Le Louvre et l’exception francaise

Last week I spent a few happy hours in the Italian and Spanish Paintings section of the Louvre. I gazed at statues I had never heard of and gawked at the huge crowd gathered around the face that launched a thousand paperback bestsellers. Unless you too have joined that crowd at some point over the years, I promise you the Mona Lisa is much smaller in person than you think it is.

It struck me later that perhaps, for a course on art in and of Paris, actual French paintings might have been more appropriate. It’s possible that closing my eyes and choosing the section of the map my finger landed on was not the best strategy for navigating the museum, overwhelmingly large as it may be.

There is a reason that the prominence of foreign art in the Louvre initially drew no surprise from me, however. “L’exception française” is a diplomatic name for what many people think of as typically French arrogance. Strictly speaking it refers to the French tendency to favor domestic arts and goods over foreign ones, as with public funding for French cinema and better market conditions for French cheeses; as with so many cultural concepts, however, it means much more than that.

Modesty and humility are fine virtues, according to l’exception — for other countries. It is silly to pretend, out of what could only be misguided politeness, that France is not special. Better. France can no longer claim a concentration of the world’s power, but it holds on to its reputation as the center of the world’s (really the west’s) culture. France simply is the center of everything, and naturally Paris is the center of France. Mockery of this mindset comes easily, especially as an American with one’s fair share of national arrogance, but the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of this concept’s power.

Paris has long been the destination for artistic and personal development for everyone from lost-generation artists to eager students with terrible accents .(I myself am guilty of the latter, but I hope to parlay my Californian-Sinaloan-Parisian hybrid voice into a career as a glamorous Cary Grant figure with the attendant unidentifiable origins.) If the cliché question to pose to someone who’s taken time off is, “Did you find yourself?” then Paris is the place where that cliché seems the most likely to be fulfilled.

The multiple Italian nationalists who have tried to steal the Mona Lisa away from France disagree that Paris is a natural place for Spain’s and Italy’s artistic heritage. Of course they do; they’re bitter that they aren’t French. Aren’t we all? Just as the United States may lose its economic superiority but not the iron grip in which American English and MacDonald’s hold the world, France’s collapsed empire enjoys an afterlife in minds all over the Occident.

The image of cultural knowledge and power outlives the political clout that created it to such an extent that a few days in a single museum in Paris can lend a person enough credibility to bluff through decades of cocktail party conversations. L’exception française has taken me in thoroughly enough that, at least on first glance, that fact seems only right.

Espace Dalí Montmartre

I am not particularly well-versed in visual art, but I can begin to understand those of my friends who are hopelessly smitten with Dalí. The subtleties of technique are often lost on me, but Dalí provides plenty to consider even when one is visually stunted. I admire the humor of his work, his witty overhaul of artistic tradition, and the articulation of a coherent set of themes and symbols. It is all too easy to rely on centuries-old associations, but Dalí created new ones, such as ants and mortality, while playing with the old, like an egg as a symbol of regeneration.

His influences range from classical art (his Venus sculptures), an English storybook (illustrations of Alice in Wonderland), to the great Spanish novel (illustrations of Don Quixote), to the Bible, to an American film star (Mae West’s Face); his media of choice include painting, sculpture, and new technology such as the hologram. A collection of his art gives the impression of a mind busily at work, transforming its surroundings and turning them out again as pieces of an artistic philosophy unexpected yet coherent. The curator weakly attempts to impose the theme of “Les illusions optiques” onto the exhibit as a whole, but where this theme breaks down, those inherent in Dalí’s preoccupations and techniques prevail.

Dalí was Spanish by birth, but while he lived in Montmartre Paris became an added influence on his mental syntheses. Most notably, Montmartre’s windmills reminded him of the futile battle of Don Quixote, and he began a series of illustrations based on Cervantes’ idealist. Paris’s power to awaken nascent images in his mind illustrates how fully he assimilated his environment in France and how seamlessly he connected his disparate influences.

Unfortunately, his much-vaunted daring did not extend far enough. Women for Dalí function as monolithic symbols rather than as individuals. Granted, the female form has more artistic tradition behind it for him to subvert, as he does in his refigurings of the Venus de Milo. However, Dalí missed the opportunity to create a new vocabulary of symbolism around something both omnipresent and underanalyzed: the male body. A distressingly predictable, narrow view of women comes into focus in one curator’s card that explains Venus à tiroirs as an assertion that “a woman’s most interesting quality is her mystery.” It is difficult to tell whether this is the artist or the curator speaking, or where one leaves off and the other begins, but its sentiment is all too consistent with the limitations of Dalí’s art.

Despite this significant shortcoming, Dalí succeed not only in bringing new ideas to 20th-century art, but also in creating a cult of personality around himself. He plays on his status most effectively in a series of photographs, unfortunately displayed in a frame without a title or any further identifying information, with question-and-answer captions in the style of a celebrity magazine. Its spirit lives on, with the exception of a rather conventional gallery of pieces for sale, in a small red museum at the top of several hundred stairs in Montmartre.