Arts Essays

Arts essays: Parisian Art

Janus would feel at home in Paris. The two-headed Roman god of doorways, passages and bridges would surely delight in the city with its thirty-seven river crossings and extensive labyrinth of little known entrances and tunnels that are buried below the boulevards and which give a fascinating and unique expression to the capital.

At street level Paris is particularly Janus-faced. It is one of the worlds most multifaceted and diverse cities, a public and private metropolis that is made up of reality and illusion, fact and mythology expressed through politics, art and architecture.

It is a city of passion, of bloody histories and turbulent regimes that have produced a lifetime of stormings, terrors, revolutions, sieges, communes, occupations and liberations that have shaped it both physically and spiritually.

The allure of Paris is so great that more than one powerful man has been moved to great declarations: to secure the French throne Henri IV changed his religion for her; Napoléon Boneparte proclaimed her ‘the most beautiful city in the world’; and Hitler would have had her burn rather than outshine Berlin.

But it is not just emperors, kings and dictators that have influenced the face of Paris. Artists including Monet, Degas and Toulouse Lautrec have contributed to the Parisian illusion with work that is familiar the world over; and writers from de Beauvoir and Collette, to Hemingway and Orwell all add a layer to the myth.

Music successfully perpetuates the fable: the tremulous voice of Piaf adds fragility to the Parisian face; the Folies-Bergère gives expression to uncontrollable exuberance; whilst the Moulin Rouge more than hints at the simmering sexuality of the French capital.

Above all, Paris has a romantic aspect and has hosted great love affairs from Héloïse and Abelard to Napoléon and Josephine.

The physical face of Paris is provided by the grandiose architecture of the great city planners from Phillipe Auguste, Louis XIV and Haussmann to Mitterand’s Grands Projects.

There is a homogeneity to the city’s buildings many of which have been constructed from locally excavated limestone, but despite architectural harmonisation there is also diversity: the great Gothic structure of Notre-Dame; the red brick and stone of the sixteenth-century place des Vosges; the sumptuously Baroque seventeenth-century Eglise de Val-de-Grâce; the grandly neo-classical Place de la Concorde; and the emphatic Eiffel Tower.

The twentieth-century has also added its touch to the city with Nouvel’s Institute du Monde Arabe and Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale.

These are the showy, flamboyant and very public faces of Paris. There is however a quiet, intimate and undisclosed face of the French capital that is integral both to its physical structure as well as its spiritual being. It is Janus in introspective mood.

Below the graceful boulevards lie miles of dank, subterranean galleries; they are a result of city planning every bit as impressive as that above the surface.

The underground galleries make their way through limestone and gypsum quarries found under the capital. The excavation of these quarries began in about the twelfth century when they provided the raw material needed to build the city, including Notre Dame.

Extractions were made indiscriminately: when a quarry had been stripped of its contents it was abandoned and vacuums developed below the city that caused potential danger to the people and buildings on the surface.

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