Birmingham vs Paris: the bottom line

 

My colleague David Walker had been working in both Birmingham and Paris. He spends a lot of his life at airports.

 

‘Paris is so elegant,’ he told me, ‘but the people – so rude.’

 

‘How about Birmingham?’ I asked him.

 

‘Well, it’s completely the opposite,’ he said. ‘The Brummies ‒ so warm and friendly. A delight. But the place itself – nothing to write home about.’

 

‘Here’s an idea,’ I proposed: ‘What if we were to switch the populations over?’

 

‘Oh, God no. Those Brummies in Paris? They’d immediately start double-glazing everything and building conservatory extensions.’

Farewell then International Herald Tribune

Perhaps the change I noticed most in Paris was the quiet disappearance of the International Herald Tribune, replaced by an international version of the New York Times.

Originally launched in 1887, the steadfastly old-fashioned Paris-based IHT had always for me been part of the city, a Gallic flavour added to its equally démodé parents in New York and Washington.

The paper had accompanied me happily through five decades of international travel.

Apps vs art

In an online article in spiked,* Wendy Earle of Birkbeck, University of London, argues for minimal information and technology in art museums, encouraging visitors to interact directly with the works themselves. 

At an exhibition in Paris of British Aestheticists (Désir et Volupté – with Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Rossetti, Burne-Jones etc) at the wonderful Musée Jacquemart-André, I noticed that the punters were nearly all reading the information panels and/or using various “apps”, leaving scarcely anyone to look at the paintings.

This is not a phenomenon unique to the French. I notice it everywhere – a real hunger for information and guidance, as though people are afraid simply to trust themselves, to look and wonder.

*Technology in museums – less is more! http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/technology_in_museums_less_is_more/14433#.UsPvQv1FDIV    

Operatic visions at the Opéra

One of the few places without an endless queue in Paris was Charles Garnier’s masterpiece, the Opéra. I’d last visited some forty plus years ago. Garnier was chosen from a vast list of applicants, virtually without experience as an architect. 

That great writer, the late Ian Nairn, captures it vividly in his indispensable Nairn’s Paris:

Quite rightly just l’Opéra, not a name like Covent Garden or La Scala. This is the final justification of the gilded acres of Versailles and Fontainebleau: a declamatory roulade of allegory that would pump a sense of occasion into the limpest libretto. The outside gives clear warning of what is about to happen, but it is only tuning up; overture, grand march, love duet and final chorus are all inside, in the gorgeous sequence of double staircase leading to the auditorium on one side and a third-floor foyer – what a name for it! – on the other, immediately behind the façade. This is more operatic than the opera…

Then he goes on to spoil it by nominating Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène as the ideal, “unforgettable” work to hear there. I’m not sure anything by that fine composer of bubbling light operas has ever made it on to the stage of the Opéra. Something much more sérieux is the ticket.

 

Anyone for Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, preferably on a nuit de sept étoiles?

Conversing in French

It was my eleven year old daughter Dora’s first time in Paris and her first experience of my rudimentary French.

On day two she concluded that, for me, conversation in the language consisted mostly of “voilà” and “pas de problème”. Oh, and "l'addition, s'il vous plait".

 

But then, what more is really useful?

Creative problem-solving in Paris

When it comes to collaborative creativity, there are indeed many ways to skin a cat.

I started teaching a group of young French managers in Paris as usual, by asking them how they normally went about it. They looked puzzled.

“Well, when you want to brainstorm or problem-solve, what do you do,” I asked.
Silence.
“Don’t you do it at all?”
“We do it all the time.”
“Yes, but what do you do? How do you go about doing it?”
Another pause.
“We go into a room together.”
“Yes, and…”
“We shut the door.”
“And…”
“Er, we argue with each other for a while.”
“And…”
“Then someone decides what we’ll do about it, and who will do it. And we leave the room.”

Job done.

Does every culture have its own default way of problem-solving?

La vie de bohème

Poking around my dissertation (which is on Australasian musicians, writers and artists who came to Europe in the fin-de siècle), I’ve recently read two seminal novels on the Bohemian movement – Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème and George du Maurier’s Trilby.

The former is set in 1840s Paris. The latter in Paris and London in the following decade. Both deal with artists living the Art for Art’s Sake ideal. But there the similarity ends.

Murger’s Bohemians are young, uninhibited, penniless and witty. Most of du Maurier’s are rich and high-born, merely pretending to be the real thing ‒ and there’s not a skerrick of wit between them. Murger’s prose bounds along joyfully, where du Maurier’s is lumpen.

Of course, La vie de bohème was written and published when the movement was young, whereas Trilby was composed in retrospect in the 1890s, fifty years later, embracing prudish late-Victorian values. Irritatingly, in Trilby du Maurier denounces “bourgeois” values and “philistines”, while managing to be consistently both of these.

My sense is that, although Trilby is still widely read, the lead character Svengali well-known, Murger’s Bohemia is only recognised these days as the book behind Puccini’s still very popular opera. Cordially recommended.

I know that there were diluted versions of Bohemia in London, Sydney and Melbourne. But how about New York, Vienna, Berlin, Milan and elsewhere?

Getting to grips with Art

Walking through the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (with its fabulous collection of Monets (above), Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Derains, Picassos etc) together with a friend some years ago, I was astonished when he completed his inspection in less than five minutes. “Oh, yes,” he announced. “Seen 'em all.”

Recent research confirms that visitors to art museums spend just a few seconds looking at each painting. Most people then take considerably longer reading the information labels. Not my friend.

I wonder why it is that people really don’t take the time to look at the works of art themselves.

The process that I use started when I began to teach myself something about art history some four decades ago. I was working at the time at Saatchi & Saatchi in Charlotte Street and could interrupt my twenty minute walk back to Charing Cross Station (on my way home) by dropping into the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. This I did most working days.

Each visit I would look at just three paintings: the one I had studied yesterday, the one which was to be the main focus for today, and the one that I would turn to tomorrow. So, over time, each painting presented three substantial opportunities for me to look (and to think) – about composition, colour, light, brushwork, subject, idea, intention, context and so on.

It gave me the possibility of beginning to understand, accompanied (it goes without saying) by one of the finest collections of Western art in the world. And it was the start of a lifetime of looking at paintings.

Not sure one can achieve that with just a glance.

Helena Rubinstein and the Sheep of Australia

I have recently been discussing with Facebook friends the apparent shortage of women innovators. Among the many contributory factors, one is that so many of the trained engineers and scientists in the western world have always been men.

But innovation comes in many forms and one woman that I find fascinating is the legendary Helena Rubinstein.

Born in 1870 in Krakow, Poland, she moved to Australia in 1902. She had very little English and no money. But she did have family there – her uncle was a shopkeeper in Coleraine, a small town some 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. This was Big Sheep country and there was an unending supply of lanolin, the grease secreted by the sheep to keep their woolly coats in good condition. Rubinstein used the lanolin as the basis of her own skin creams, disguising its unpleasant odour with lavender and other fragrances.

Later she moved to set up business in Collins Street, still the smartest place for shopping in Melbourne, then Sydney, then London, Paris and New York. She was a brilliant marketer of her products, creating the whole concept of “problem skin” and discovering that, if sales were flagging, raising prices was a good way to get things moving again. Her pushy mantra was: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”

She was to become the first self-made female millionaire.

(I see that there’s a new book out by Ruth Brandon about Rubinstein and the founder of L’Oréal, Eugène Schueller, which I’ve not yet seen.)