Svetlana Reingold "The sun of the arts shone only in Paris…"

The legend of Paris, a legend created in bold strokes of primary colour... Like all legends, it has its melancholy moments and heroic episodes, streets paved with poverty and brilliantly lit windows. Pause for a moment. The curtain has not yet risen, the clock hands are frozen, the trains stand motionless, the stations hushed, the pavements silent. In a few seconds everything will burst into life, these streets and boulevards will come alive with hectic activity, the whole city is poised to enter the glittering annals of fame. As the final seconds tick away, let us ponder its destiny. Valerie Bougault1

The lively spirit of modernism first arose in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century,2 primarily in cities where there was a combination of rich intellectual activity in the universities, academies and schools of art, and a spirit of political liberalism. In the capital of France there was a particularly fruitful combination of these elements. For generations, the Parisian cultural institutions had maintained an international reputation, thanks to the strong investment of the monarchy and later of the republican government. The heritage of the French Revolution endowed Paris with its reputation as the capital of human rights - freedom, equality and fraternity.3 Even when the monarchy and imperial rule returned from time to time to 19th century France, the Parisian ethos as the capital of humanism was never dispelled.4 The centrality of Paris is very evident in the unique phenomenon with which this exhibition deals – the gathering of foreign Jewish artists in the city during the first half of the 20th century, also known as the “Jewish School of Paris”.5 Indeed, the capital of France at that time held the largest group of Jewish artists in the entire history of Jewish art. On arriving in Paris, these artists became members of an international group of pioneers of modern art, paving the way for the literary and artistic capital of the western world and searching for new modes of expression. This was possible because of the inspiration and artistic freedom with which the city itself endowed them. In the 1920s and 1930s the streets of Paris formed a “glittering stage of modern life”, in which the culture of consumption predominated.6 Cinemas, cabarets and local boutiques supplied the basic needs of modern living. For most of the artists and writers who had arrived in Paris during the first quarter of the 20th century, the city predominated, and this they tried to capture and translate into visual and literary expression. For them the Parisian milieu became their benchmark for the study and comprehension of reality. On arrival in Paris, the artists did not merely focus on learning techniques, but also on “how to be an artist” according to the understanding of the term in regard to Parisian modernism. According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the artists acquired “habitus” (a pattern of behavior) that allowed them to enter the field of contemporary art, and even admitted them as active participants in this field.7 Interpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s command to “paint modern life”8 became the prime basis for definition of the modern artist. His view links the artist with the life of the French capital as a modern metropolis, while Paris during the second half of the 19th century had begun to develop as a modern city under the guidance of Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who transformed the narrow old streets into broad, spacious boulevards. Here, at the junction of those boulevards, Baudelaire placed the image of the artist- protagonist of the modern city. As a detached observer wandering through the Paris streets, he acts as a “flâneur” – a poet of modern life, sitting in the cafes and watching from the sidelines, studying the passersby, registering his impressions while not actually experiencing them. This flâneur has, however, some measure of aloofness and arrogance even though he passes no judgment on what he sees, but merely documents it.9 According to Janet Wolff, the flâneur is the modern protagonist whose experience is based on freedom to roam the city and the ability to overcome his subordinate position, an active participant in the milieu while remaining detached from it. As an anonymous member of the crowd, he exists on the borders of society.10 This figure of the “wandering artist” whose time is his own, moving about aimlessly and looking in shop-windows, appealed to the artists, and they behaved accordingly.11 In his memoirs, Mané-Katz wrote – “We wandered around Paris like madmen, visited museums, exhibitions … You lose your way. And Paris, the lofty skies of Paris, the boulevards, the little street-singers – it’s all fascinating, touching, exciting.”12 The Jewish artists’ enchantment with Paris is closely linked to the fact that living in it contributed to the creation of their self-image and self-respect. Thus, the city that was their host was a major element in the crystallization of their new identity (changing their names, for instance, was another expression of this). In this regard, Walter Benjamin stated that the city, as the definitive expression of modernity, defines the experience and world view of anyone living in it. Indeed, the material actuality of Paris was the accepted milestone on the route to becoming a “modern artist”. For the contemporary artist, according to this principle, the locus of creativity could only be the capital city of modern art. Furthermore, one specific quartier – Montparnasse – was its accepted centre. The transition of the artistic and cultural life of Paris to Montparnasse has been studied in depth.13 The Jewish artists participated fully in this premise, seeing their life in Montparnasse as an essential factor in becoming modern artists. This is clearly evident in Mané-Katz’s memoir – “In those days I never wandered around Montparnasse. I was scared to do so because I didn't want to become a modern artist.”14 In 1914 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote – “Nowadays the real artists are to be found in Montparnasse… What a fine country that is, where the whole sky is for us to enjoy, a country of fresh air and café terraces.”15 The connection between the identity of the Jewish artists who gathered in Paris and how they viewed the city is a fascinating and multi-faceted subject. The exhibition “The Desire for Paris”16 deals with this phenomenon and is organized in two intersecting circles. The first circle examines the self-image of the Jewish artist through the prism of his experiences in the modern metropolis. It also reveals the substratum of the artistic space in which the Jewish artist adjusted to the accepted “habitus” – the Parisian artistic community and its venues - and the artist’s studio as the space that defined his personal and artistic identity. The second circle examines the various ways in which the artists viewed Paris as a modern space, a centre as opposed to a periphery. Through this variegated image of the city, the exhibition examines the attachment of the Jewish artist to the place that embodied, for him, the “promised land” of modern art during the first half of the 20th century. The attachment to Paris is grounded in the debate about the modern concept in relation to the tension between “here” and “there”. The assembly of the Jewish artists in Paris is closely linked to the manner in which the city (“there”) was imagined as the cultural centre of classical Europe, sublime but remote: “There is the aesthetic, the great culture of the West. There materials have souls and meaning, the wine is blood, bread is the body, the cross is fate”.17 This contrasts sharply with the periphery, making the artist’s odyssey to Paris a real event symbolizing a real change, an event that was very meaningful in regard to “pre-“ and “post-“. The art historian Sarit Shapiro discusses the concept of wandering as endemic to the Jewish myth. According to her, wandering in unknown spaces means abandoning the sense of “home”, so that movement becomes deliberate, and has meaning and limits. Wanderlust is a focal subject of romance, implying a journey through unknown lands to a longed-for place, free from restrictions of law and order.18 For the Jewish artists, Paris was the stronghold of freedom, it presence or absence denoting “centre” and “periphery”. Something of this is evident in Chagall’s memoir: “I arrived [in Paris] as if borne by fate, with all my dreams and ideas. My every desire was fulfilled when I alighted from the train to find the light and liberty I have never encountered anywhere else”.19 This yearning of the Jewish artists for Paris signifies a completely different reality from what we know today. Facing the works of the artists of the Paris school, the exhibition presents works by contemporary Israeli artists, suggesting that the dichotomy of centre vs. margin as interpreted in the modernist era is devoid of meaning in the era of the global net. Works by David Adika, Yossi Breger and Yosef Dadoune represent the world of post-modernism, in which the term “glocal” (a synthesis of “global” and “local”) has replaced the term “place”. The images in these works deal with the status of Paris in the cultural canon of the West. They explore the codes and signals embedded in the semiotics of the city, and relate to the concept of the virtual space in the new reality that has no connection with the real world. Such works correspond to the post-modern discourse, emphasizing the emptiness of the perceived cultural space. In this context, Dror K. Levi noted that in the post-industrial era, transmissions in “real time” reject actual space. Detached from geographic space on the computer screen, the distance between ‘here’ and ‘there’ vanishes with the speed of light, history crashes against the barriers of time.20 In his book “Lost Dimensions”21 Paul Virilio depicts the evacuation of the historic city centre, the appearance of the over- exposed city. Reducing geographic space and face-to face encounters to the computer screen, conversion of depth to absolute two-dimensionality, cancelling the distance between home and the workplace, collapse of the workspace into the home computer system – all these have been conducive to the disappearance of the modern city into the heterogeneity of the time regime.22 “In those days, the sun of the arts shone only in Paris…”23 wrote Marc Chagall in his memoirs. The current exhibition is an attempt to examine the actuality of his words for our time. It seems that the myth of Paris as the heart of western culture only emphasizes the gap between the artistic discourse of the modern age in the first half of the 20th century, and that of contemporary cultural discourse.

Note: This article published in the exhibition catalogue: The Desire for Paris, Haifa: Mané-Katz Museum, 2012.

1 Valerie Bougault, Paris-Montparnasse: the Heyday of Modern Art 1910-1940, Paris: Terrail, 1997, p. 8. 2 There is a spectrum of opinions as to the beginnings of modernity. Cyril Connolly’s essay “The Modern Movement" claims that it originated in mid-19th century bohemian Paris. He characterizes the works of Baudelaire and his personal mode of expression as characteristic of this new artistic phenomenon, culminating in the modernist revolution, and tends to view it as anarchistic romantic individualism. Others concede that modernism began during the first 3 decades of the 20th century. Alvarez saw it as revolt against and discarding of previous values in the 20th century, especially in the decade following WWII, and dates the “epicentre of the earthquake” – the rise of modernism, to the early 1920s in the works of Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Kafka. See: Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement, 100 Key Books from England, France and America, 1880-1950, London: Picador, 2002. 3 Pascal Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres, Paris: Seuil, 1999, pp. 41-55. 4 Amotz Giladi, Modernism in Three Movements: on Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Surrealism, Tel Aviv: Sal Tarbut Artzi, 2010, p.12 (Hebrew). 5 See further references in the current catalogue. 6 Carol Mann, Paris: artistic life in the twenties and thirties, London: Laurence King, 1996, p. 60. 7 David Sperber, "Good Morning Elijah", VAT, http://www.bac.org.il/ContentPage.aspx?id=820 (Hebrew). 8 Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", Le Figaro, 1863. See also: Dalia Manor, "No aspect of life seemed hackneyed", Review on "The Painter of Modern Life", Haaretz, 30.12.2011 (Hebrew). 9 Dalia Manor, Ibid. 10 Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity” in: Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990, p. 39. 11 Dalia Manor, Ibid.

12 Mané-Katz, “Memoirs from Paris” in: Noa Tarshish (ed.), Mané-Katz – Ukraine, Paris, Israel, Haifa: Mané-Katz Museum, 2011, p. 40. 13 See e.g.: Nicholas Hewitt, “Shifting Cultural Centres in Twentieth-century Paris” in: Michael Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Fields, London: Reaktion Books, 1996, pp. 30-45; Valerie Bougault, Paris- Montparnasse: the Heyday of Modern Art, 1910-1940, Paris; Terrail, 1997. 14 Mané-Katz, p. 40 (see note 12). 15 Cited in: Valerie Bougault, p. 42 (see note 1). 16 The exhibition's title is, like that of the article by Yona Fischer, "The Desire for Paris", in: Noa Tarshish (ed.) Mané-Katz – Ukraine, Paris, Israel, pp. 286-289. 17 Sara Breitberg-Semel, The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art, Exhibition catalogue, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1986, p. 16 18 Sarit Shapira, Wanderers’ Routes: Emigration, Journeys and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art, Exhibition Catalogue, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1991. 19 Cited in: Valerie Bougault, p. 42 (see note 1). 20 Dror K. Levi, “The Big Aphanisis: From Time to Space and Vice Versa”, in: History and Theory, Bezalel, Issue no.4 (March-April 2007), http://bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/en/1173510036/dror_en. 21 Paul Virilio, Lost Dimension, transl. D. Moschenberg, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991. 22 Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City”, in: Zone, No. 1-2 (1986), p. 19. 23 Cited in: Valerie Bougault, p. 8 (see note 1).