Heaven and Hell

L’Enfer was a night club on the boulevard de Clichy where your drinks were served by staff dressed as devils. Next door (just visible on the left of this image) was a cabaret called Le Ciel where the waitresses were dressed as angels. Both businesses were operated by the same proprietor and were well calculated to cater to the appetite for novelty and decadence in fin-de-siècle Paris. Entrance to L’Enfer was by way of a monstrous gaping jaw and the facade was embellished with sculptural representations of devils and souls in torment. A fiery furnace glowed in the centre and an unfortunate sinner can be seen pitching headlong into an eternity of suffering. It can be assumed that the spectacle would have been intensely offensive to bourgeois sensibilities in the same way that the sex shops that have replaced them today continue to do so. Whether future generations will look back on today’s sex shops with a sigh of nostalgia remains to be seen.


The wonderfully sharp eyed observer of human folly, Edward Burra was an habitué of the boulevard de Clichy in 1931 where he found the subject for one of his finest paintings, Minuit Chanson. Cab Calloway was a special favourite of Burra and his recording of Minnie the Moocher was first released in 1931 so it’s just possible that it could have been heard playing in the hallowed precincts of Minuit Chanson. All of which brings us to the singular figure of Betty Boop who memorably shared the screen with Calloway in a Max Fleischer animated film that can be seen here. Note how the sequence in the spirit world features a landscape populated with vast sets of Satanic jaws just like those that decorated L’Enfer.

Past and Present: Brittany

Morbihan in southern Brittany has one of the greatest concentrations of megaliths to be found anywhere. There are so many that you get used to spotting them in unlikely surroundings – adjacent to a filling station, next to a modern house, in the middle of a forest or on the cliff tops of the Quiberon peninsula. This fine dolmen is located at the point where two roads diverge in the middle of the tiny village of Crucuno. It was recorded about 100 years ago by this postcard photographer. A century is a very small time in the life of a megalith so we should not be surprised that so little has changed when it was photographed again in March 2008. The entrance has been altered and the render removed from the wall of the neighbouring house, otherwise all is as it was. We get used to seeing these structures surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of landscaped open space but in my view, they lose none of their mystery when they’re encountered in the midst of modern development. If anything, the sense of incongruity is enhanced.

Bibendum en famille

This is a scene to warm the heart. An exuberant celebration of family values to inspire the hedonists of the French Riviera to forgo their licentious ways in favour of the simple pleasures of domesticity. The slightly flaccid family Bibendum gesture expansively to the adoring crowd from their precarious position on the roof of an oversized motor car, drawn by a team of patient horses. The carnival in Nice continues to thrive to the present day and has expanded to an entire fortnight of events. Bibendum continues to dedicate his existence to marketing Michelin tires and his story has been told in detail in a number of books. So great is his hold on our collective imagination that there are even those who confess that they have surrendered to his warm embrace in their dreams. A final bonus is a postcard view of the great Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand.

Postcard of the Day No. 26, Wrigley’s Spearmint

The Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum electric spectacular sign, largest of its kind in the world, extends a full block from 44th to 45th Street on the east side of Broadway, towers ten stories high, and represents a million dollar investment. The electrical current required for this colossal animated display would serve a city of ten thousand. It contains 1,084 feet of neon tubing, almost 70 miles of insulated wire and 29,508 lamp receptacles.

I have no affection for chewing gum, an obnoxious substance and a prime example of a business that passes on the social and environmental costs associated with the product, to the public purse. However, we can put that all aside and enjoy this gargantuan display of neon lighting constructed by Artkraft-Strauss of Lima, Ohio, installed in Times Square in 1936 and equivalent in height to a ten storey building. The aquatic spectacle makes a wonderful subject for a linen postcard from the late 1930s. All competing signage, visible in contemporary photographs, has been either eliminated or toned down by the retoucher to enable the Wrigley sign undisputed command of the image. The end came in 1942 when it was switched off for the last time as a wartime economy measure. The card fits comfortably into the category of Postcards of the Night which formed the subject of a fascinating book published in 2003, illustrated with some superb examples from the genre. The story of illuminated signs in Times Square can be read by following this link.

Albertopolis – a postcard tour

This is by way of a footnote to my posting dated April 30th. 2008. These postcards of the Albert Memorial form a tribute to this gilded Gothic Revival confection with its riotous ecclesiastical ornamentation. There are two cards that show some of the outlying sculptural groups, one of which offers a rare postcard opportunity to admire an exposed female breast, albeit one carved in stone.

Giorgio de Chirico, La fabrique des rêves

It is said that both André Breton and Yves Tanguy first encountered the paintings of de Chirico through the windows of a bus. Not the same bus. Breton became the proud owner of several de Chirico paintings that he continued to value throughout his life. But when de Chirico turned his back on his metaphysical paintings after 1918, his return to a reinvented classical tradition was resoundingly denounced by Breton with all the ferocity (which was considerable) at his disposal. And therein lies the problem with de Chirico. His early Paris paintings stand in the highest critical regard but there is no agreement on the merit of the paintings that occupied his attention during the last 60 years of his very long life. Three years after de Chirico’s death, in 1982, the Museum of Modern Art, New York put together a major exhibition that included no more than a handful of work from the years 1920 to 1935 and nothing whatsoever from the remaining forty plus years of his life. The bitterness of Breton’s reaction seemed to reverberate through the succeeding decades.

So fixed was the orthodox view of de Chirico as a lost talent that a re-evaluation on the part of revisionist critics and historians was inevitable. This process began in de Chirico’s last decades and climaxed in the 1980s when there was great critical enthusiasm for bad painting. The late work of Philip Guston and a European outbreak of mostly German and Italian painting of remarkable clumsiness and lack of finesse created a climate in which de Chirico’s adoption of deliberately heavy-handed technique, combined with vapid drawing seemed utterly in tune with the times. I don’t recall any outright condemnation of de Chirico’s early work from enthusiasts for the late work but there was an implication that a serious interest in the early work was a symptom of an unhealthy mind.

This spring, the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris has an exhibition entitled, Giorgio de Chirico, La fabrique des rêves showing until May 24th. It provides a complete survey of de Chirico’s work and there is no avoiding the paintings produced in the years he fell out of favour. There’s enough late work to get a clear view of how the artist transformed himself from avant-garde favourite into a reactionary, technique obsessed, Renaissance caricaturist. At the same time his great facility for enigmatic imagery was never totally submerged and in among the late dross are some truly arresting images, especially in the Bains mysterieux series and the sun and moon series (derived from the 1930s illustrations for an edition of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes) from the late 1960s. In part, the steady decline in quality owed a lot the artist’s curmudgeonly nature, possessed of an irresistible urge to bite the hand that feeds. This impulse led him to initially renounce his early work and then systematically devalue it by making copious replicas of his more marketable work, frequently, but not always, inscribed with misleading dates.

I suppose that if I had the good fortune to earn the praise of André Breton for making a decisive contribution to the birth of Surrealism, I might be tempted to take my foot off the pedal and just enjoy the moment. The pressure to carry on producing innovative imagery would have been immense and it’s quite understandable if de Chirico simply didn’t feel up to it. If you factor in an awkward personality in which radical and reactionary impulses were held in uncomfortable co-existence then it makes sense that de Chirico might suppress one or the other, and in the event it was the reactionary impulse that won out. I certainly can’t accept the proposition that the post 1920 work is of equal quality to the work that preceded it but it should be accepted that his talent for creepy and unsettling imagery didn’t completely evaporate and some interesting work was to be seen in the latter half of the exhibition alongside some truly egregious exercises in the art of painting badly. The genius of de Chirico resided in his ability to create a new landscape vocabulary that overturned most of our assumptions about the subject and fundamentally disorientated the spectator with the application of simple but potent strategies. De Chirico discovered new poetic values in such things as sculpted figures (where human tissue is replaced by stone), smoke from factory chimneys and passing steam trains, the long shadows of late afternoon sun, diminutive human figures surrounded by vast, hot and dusty, tilting picture planes, all enclosed by interminable arcades with conflicting vanishing points. It was the marriage of the antique (the Renaissance piazza) and the contemporary (symbols of the Age of Industry) and created a strange and haunting resonance with the landscape of our dreams.

Barbès-Rochechouart

This is one of Paris’s most clamorous, raucous and cacophonous crossroads. Three arrondissements meet at the intersection, the 9e, 10e and 18e. It’s a maelstrom of conflicting traffic flows and tailbacks overshadowed by the Métro Aérien that clatters overhead on a muscular viaduct supported by massive steel columns. The combined sounds of trains and traffic dictate that human speech has to be delivered at maximum volume. When this acoustic aggregation reverberates from the sub-surface of the overhead railway, the decibel level approaches the red zone. There’s a constant flux of pedestrian movement and an ethnic mix that reflects the full range of Francophone post-colonial economic migration.

Crude but assertive graphics compete for attention from every vertical surface. At street level, the Tati store stretches west along Boulevard Rochechouart offering its attractions to the less affluent bargain-hunter. It functions as an antithesis to the grands magasins while the blue and pink colour scheme and branding brings a new dimension to the French reputation for excellence in the arts of display. Diagonally opposite on the corner of Boulevard Magenta is the facade of the long closed Egyptian-styled cinema, the Louxor. This is the subject of a protracted restoration project scheduled to begin next year (2010). Read more about it by following this link. There is a pervasive quality of dilapidation to the crumbling and unloved frontages. A special pleasure is to note that the name of Jean Cocteau has been immortalised by attaching it to a car park. Others in this vein might include the André Breton Laundrette or the Guy Debord Déchetterie.

The Métro station, Barbès-Rochechouart, is the westernmost stop on the elevated section of Ligne 2 where trains and track make a spectacular plunge into the subterranean gloom, en route for Anvers and Porte Dauphine. Below ground, Ligne 4 provides links to the Marché aux Puces at Porte de Clignancourt to the north and Chateau d’Eau with its African population to the south. The locality is close to la Goutte d’Or district with a long established North African population, an area extensively prowled by Richard Cobb on his journeys of urban discovery. A little further to the east are the twin ferrous corridors feeding trains into Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est. If you have visited Paris and feasted well on the treasures of the Right Bank, Left Bank, Grands Boulevards, it might be time to experience a very different aspect of the city with a trip to Barbès.