Vanishing Points

A slender excuse to show some favourite postcard images where perspective is pushed to breaking point. In these examples we get vast and empty spaces opening up in the foregrounds in the very place we might expect to find a point of interest thus creating a kind of postcard paradox. Postcards are intended to function as carriers of information but here the tyranny of the vanishing point has the effect of banishing anecdotal detail to the margins.

Métro Parisien

For anyone with recent experience of London Transport, the Paris Métro is a revelation. The average wait for a train during the working day is about 3 minutes. There is nowhere on the entire system where you can be faced with the sort of 20 minute service gap that occurs so often on the Circle Line in London. Trains are clean, brightly lit and spacious when compared with London’s “deep tube” trains. Rubber tyres are employed to produce a much smoother and quieter ride than conventional track. Other novelties include driver-less trains on line 14 and inter connected carriages on line 1 that enable the traveller to walk the length of the train. The Métro was built some 40 years after the development of London’s Metropolitan railway and the French had the advantage of learning from the structural problems that follow when two or more services share the same tracks. All 14 Métro lines are out and back shuttles though a few of them divide in the suburbs to serve more than one terminus.


The great age of London Transport (LT) came between the wars when Frank Pick created and developed a design-led network in which all aspects of operation were subject to a co-ordinated design process. In two respects LT achieved standards of excellence that the Métro never did, namely, posters and publicity and station architecture. To be fair to Paris, there are virtually no street level station buildings, access being via clearly signed staircases. The elevated sections are served by undistinguished elevated stations with either platform canopies or all-over roofs. The only areas where design played a significant part were the station interiors at platform level and the signage at the station entrances. There is no other graphic tradition and in the matter of graphic design and illustration for advertising London wins hands down.


Branding distinction has been achieved by careful preservation of the Art Nouveau derived designs of Hector Guimaud. Some of Guimaud’s finest achievements were destroyed in the years when Art Nouveau bottomed out in terms of public esteem but since the 1960’s the Guimaud heritage has been assiduously cultivated and replicated to the point where it now stands in the first rank of Parisian icons. Organic letterforms and twisting plant-like cast iron structures all contribute. The bizarre candelabras that loom owlishly over many an entrance have an almost sinister presence. Insect-like hooded light fixtures complete the picture.


Below street level the station platforms have been graced by a succession of ceramic-based decorative schemes that over the decades have been covered over in pursuit of a more contemporary acrylic-panelling look and then later reinstated and restored to their former glory. There have been a number of prestige projects to develop themed station decor (Louvre-Rivoli, Concorde, Bastille, Assemblée Nationale) but in central Paris at least, ceramic tiling remains the order of the day. The holy grail for connoisseurs of Métro architecture is the long closed station of Saint-Martin where a series of hoarding sized ceramic tiled advertisements have survived intact from the 1940’s. Urban Explorers have penetrated the security to gain access and photographs of their discoveries can be seen by following this link.

Hats off in Oklahoma

Contrasting styles from neighbouring states. Oklahoma is famous for oil and gave its name to a musical. Arkansas has yet to be honoured with a musical but it is the home state of Bill Clinton. The Oklahoma City Rangers have a louche and carefree air about them that contrasts with the sober suited donkey riders of Hot Springs. Hats stay firmly clamped on Arkansas heads while in Oklahoma they are launched to the sky in a gesture of jaunty exuberance. It’s not clear whether the Oklahoma City Rangers have some law enforcement functions or whether their role is purely ceremonial but they have the swagger of Western Swing about them. There’s only one smile in Hot Springs – it belongs to the man in the middle of the card. On closer examination it turns out that not everyone in Hot Springs is mounted on a donkey – the rider on the extreme right has an alternative quadruped for reasons that are unexplained. Hot Springs has a chequered history. Originally developed as a citadel of cleanliness with thermal springs, it later declined into a cesspool of crime when gambling became established. Al Capone was a visitor to Hot Springs in the 1930’s and was photographed wearing a cowboy hat and mounted on a donkey, neatly combining aspects of both these postcards.

Chinatown

In the years between the wars the word Chinatown carried an immense variety of transgressive associations. It was the exotic locale for an endless sequence of detective fiction, white slave melodramas, musical comedies, gangster movies and tales of opium smoking and heroin smuggling. Even contemporary authors as sophisticated as Philip Pullman have been seduced by the concept of Chinatown as a reliable vehicle for the creation of instant mystery and exoticism (The Ruby in the Smoke). Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op was a frequent visitor to do battle with the Oriental forces of evil.


This fold-out postcard (undated but probably from the inter war years) makes its own small contribution to the enduring myths about China and Chinese culture as transplanted to California with generous displays of exotic costume and architecture. Fortune-tellers and a soothsayer pose for the camera and underline the association with gambling and the occult. There’s evidence of an extravagant quantity of photo retouching to the point where many figures are left floating in space, detached from their surroundings by an over-enthusiasm for eliminating shadows and textures. This was truly the first golden age of the air-brush.

Passages Couverts

Boulevard Montmartre in the 2e runs east-west between métro stations Richelieu-Drouot and Grands Boulevards. To north and south of the boulevard extend a network of shopping arcades (passages couverts). There are 4 such clusters to be found in Paris of which this is one, comprising the Passage des Panoramas, the Passage Jouffroy and the Passage Verdeau. These locations have long been a great source of fascination to Parisian intellectuals and flâneurs, valued for the strange and esoteric selection of goods on display as well as for the alternative routes that they offer through the city.


They are structures that lack any external facade (other than an entrance portico), thereby overturning some of the basic rules of architecture. In this sense they have as much in common with a tunnel as they have with a conventional building. Unlike a tunnel they possess cast iron ribbed, glazed roofs that even on a dull day of incessant rain can be depended on to admit a generous amount of daylight. With bright tiled floors and reflective glass facades, the light is doubled and redoubled. The noise and clamour of Parisian street life is left far behind and pedestrian progress is unimpeded by conflicting streams of traffic. It’s not long before you begin to suspect you may have entered a parallel form of existence.


Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant has appeared before in these notes and should be referred to sparingly lest one is accused of seeking an unearned note of intellectual respectability so caution is called for here. Aragon celebrated the idiosyncratic life of the Passage de l’Opéra at a time when it was due to be demolished to permit the inexorable advance of the boulevard Haussmann in 1924. For Aragon the passage represented an alternative universe of infinite possibilities, a closed world where bourgeois conventions had no force and a Surrealist playground where the absurd and the ridiculous, the bizarre and the pompous, the monumental and the trivial were continually colliding with one another.

Each of the arcades featured in these photographs has an individual flavour. Passage des Panoramas, on the south of bd. Montmartre has a simple pitched glazed roof and a floor of cracked paving stones. It starts brightly with a flurry of restaurants and dealers in vintage postcards, stamps, coins, medals and printed ephemera but at the extremities it peters out into two dark and neglected corridors where rainwater drips down the damp but perfectly tailored collar of the passing flâneur. The carefully preserved vintage signs for Stern Graveur supply a note of distinction.


Passage Jouffroy with an entrance on the north side of bd. Montmartre in the 9e is the longest of the three. There is a central section where it turns through two right angles and descends a short flight of steps before continuing in the same direction at a lower level. At this point are the entrance to the Hôtel Chopin and the exit from the Musée Grévin. The passage is broader and lighter than Passage des Panoramas with a vaulted roof and a more eclectic range of retailers. This is the place to purchase antique dolls and toys, dolls’ houses and accessories, walking sticks, canes and animal skins, movie memorabilia and vintage posters. The second (and shorter) section is narrower with shops on the left and false shop fronts to the right where a book seller (Librairie du Passage) displays a wide selection of reduced-price books on art and design. There always seem to be interesting books to be found here.


Walter Benjamin’s intimidatingly huge book (or 1,000 page collection of notes, clippings and drafts) published under the title The Arcades Project has many interesting observations based on the author’s heroic effort to comprehend the vast sweep of human history by means of intensive scrutiny of the cultural values of the 19th. century bourgeoisie but as a linear read, it’s a major challenge. Embedded in the aggregation of raw data are many real gems. For Benjamin, the Parisian arcades represented a focal point for the examination and understanding of the way that commerce shaped the history of the period.

The Neoclassical entrance to Passage Verdeau is just across the road (rue de la Grange-Batelière). This passage has a cooler, uncluttered look lined with galleries and rather forbidding dealers in water-colours, prints and old photographs. Of course, it being August, le congé annuel had brought the shutters down on a fair number of businesses. Even on a wet day traffic was light and the long and deserted perspectives began to assume a melancholy air.

Métro Parisien, Line 2

The pleasures of line 2 on the Paris Métro include the last surviving Hector Guimard édicule at Porte Dauphine, Parc Monceau, Père Lachaise cemetery and an elevated section from Jaurès to Barbès Rochechouart that discreetly dives back underground at Anvers to spare the traveller from the sleaze between Pigalle and Place de Clichy. A less celebrated highlight is the opportunity to admire the commercial effrontery of the wonderfully egregious ribbon of Tati stores at Barbès. At Jaurès there’s easy access to the Canal Saint-Martin and Bassin de la Villette. Also at Jaurès is one of the last surviving Parisian toll-houses (Rotonde de la Villette) built for Louis XVI between 1784 and 1791 to tax all goods entering the city and add to his already considerable unpopularity. Claude Nicolas Ledoux was the architect responsible for the Neoclassical designs. Most of these detested structures were demolished by an ungrateful populace soon after the Revolution but another survivor can be found some 10 stations to the west at the entrance to Parc Monceau.



I have written before on the subject of the métro aérien and the splendour of the elevated sections. Revisiting in summer brings the additional delight of a sense of cruising through the treetops as the foliage encroaches on the rippling profile of the viaduct. The architectural style of the métro aérien is robust bordering on the brutal. Massive stone abutments and fluted Neoclassical cast iron columns along the central reservation support substantial steel trusses and a dark and uninviting space is created underneath. The métro entrances tend to be simple and unadorned and the exits are spectacular exercises in cast iron brutalism with security fencing and massive turnstiles that discourage even the most determined prospective intruder from attempting an illegal access. I rather like the association with the architecture of prisons and football grounds.

Temps de Pluie

The Art Institute of Chicago is the proud owner of Gustave Caillebotte’s ambitious grande machine, first exhibited in 1877 at the Third Impressionist Exhibition under the title, Rue de Paris; Temps de pluie. It is a compelling image with its perambulating figures frozen in mid-step, its Parisian apartment blocks with plunging perspectives and its striking tonal and surface qualities that capture the watery essence and unexpected luminosity of a wide and open urban space on a day of incessant rain. The finish is smooth and closely controlled with none of the surface agitation that typified the Impressionist approach. The current position of the Art Institute is that this painting is not sufficiently robust to travel and it’s unavailable for loans to other museums. All of which means that to see it, you must travel to Chicago.


Thirty years have passed since I made the journey to Chicago and saw this painting for myself. I can still recall the tremendous quality of physical presence and its capacity to totally absorb the senses. With a narrow range of colours the artist created an immense diversity of chromatic notes to compel our attention. The composition is bold and unconventional, drawing heavily on the vocabulary of photographic imagery in the portrayal of space and depth. The location is the Place de Dublin at the heart of the Quartier de l’Europe, a massive Parisian residential development that in 1877 was little more than 10 years old. By engaging with photography and contemporary architecture and turning his back on monumental and historic Paris the artist made a clear declaration that the modern world was his chosen subject.


In the last 30 years the reputation of this painting has increased enormously and public estimation of Caillebotte has graduated from that of a footnote in the standard account of Impressionism to a respectable position just below the first tier of Impressionist masters. There was a touring retrospective in 1994-95 and the sterling efforts of the late Kirk Varnedoe (organiser of the pioneering Houston retrospective in 1976) and Marie Berhaut (compiler of the Caillebotte catalogue raisonnée) have contributed greatly to the revaluation of this long under-rated artist.


All of which is by way of preamble to a Saturday evening stroll south from Place de Clichy down rue St-Pétersbourg to visit the original location of the painting at the Place de Dublin. The photographs I took from rue Turin (the original vantage point of the artist) show that it is possible to obtain a rough approximation of what Caillebotte recorded but due to tree planting and some remodelling of pavements it was impossible to recreate the scene in the way that Varnedoe did in his research in the mid Seventies. The last image below is a more general view of the Place de Dublin, showing from the left, rue Clappeyron, rue de Turin, rue de St-Pétersbourg and rue de Moscou. I have a suspicion that somewhere there’s an error in my positioning but the time of day (Saturday at 19.45) turned out to be good because of the absence of traffic. Though somehow the timing is never completely right because the previous day would have been ideal – it rained without a break from dawn till dusk.