Bonjour, ça va ?
It’s la rentrée! The Great Return of September when Parisians pour back to work following the annual estival exodus that leaves the capital a ghost town during the month of August. I was surprised so many businesses still observed so strictly the unofficial month of holidays: having been closed for so long, I thought business owners would have capitalised on the return of international tourism and stayed open to make up for lost time and money. But who am I kidding? This is the French we are talking about.
Despite the continuing circulation of the Delta variant, a rentrée lockdown special doesn’t seem on the cards (for now). E-Mac has made the pass sanitaire mandatory to do just about anything in France—including participate in protests against the pass sanitaire. So if he were then to cage at home a nation he (sort of) cowed into getting vaccinated, a revolution à la 1789 would most likely ensue.
On that note, if you’re traveling to France from a non-EU country, I would advise checking with your embassy to see if you need a special QR code: a lot of establishments will not accept a simple vaccination card (too easy to fudge).
And don’t worry about your data being misused: whilst testing out the government-developed QR scanner app, my partner, who is required to use it to check the pass sanitaire of clients at his restaurant, accidentally screenshotted my details. In a matter of seconds, the police contacted him warning that if he did that again, there would be big, big trouble…
There was a running joke on social media following the last deconfinement that consisted of people posting photos of themselves en terrasse, drink in hand, captioned “I’m so glad museums and galleries have reopened”—the joke being that the French seemed more preoccupied with making up for lost time on the terrasses of Paris than submerging in all the culture they’d been deprived of.
But with no lockdown in sight, French cultural institutions have been able to confidently resume programming—and there’s no better time than la rentrée for vaccinated culture vultures to spread their wings and start the new work year on a well-cultivated foot.
Kicking off the art calendar this year is Art Paris, a contemporary and modern art fair featuring 140 galleries from across the globe (bar the Hermit Kingdom) which will take place this weekend, 9-12 September.
On the subject of galleries, Paris’ gallery scene is an oft-overlooked way to brush up on your contemporary art gratuitement.
It hasn’t always been this way: until recently, Parisian contemporary galleries struggled to earn clout amongst a society that, for the most part, believed art best be left to Delacroix. For many French, no artwork was of value until history had given its stamp of approval.
I took a course in contemporary and emerging art while I was studying History of Art at La Sorbonne (it was the least popular of all courses; the most popular was on the French Renaissance). And for two semesters straight all we studied was France’s darling dadaist Marcel Duchamp. My professor believed Duchamp had done all there was to be done with his ready-mades and very little of artistic interest had been created in the 100 or so years since the infamous exhibition of a urinal. Some lip service was given to Picasso, but only in the context of Duchamp’s influence on the former’s redefinition of perspective.
The widespread antagonsim towards l’art contemporain was unfortunate for Paris’ reputation as a center of artistic production. And as the bulk of the art market became driven by sales of contemporary and emerging art, Paris slipped behind New York, London, and Hong Kong as a destination for both artists and collectors alike.
The French government tried to alleviate the national malaise towards contemporary art through numerous public art initiatives—an attempt to show that art could be made by someone other than a 19th-century white male.
My personal favourite is the invitation extended to one international artist each year to create works to be shown within the palace and gardens of Versailles (no better place to start a revolution!) A few big names have really taken advantage of the opportunity to stick one to the French and unsettle their conversative definitions of what art should be.
First up was art’s agent provocateur Jeff Koons who almost sent French critics to an early grave in 2008 by setting his iconic kitsch creations within the regal realm. As the founder of the Fondation du Patrimoine, Edouard de Royère, lamented:
I am not against contemporary art but I am absolutely shocked at its descent on Versailles, a magical, sacred place!”
But not even Jeff Koon’s berated balloon dogs could prepare the French public for the shock of Anish Kapoor’s 2015 Versailles installation. Taunting French journalists, the British sculptor explained that his giant steel vessel, which imposed on the royal lawns, was “the vagina of the Queen taking power.”
Many an outraged royalist (of which there are a lot living in the town of Versailles) stormed the installation in protest and the town Mayor, François de Mazières, took to Twitter to decry Kapoor’s (very) abstract allusion to Marie Antoinette’s private parts.
And then whispers of Brexit start circulating. Big-name galleries, like David Zwirner, panicked and began shifting their European outposts from London to Paris. Young artists also started looking for affordable alternatives to New York, which had become financially inhospitable to struggling creatives. And so Paris started creeping back to its glory days of the early 1900s when the Salons were the place to be.
FIAC (la Foire internationale de l’art contemporain) even outperformed Frieze London in terms of sales in its last edition before COVID.
Bref, there is now a panoply of museum-worthy gallery shows on exhibition in Paris.
I’m the first to admit that it can be intimidating to venture into a gallery… to find yourself alone with a gallerina* within a white cube. But having worked in the art world for several years, I can assure you that galleries are open to ALL for FREE.
*Gallerina is the art world’s rather insulting nickname for gallery assistants who are often assumed to be from privileged backgrounds—the thought process behind being that their notoriusly meagre salaries must be being supplemented by a trust fund in order to stretch across cities such as New York and London.
We Go to the Gallery
Le Marais remains the heart of the Paris gallery scene with both established and emerging galleries taking up shop side-by-side. Noteworthy shows of the moment include Robert Mapplethorpe at Thaddeus Ropac, Ryan Gander at GB Agency, Andra Urusta at David Zwirner, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Chantal Crousel.
Other galleries worth popping into are Perrotin, Marian Goodman, Almine Rech, Max Hetzler, Campoli Presti, Templon, Levy Gorvy, and Ceysson & Bénétière. New Galerie and Galerie Joseph Tang are located a little further north towards République but are well worth the extra steps.
For emerging art, head up to Belleville and the 9th arrondissement where galleries such as Balice Hertling, Edouard Montassaut, and High Art are incubators for hot new talent.
And for a weekend daytrip, journey out to Thaddeus Ropac and Gagosian’s larger warehouse spaces located on the periphery of Paris. These venues allow the galleries to exhibit monumental works that are simply trop grande for their inner-city spaces. Air de Paris, a frontrunner of the Parisian emerging art scene, has also recently located to a larger site outside the city centre. (They note on their website that no pass sanitaire is required to visit… controversial).
Gallery shows change frequently so I recommend downloading the app SeeSaw for a regularly updated list of who/what is showing where (the app works in New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, and Paris). SeeSaw also conveniently lists the week’s gallery openings—and as every art insider knows gallery opening = free wine.
I’m also going to sign off this newsletter with a link to my personal Google Map of galleries in Paris so that it’s all there on your smartphone.
Happy gallery trawling culture vultures!
A la prochaine.