In similar places that have been sold off for private ownership, such as the equally picture-postcard Cité des Fusains in Montmartre, where Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec used to paint, any studio that becomes vacant is instantly snapped up by loft-hunters. The new non-artist residents then start complaining at the disturbance caused by a neighbour loudly sculpting wood or slapping paint on to canvas with too much expressionist abandon—while, of course, boasting to friends about how bohemian their new neighbourhood is. Parisian estate agents have a special label for the type of person who wants to buy an artist’s studio—they are clients looking for l’atypique (the unusual). And I should know, because I was one of them. I once tried to buy a small place in the Cité des Fusains, and would have done so if it hadn’t turned out to be a miniature rather than the large canvas I’d imagined it to be from the agent’s description.
This competition with non-artists for studio space explains why Paris now tries to help artists find a studio. They can apply to the city for a special HLM (habitation à loyer modéré—low-cost housing) with a studio attached. On the application form, the artist can specify which floor their studio should be on, and stipulate a minimum surface area.
The offer is open to painters, engravers, sculptors, photographers, plastic artists, video artists and creators of installations. All they have to do is provide a CV, a portfolio, a letter of motivation (‘I need a studio or I’ll cut my ear off’) and proof that they have signed up to the artists’ social-security scheme (presumably, their medical cover includes testing for paint poisoning, marble-dust inhalation and feeling misunderstood). Every two months, a commission consisting of four city councillors and two artists meets to study applications.
No other professional body in Paris gets such preferential treatment for housing (except people like ministers, head teachers, firemen, and directors of institutions who might have to live at their workplace). There are, for instance, no special provisions for taxi drivers, bakers or waiters, all of whom contribute just as much to making sure that Paris stays Paris. There are none for writers, either, I should add, though we scribblers can apply for rooms in special residences, the only problem with them being that you have to live next to other writers, and there’s only so much conversation about royalties, word counts and the use of the semi-colon that a balanced human being can stand.
Parisian artists in search of something more temporary can also apply for six months’ free accommodation, plus a grant, to work in an artists’ community near the Gare de l’Est. And if they get fed up with Paris, they can go and spend their grant in partner residences in Budapest, New York and Buenos Aires.
Paris’s most prestigious lycées might do their best to force pupils to learn maths and physics and become engineers, but there are definite compensations for the kids who spend their time doodling.
Avoiding the museum queues
There are a dozen major art museums in Paris, the main problem being that there are slightly more than a dozen people trying to visit them. On a rainy day in spring or summer you can spend ten times longer queuing outside a museum than you will looking at the paintings. Even when you get inside, you have to join the crowds jostling to get a quick glimpse of a famous picture before the jabbing elbows and shoving shoulders eject you from your vantage point. An hour of waiting just to spend ten seconds in front of The Painting Made Famous by the Da Vinci Code.
Although it must be said that, thanks to Mona Lisa, some of the other picture galleries in the Louvre are relatively crowd-free. The French-painting rooms in the Sully Wing of the museum are often empty, and you can spend uninterrupted minutes exchanging doleful gazes with Watteau’s Pierrot (the white clown), or admiring the shapely buttocks of one of Boucher’s famous reclining nudes. There’s even a largely ignored group of Impressionist pictures in the collection, donated to the Louvre by a certain Victor Lyon, a Parisian financier who had a sharp eye for art investments, to judge by his Monet snowscape, his gorgeous bathing nude by Degas, and several wallfuls of Sisleys, Renoirs and other household names. Though this doesn’t, of course, save you the bother of queuing up to get in the Louvre.
There are, however, smaller museums dedicated to a single artist or genre where the crowds aren’t so intimidating—the Musée Gustave Moreau for lovers of Romanticism, and the Musée Guimet for oriental art, for example. Even the Musée Rodin isn’t always crowded, and has a large garden that is ideal for a picnic. But Paris can go one better than that—museums where there is almost no one, or where a short time queuing will yield unbelievable artistic rewards.
In the first category is one of my favourites, the museum dedicated to the abstract artist Jean Arp—or Hans Arp as he is sometimes known. He was born in 1886 in Alsace, which was then part of Germany, and came to Paris just before the First World War to work alongside rising stars like Picasso and Modigliani. When war broke out, Arp avoided conscription into the German army by having himself declared insane, and went to Switzerland to work with the artist who later became his wife, Sophie Taeuber, and the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. The three of them founded a new movement, the most modernist of all, Dadaism—its philosophy: to reject all previous artistic conventions (except, of course, that of claiming to reject artistic conventions). Arp, Taeuber and Kandinsky began to produce abstract art and nonsense poetry, exploding the rules as a comment on the real explosions happening on the other side of the Alps.
Abstract artist Jean Arp may not look like
