillo, Raoul Dufy, Émile Bernard and Suzanne Valadon all worked in the collection of buildings that is now the museum. The former’s garden with its iconic swing and the latter’s studio with its used paintbrushes have both been recreated. The composer Erik Satie lived next door.
The Master Revealed is the current exhibition celebrating the life work of Auguste Herbin (1882 to 1960). Occasionally whacky, always brilliant, this painter embraced all the main art movements of the 20th century. Auguste moved seamlessly between Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract, Post Impressionism, Realism and Musicalism. He was very much a man of his time. Curator Fanny de Lépanau opines, “Given that he produced work for such a long period and of such high quality, it is surprising that Auguste Herbin has never had an exhibition in a Parisian museum.” She laments his undeserved descent into relative obscurity despite a successful career across Europe spanning six decades. Perhaps this exhibition will act as a catalyst to resurrect his reputation and establish his deserved place in the history of 20th century art.
The exhibition illustrates the artist’s versatility and includes portraits, self portraits, still lifes, townscapes, landscapes and even his plastic alphabet. One of the standout townscape works is the intensely mysterious Paysage Nocturne à Lille (1901). Another wintry painting is Toits de Paris Sous la Neige (1902), an atmospheric snowstorm scene captured at eyre level. The standout landscape Paysage Méridional (1924) reveals such a sunny disposition. La Vieux Pont à Bruges (1906) and La Place Maubert (1907) are explosions of vibrant colour. Auguste Herbin believed, “The more abstract art is, the more it expresses personality. The more abstract art is, the more it identifies with a thousand and one personalities.” Nature Morte Aux Feuilles (1917) does just that.
