City Lights

What do artists want? To live and work cheaply in a free-and-easy atmosphere. At the dawn of the 20th century Paris was the place for them. It was fun: it had cabarets, cafés, dance halls, bars, brothels, an underground railway, even neon lights. The artists gathered in steep and semi-rural Montmartre and later in Montparnasse, St. Germain des Près and the Latin Quarter. Groups of friends evolved into artistic movements, each with an “-ism” of its own. Even World War I couldn’t cramp the city’s style.”Paris, Capital of the Arts 1900-1968,” which opened last month at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (it moves to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, from May 21), charts the city’s artistic history. “The R.A. has had a tradition over the last 20 years of doing major surveys of art in the 20th century in various countries, and it had never done France,” says co-curator Anne Dumas. “We felt that French art toward the end of the 20th century was not so interesting and innovative, [while] the first half of the century was extremely rich.” The team decided to concentrate on Paris and end their overview in 1968, a year of riot and political upheaval in France. The early rooms fizz with life. Before World War I, artists were experimenting like children with a chemistry set. Here are pieces from the studios of the great and the less-great who splashed the lurid colors of the Fauve (Wild Beast) school onto the reality they lived. André Derain’s scarlet-haired Woman in a Chemise of 1906 gazes up from a rumpled bed, while Auguste Chabaud’s deserted Hotel Corridor of 1907-8 reveals only a suggestive line of light under a door.

The Fauves were followed by the Cubists, led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who deconstructed the basic sphere, cylinder, cone and cube that learner artists were set to copy. They broke apart these simple solids to construct ambiguous images that appear to emerge from the canvas or flatten out like a collapsing card-house. Their rather dry theories were gleefully hijacked by others and transformed into still lives, portraits, street and café scenes. Cubist angles form the background to Russian Marc Chagall’s Paris through the Window of 1913 and even become a pair of frilly panties in Italian Gino Severini’s Dancer No. 5 of 1913-16.

After World War I Parisian painters went back to nature. They may have taken a rest from challenging artistic fundamentals, but they still had no time for bourgeois morality. A room devoted to nudes painted between the wars is frankly erotic, including the Italian Amedeo Modigliani’s lush Reclining Nude of 1919. Less familiar are the delicate Youki, Snow Goddess (1924), by the Japanese Tsuguharu Foujita, who lies against frozen whiteness protected by an alert and sharp-featured dog, and Marcel Gromaire’s Seated Nude (1929), sporting fashionable bobbed hair and a wide-collared coat slung around her shoulders.

Spaniard Picasso, a Paris resident from 1904 to ’46 apart from a five-year stay in the country in the ’30s, is a constant presence, throwing up ideas and trying out other people’s. Here are sketches made in 1907 for his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of that year, the harsh painting set in a brothel and inspired by African masks. “He was a leading figure throughout the period,” says Dumas, an inventive mind who had an impact on many of the multifarious movements. He was also one of the few artists of stature to remain in the capital throughout World War II.

When the Nazis occupied the city, the party was over. The grim mood of the times is reflected in paintings like Jean Dubuffet’s Building Faades of 1946, where graffiti-like scratches are clawed into a thick black surface, and in sculpture like the Swiss Alberto Giacometti’s attenuated and isolated figures. Death’s heads entered Picasso’s work. Playwright Antonin Artaud spent the war in mental hospitals undergoing electroshock therapy. His Self-Portrait of 1947 almost destroys its flimsy paper with savage pencil lines. It’s in a private collection, so here is a rare chance to see this remarkable and anguished work.

There is nothing so raw in the rooms that follow, filled with the surgical purity of Kinetic and Op art, until we reach works inspired by ’60s politics. Like artists before World War I, Jean Jacques Lebel draws on images of lowlife, but in Parfum Gréve Générale, bonne odeur (1960), pretty girls posing in underwear rub elbows with bloody corpses. Jacques de la Villeglé’s Boulevard de la Bastille (1969) uses torn posters from the previous year’s near-revolution overlaid with depictions of General de Gaulle.

Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati, members of the Narrative Figuration school, created a sequence of paintings in 1965 by projecting photographs onto canvas. They show the “assassination” of artist Marcel Duchamp, who they considered had sold out by, among other things, moving to the U.S. To Live or Let Die, or The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp includes faithful copies of his works. His assassins, ordinary fellows in jackets and ties who could be paper-clip salesmen, smoke while the artist slumps unconscious in a chair.

Duchamp was the joker in the pack. You can see some of his witty and enigmatic works here, including his famous improved version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (with added moustache and goatee), on loan from the French Communist Party. A theme that runs through the show is the way artistic and social revolutions were born in smoky bars. The Surrealists and Dadaists made each other laugh with assemblages of popular art and everyday artifacts—their productions often look like in-jokes. That’s why the R.A. has mounted them in a model of a Paris public urinal, says Dumas—a pun the artists would have appreciated.