After the war, Arp and Taeuber came back to Paris and accepted the offer of another modernist artist, Theo van Doesburg, to build a house on a piece of land he owned in the suburb of Clamart, not far from Rodin’s second home in Meudon.
And it was there, interrupted only by yet another war, that Arp would live and work for most of the rest of his life. The house, designed by Sophie Taeuber, has now been turned into a museum that is one of the Paris region’s best-kept artistic secrets.
It’s not a deliberately kept secret—the museum would love to have more visitors. But it seems that hiding the house about 400 metres from the nearest suburban train station, even if that station is just outside Paris on the way to the slightly better-known Château de Versailles, discourages all but the hardiest art lovers.
I almost didn’t find it myself, and wished I had a phone with Satnav, because the supposedly helpful road signs didn’t help at all. When I got off the train at Meudon-Val Fleury station, the sign pointed to the ‘Fondation A R P’, as if the town didn’t know that Arp was a man. They seemed to think he was an institution like the Anarchistes pour la Révolution Perpétuelle or the Association des Restaurants de Poisson.*
I climbed the hill, past the modernist house of Van Doesburg himself, a cube like a 3D Mondrian painting, and then turned right, seeing absolutely no one and hearing nothing except the chattering of birds. It was eerie. This was a neighbourhood of stone cottages, on the edge of Meudon forest, and I felt as if I should be identifying different species of tree rather than looking for an art museum. But after just a couple of minutes I found another sign, this time with ‘Arp’ spelt like a real name, and sure enough, a few metres further up the hill, there was a house marked Fondation Arp.
To someone more used to Rodin’s palatial mansion near the Invalides or even Monet’s villa out at Giverny, this place came as a surprise. It was tiny, a cuboid version of the other cottages in the neighbourhood, made of the local Paris stone, with a façade that looks like lumps of brown coral set in concrete.
I rang the bell on the gate and the lady in the office looked at me as if she was astonished to be asked to buzz anyone in. When I explained that I hadn’t come to the wrong address or to read the gas meter, she called the guide, who clearly wasn’t expecting to be needed that day, and I was given a personal tour of the house by someone who seemed genuinely pleased that a visitor was taking an interest in Arp.
And there was plenty of Arp to see. The three floors of the house were crowded with small sculptures, paintings and engravings, wooden Dadaist reliefs, a carpet and a tapestry, all of them in Arp’s swirling abstract forms. It is highly unusual to see a studio so full of a famous artist’s own works—Giverny, for example, has none.
There were also some pieces of Sophie Taeuber’s furniture—homemade, primary-coloured units that were in effect Ikea fifty years before it was invented. And a small display of family photos included a picnic in the garden with James Joyce and Max Ernst, and some funny shots of Sophie and her sister in weird ‘abstract’ Dadaist costumes.
You don’t have to be an art historian to enjoy the place, but you do have to like abstract art, and especially Arp’s trademark blobby shapes. I do, and was not surprised to learn that the circular holes in his work are often supposed to be navels—he was a bit of a belly-button fetishist, apparently** Similarly, his sculptures often manage to be exactly like—and yet not quite like—thrusting buttocks, smooth thighs, arched backs and bulbous phalluses. They feel erotic, but you don’t know exactly why.
The eroticism came to a height when the guide got out a box of white gloves and invited me to caress the statues in the garden. This highly Parisian activity is, he told me, a regular part of any tour of the studio. So I went ahead, feeling inexplicably embarrassed at running my hands over the curves and into the holes of the statues. Doing the same thing at the Rodin museum would have been outright pornographic, but here the statues are abstract, and any resemblance to the human form is in the imagination. Even so, it felt like touching up the Venus de Milo.
When I left the museum, there was still no one disturbing the peace of this tranquil neighbourhood, no crowds of art pilgrims trekking up from Meudon. On the guide’s advice, I walked up the hill to the end of the street, where there were some weird and wonderful modern houses—the weirdest of which had a façade of mirrors, with bright-yellow windows and doorframes, like a modernist Hansel and Gretel cottage. Close by, on a garden wall, there was a panel saying that the huge cedar tree nearby was a present from Napoleon’s Josephine to her art teacher. This place really is part of Paris’s art history.
Monet, Monet, Monet
Visiting Paris without seeing some pictures by the Impressionists would be a bit like missing out on croissants. The problem being that croissants are made fresh every morning, whereas the Impressionists stopped painting over a century ago.
This is why there are almost always logjams at the permanent collections, and if there’s a temporary exhibition—even something as sub-Impressionist as Painters Who Once Met Manet While He Was Out Shopping—the lines can stretch for a hundred metres. And that’s just to use the toilets.
The Musée d’Orsay is the usual must-see for the Impressionist fan, and it does have some spectacular masterpieces, such as Renoir’s Moulin de
