Lavender's Blue: Wherever there's design there's Lavender's Blue

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.

Paris + Literature

The Myth of Normal

Like Colette, we prefer passion to goodness. The great French novelist purrs in The Cat (1933), “The June evening, drenched with light, was reluctant to give way to darkness.” And, “June came with its longer days, its night skies devoid of mystery which the late glow of the sunset and the early glimmer of dawn over the east of Paris kept from being wholly dark.” She too was a lover of “The giddy horizons of Paris.”

Writer and poet Charles Baudelaire caused quite the stir in 1857 with his risqué poem collection Les Fleurs du Mal. One of the tamer pieces is The Swan. Roy Campbell translated it into English in 1952, including the line, “Old Paris is no more (cities renew, quicker than human hearts, their changing spell).” Two years later, William Aggeler also translated it. His version includes, “Paris changes! But naught in my melancholy, Has stirred! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone, Old quarters, all become for me an allegory, And my dear memories are heavier than rocks.” All those Haussmannian boulevards must have seemed so sharply new.

Nancy Mitford, as always, is right. In Don’t Tell Alfred (1960), the Francophile novelist continues, “… past acres of houses exactly as Voltaire, as Balzac, must have seen them, of that colour between beige and grey so characteristic of the Île de France, with high slate roofs and lacy ironwork balconies. Though the outside of these houses have a homogeneity which makes an architectural unit of each street, a glimpse through their great decorated doorways into the courtyards reveals a wealth of difference within. Some are planned on a large and airy scale and have fine staircases and windows surmounted by smiling masks, some are so narrow and dark and mysterious, so overbuilt through the centuries with such ancient, sinister rabbit-runs leading out of them, that it is hard to imagine a citizen of the modern world inhabiting them.”

Frédéric Dassas, Senior Curator Musée du Louvre, told us at the Remembering Napoléon III Dinner in Camden Place, Chislehurst, Kent, “Walk through Paris with open eyes. We still have Paris in Europe!” We will. We do. We’re full of passion for this city. Especially riding through Paris with the wind in our hair. On the back of a motorbike, weaving through rush hour traffic, speeding down narrow streets, zooming round the uninsurable l’Arc de Triomphe roadway, this is life in the fast lane and the overtaking one too. Sporting Mary Martin London and Isabel Marant of course. Selina Hastings writes in her biography of Nancy Mitford (2002), “She found in beautiful Paris happiness of spirit …” Soon we will be deuxième étage living it up. We’re not always good but we’re always passionate.

Then there’s the Manifestation! We head up Montmartre for a hawk’s eye view of Montparnasse. Sacré Coeur.

Share this:

Share this: