Saint Agatha

An enjoyable afternoon last week at the newly-reopened Musee Fabre in Montpellier. Someone said to me the night before that it had ideas above its station, and maybe it does. But if you ask me, that is what provincial museums are for. A reasonable provincial museum -- in terms of the absolute merit of its collection -- is far more interesting than a good national one. It is more intimate. The pictures were not the property of kings and princes -- but of bourgeois types like you or me. One somehow feels more involved -- and who cares if a lot of it is frankly second-rate? The Musee Fabre is a case in point. I found the eclectic mixture of good and bad wonderfully stimulating. I actually liked some of what was supposed to be bad and a lot of what was supposed to be good left me cold. Especially the modern stuff by Pierre Soulages -- in theory France's best-known modern artist. No doubt his black daubings mean something, but I am beggared if I know what. Prize for most tasteless picture: Zurbaran's Saint Agathe, showing her with severed breasts on a tin tray like a pair of blancmanges! Incidentally (as readers of the latest edition of Champs-Elysees will know) there is an interesting link between the Musee Fabre and the Young Pretender to the thrones of England and Scotland, Bonnie Prince Charlie. The good prince was married in later life to Princess Louise, Countess of Albany, a European aristocrat (exactly what country she was from is impossible to say in less than a full paragraph). When Charlie died, she took up with the Italian poet Vittorio Alfieri and after him with the French artist François Xavier Fabre. It was to Fabre that her inheritance went when she died, and he used the money to open the museum in Montpellier that bears his name. And that is how the Jacobite cause became a force for cultural improvement in the Herault!

La Grande Odalisque

Back to the Louvre -- this time for the main spring exhibition, a retrospective of the very long-lived 19th century painter Ingres. Before going any further, here is a lesson in French spelling and pronunciation. His name is Ingres. Not Ingrès. In other words it is a one-syllable name that rhymes (roughly) with bang. It is funny but nearly every English-speaking person I know refers to the painter as Angrez. I did it myself until I was disabused by the show's curator Louis-Antoine Prat. Why we do it, I don't know. Is it by sub-conscious association with Spanish-origin names like Delibes or Ines? In fact the French language is very consistent when it comes to "l'orthographie," so we should have known. There's no accent, so it's "Angre". Anyway the exhibition is great, and if you are in Paris before May 15 ça vaut le détour. He was a remarkable man. A grouchy and intolerant curmudgeon by all accounts (hmmm warming to him already) but an instinctive "deviant" -- as Prat described him. (I had a guided tour, thank you for asking). He saw himself as part of the classical school, but could not help subverting from within the very code he claimed to uphold. And such a variety of genres! The erotic nudes, religious works, bourgeois portraits, grand classical allegories, masses of charcoal sketches etc etc. They have chosen La Grande Odalisque for the publicity (see above). It is famous for showing Ingres' remarkably elastic attitude to anatomy. The woman's back has several vertebrae too many, and her right arm would dangle by her calf is she stood up. But who cares? It works. For more on the show, buy the upcoming edition of Champs-Elysees. Ça vaut la dépense.

Anyone who has read Le Figaro newspaper at any point over the last half century will be familiar with the work of the cartoonist Jacques Faizant, who has died at the age of 87. His drawings appeared regularly on the paper's front page, often featuring a bonneted Marianne, two spindly-legged old ladies, a gentleman with a Napoleon III goatee and a bemused cat. Faizant was an unashamed right-winger and he used these symbols of the bourgeoisie to air his own feelings of ironic surprise at changes in French society. He was also a reverential -- not to say sycophantic -- supporter of Charles de Gaulle, the first of five Fifth Republic presidents that he caricatured. In one well-known drawing, de Gaulle is seen muttering to himself after a press conference: "What would I do if I didn't have me?" On the general's death in 1970, Faizant drew Marianne -- the female symbol of France -- weeping over the massive trunk of a fallen tree. In the cartoon shown above, Faizant has a rare dig at de Gaulle, implying that the 1961 Evian peace accords to end the war in Algeria are a sell-out. Faizant never had quite the same rapport with subsequent presidents, but his cartoons kept appearing over the decades. By the 1990s it was clear that management at le Figaro wanted to get rid of him. His work reeked of the past, and the paper needed badly to attract younger readers. In 1999 he was relegated to the inside pages, and finally last October he was dropped altogether. Just three months later he died. President Jacques Chirac -- who he first portrayed in the mid 1970's as a sharp-chinned young prime minister -- said Faizant's death "leaves a great void in the hearts of all those who over the years loyally kept their daily rendez-vous with his cartoons."

Romanesque art at the Louvre

To the Louvre for a special exhibition on Romanesque art, sculpture and book illumination. A fantastic afternoon almost but not quite ruined by the 45 minute wait, and then the troubling sense of being herded through as fast as possible to let the next lot in. Only 450 people are allowed to view the "objets" at any one time and the number of those currently in the salle d'exposition is flashed up above the queue outside. As a result when you finally make it in you feel under an obligation not to hang around. In any case you cannot spend more than ten seconds on a display case before being surrounded by a cluster other peering heads. A reminder only to visit the Louvre on early Monday mornings in mid-winter. Still -- it was a wonderful array. The French Romanesque period is reckoned to have started in the mid 10th century and lasted 250 years. It was a time of unwonted peace in western Europe, which triggered a period of intensive church-building. A chronicler (you can see the original text) described it as a "great white cloak" of churches across the country. Many of the 300 artefacts come from obscure rural churches in central and southwestern France. Others were originally in the great monastic houses of Cluny and Citeaux. By far the most striking were the large polychrome wooden statues of local saints. Still looking you sternly in the eye today, what effect they must have had on a peasant congregation a thousand years ago heaven only knows.

Shock horror in the French art world this week as the billionaire businessman Francois Pinault announces that he is pulling the plug on his planned 150 million euro gallery in Paris. Pinault -- the man who owns the FNAC media chain and Christie's auction house among multiple other holdings -- had pledged to build the gallery on the site of the old Renault factory on an island in the river Seine a few miles downstream from the Eiffel Tower. It was to be used to put on display his 2,500 strong collection of contemporary art, which includes works by Jackson Pollock, Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hurst etc etc. But on Monday he announced in Le Monde that he is so frustrated by the series of planning delays and other obstacles that he is dropping the whole project. Instead he will house his collection in the magnificent Palazzo Grassi which he has just acquired in Venice. Whatever one's views on modern art, this is surely a sad comment on French attitudes to cultural philanthropy a l'Americaine. A huge opportunity was there for the taking to establish Paris as a centre of modern art in the first half of the 21st century (let's face it - it has not exactly excelled at it in recent years) but instead of leaping at it, the country showed total uninterest. Catherine Millet, editor of ArtPress magazine (and best-selling author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M.) said it shows how "people still despise modern art. They think a rich businessman like Pinault should put his money into good social causes rather than in what they see as a load of rubbish." For Le Figaro, the story illustrates how the French like their art handed to them by the state but feel private collections are somehow tainted. Anyway -- France's loss is Venice's gain, and it is hard not to feel angry.