More Art in Paris

Friday October 18 was a sun/cloud mix with a high of 15C.  Perfect walking weather.  We headed out late morning and had a coffee at the Yellow Tucan, just a few metres away from the apartment.

Yellow Tucan

Very good coffee-- we had a chat with the owner

We stopped to make a reservation for dinner at L'Ange 20 just up the street.  We decided to wander around the Marais for a bit, checking out old favourites.

At the Jack Gomme store-- our favourite bag store

Alain deciding on a purchase

We both made purchases-- the light bags are great and the prices and selection much better in Paris than in Toronto.

We stopped at Merci's Cinema Café for a lovely haricots verts salade.

Lovely salad

Haricots verts are always better in Paris

New street art

Our first museum of the day was the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme (mahJ) (Museum of the Art and History of Judaism).  There were two exhibits of interest.  The first was a major retrospective: Jules Adler, Peintre du People (Painter of the People) and the second smaller exhibit was: Adolfo Kaminsky, Faussaire et photgraphe (Forger and Photographer).

MahJ is located in the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan on rue du Temple.  The building was a mansion built between 1644-1650.  It opened as MahJ in 1998.

Statue of Captain Dreyfus in the courtyard of the Musem

Jules Adler (1865- 1952) was born into an Alsatian Jewish family at Luxeuil-les- Bains in Franche-Comté.  His parents had a draper's shop there.  In 1882, he moved to Paris to enrol at the École des arts décoratifs.  His family moved to Paris with him.

Adler's work is little known to the public today, yet one of his pictures, La Grève au Creusot (The Strike at Le Creusot) (1899) became an iconic image of the workers' struggle and has been frequently reproduced in history books.  The exhibit featured 170 paintings, drawings, prints and documents, many of which have never been shown to the public.

At the beginning of his career, Jules Adler, a defender of Dreyfus and a great admirer of Émile Zola, was preoccupied with the misery and hardship caused by industrial society.  His depictions of the plight of workers particularly in Paris where he lived, earned him the epithet of "painter of the humble."  Although he later turned to other subjects, his interest in the common people endured.  He painted many pictures of peasants, fishermen and their wives.  

In 1944, Adler and his wife were denounced and interned for six months at the Hôpital Rothschild which had been turned into an internment camp for sick and aged Jews awaiting deportation.  He sketched his fellow inmates during this period.  The Adlers were released.  In 1948, Adler showed a "Series of 83 drawings done during my six-month internment after my arrest by the Krauts in 1944."

My Old Luxeuil (1932)- acquired by the Musée du Luxembourg in 1933

Self-Portrait c. 1900

Transfusion of Goat's Blood-- his first major work, a commission,
which was shown at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1892.  This painting launched his career.

Portrait of My Father - his father, Nathan (1832-1910) 

Portrait of My Mother (1836-1913) Julie Grombach, his mother, was born into a southern Alsatian family 

In the Coalfields 1901.  Shown at the Salon in 1902.  Men and women leaving the mine, their fatigue and pain shown by the exaggerated tension of their legs.  

The Stokers, Interior of a Bottle Factory.  In 1909, Claude Bouher, director of the Cognac glassworks, commissioned Adler to paint a large picture depicting the enfourneurs, the workers who stoked the furnaces.

The Barge Haulers.  Acquired by the Musée du Luxembourg after the Salon in 1904,  it depicts five men and a woman haling a barge, out of view, along the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, with factories in the background.

Man in a Smock 1897. The old worker was spotted by Adler in the Place de la République district  and posed for several pictures, including wearing the same smock,  in The Weary (see below).

The Weary, acquired by the State and awarded a silver medal at the World's Fair in Paris in 1900.  It is one of the pictures that earned Adler the epithet of "painter of the humble."  Adler said that this picture was inspired by a passage from Émile  Zola's L'Assommoir (1877).

Portrait of Jules Jeanneney.  Jeanneney (1864-1957) was an ardent Dreyfussard who became active in politics.  He become Speaker of the Senate in 1932. He chaired the session of the National Assembly that voted full powers to Marshal Pétain but he soon opposed the Vichy regime.  After the Vel'd'Hiv' Roundup (July 16 and 17, 1942) he wrote a letter of support for the Chief Rabbi of France.  Jeanneney went into hiding in June 1944, then served as a minister in the provisional government after France's liberation.  Although he regretted not having been able to free Adler, he probably intervened to prevent his deportation.

Too old to be mobilised in WWI, Adler ran a canteen with his wife for artists in need.  In 1917, he  was sent to Verdun as an army artist.  Instead of depicting the combat on the front, he focused on the results of its violence, showing devastated landscapes, exhausted soldiers and prisoners.

Workers Leaving the Ruelle Foundry 1917

Canteen for artists in need run by Adler and his wife.  It was housed in the studio of a mobilised artist on Place Pigalle, and served free or low-price meals to artists in difficulty.
Bottom picture is a Laissez-Passer in the name of Jules Adler, 1917

During the Bombardment, Paris 1916.  Depiction of civilians behind the lines caught in the violence of the conflict.

Summer Evening, Café Victor 1930 

Paris Morning- shown at the Salon in 1905,

The Smoke 1924.  

After the establishment of the Vichy regime, Adler, then 75, was confronted with anti-Jewish measures.  When he was banned from exhibiting, he resigned from the committee of the Salon des Artistes Français in August 1940.  There was a letter in the exhibit in which he evokes his indestructible bond with France, as an Alsatian and as the grandson of one of Napoleon's soldiers, recalling his dedicated commitment to artists in difficulty during the Great War, during which he ran a canteen for more than four years.

On March 29, 1944 he was arrested following a denunciation- he had supposedly been seen painting in the park at Les Batignolles, forbidden for Jews.  While the Adlers escaped deportation, his nephew and his wife were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and murdered as soon as they arrived.

Jules and Céline Adler's Internment documents November 1944

Portrait of a Man 1944

In the last room of the exhibit, were two of his major works.  The first was The Strike at Le Creusot.  Between May 1899 and July 1990, the steel mills at Le Creusot employing more than 9000 workers, wee brought to a standstill by four general strikes.  Adler went to observe events on the spot.  His picture depicts the solitary of the workers as they advance arm in arm, hand in hand.

The Strike at Le Creusot 1900

Paris, View from the Sacré-Coeur, 1936.  A declaration of love and a tribute to Paris.    The couple is probably the artist and his wife.

It was a wonderful retrospective about an artist that we hadn't heard about before.

The second exhibit was Adolfo Kaminsky: Forger and Photographer.  Kaminsky was born into a family of Russian Jewish émigrés in Buenos Aires in 1925.  When his family moved to France in 1932, he went to work as an apprentice dyer in 1940 and learnt the rudiments of chemistry.  He was interned with his family at Drancy in 1943, but was freed by the Argentinean Counsel, due to his Argentinian citizenship.  He joined the Resistance at 17, using his knowledge of chemistry to become an expert in forging official documents, working for the Jewish Resistance and then for the French military secret services until 1945.  During the war, Kaminsky created documents that saved the lives of 14,000 Jews, sometimes working all night to create documents. From 1944-45,  The French military secret service entrusted him with making false IDs for spies sent behind the lines in order to investigate and detect the location of concentration camps.

After the war, he forged identity papers for the Haganah to facilitate clandestine emigration to Palestine.  Known as "the technician" in the 1950s and 60s, he forced documents for the Algerian National Liberation Front's networks in France; South American revolutionaries, Third World liberation movements and opponents of the dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece. He even made false ID papers for American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War.  Faithful to his humanist ideals, he refused to work for the violent groups that emerged in Europe in the 1970s.

He always worked for free, in order to be able to refuse a job if he didn't support the ideas, the only exception being during WWII, when his expenses were covered so he could dedicate himself full-time to the job.

Kaminsky also become a photographer after the Liberation of Paris, taking photos of workers, lovers in lamp-lit streets, second hand goods dealers, bearded men, the city lights and the elegant and those living on the margins of society in Paris.  He moved to Algeria in 1971, married and had three children.  In 1982, he and his family returned to France.  His daughter Sarah, published Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger's Life in 2009.

Poster for show

We watched a short New York Times video about Kaminsky.  He is 94.  He risked his life many times forging documents during WWII.  

Screen shot from a short film about Kaminsky entitled The Forger which accompanied an online New York Times article in October 2016.

Self Portrait at 19 -1944

The exhibit featured 70 photographs taken by Kaminsky.  

Ernest Appenzeller and Anar Grouchof, Paris 1947

Le libraire, Paris 1948

La pluie, la femme au parapluie, Paris 1949

It was a very interesting exhibit, again learning about an incredible life of someone we had not previously known.  The photos were also very evocative of post-war Paris.

We walked over to the new Paris Eataly store which had just opened earlier this year. It is housed in a beautiful building in the Marais and is a lot more open and airier than the Eataly's in New York and Chicago which we have visited.  Soon Toronto will have it's own Eataly on Bloor Street.

Outside Eataly

View from the second floor--- we liked the Fraternité reference

Outside café

We stopped for a coffee at Archive 18-20, a coffee shop attached to a fashion and design store in a beautiful building located at 18-20 rue des Archives.

Archive 18-20 coffeeshop

Umbrellas further along rue des Archives

It was then on to the Centre Pompidou to see the exhibit: Bacon: Books and Painting.  The exhibit featured paintings by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) produced between 1971 and 1992, in relation to six poetic, literary and philosophical texts taken from books in Bacon's library.  The curators had chosen 1971 as the starting point as that was the last year of a retrospective event in Paris.

According to the brochure, although Bacon always contested any literary or narrative interpretation of his work, the wealth of books in his collection, which included over 1000 items, revealed his interest in the written word.  Bacon said "Great poets are incredible triggers of images, their words are essential to me, they stimulate me, they open the doors of my imagination."

There were six small rooms in the exhibit in which recordings were played of excerpts from the chosen books (in both French and English).  These included works by Aeschylus, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land); Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness); Micael Leiris and Georges Bataille.

Study of Red Pope, 1962, Second Version 1971

Triptych, August 1972

In Memory of George Dyer, 1971

Section from larger painting

Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981

Triptych, 1986-7

Three Portraits-Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer; Self-portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud 1973

Study for Bullfight No. 2, 1969

Triptych, 1970

Miniature replica of his studio-- we saw the recreated studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin

Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968

We really enjoyed the exhibit, especially after visiting his recreated studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and seeing a number of his works at that Gallery.  We didn't think the rooms where the excerpts of the six chosen books were read added that much to the exhibit.  Not that many people were in those rooms in which there was only a copy of one of the books and a seat to listen to the excerpt.

One last photo heading down on the escalator at the Pompidou.

Lovely view- though the windows are dirty

We went back the apartment to rest and then at 9:00 p.m. went to L'Ange 20 for dinner.  The restaurant is located just a few minutes up the street (Rue Tournelles) from the apartment.  It had good reviews as serving fresh ingredients with a modern twist.  They also keep their menu simple, with each course at the same price.  We had a very good meal at a reasonable price.  The place was packed on a Friday night.

I took this photo in the late morning when we dropped by to make our reservation

Great cartoon on the wall

Inside of the restaurant- lots of magazine and newspapers on the ceiling - small dining area

We shared a shrimp/crab starter (la salade tomates cerises et roquette, rillettes de crabes et crevettes)

I had lovely lamb with vegetables and potatoes (Le fondant d'agneau de sept heures, purée de carottes et pommes de terre sautées)

Alain had veal and potato gratin ( L'émincé de veau poêlé aux girolles et pleurotes, gratin dauphinois)

We really were too full for dessert.  Luckily, we were only a two minute walk from the apartment.  Another wonderful day in Paris!