Searching Hemingway and Fitzgerald Ghosts... Last Week in Paris...

Harry's New York Bar

Sir Winston Churchill Pub

... They were there. But they weren't on speaking terms.

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RALPH JAMES WATT R.I.P.

Ralph at NYU:
The Washington Square Journal (1967)

Journalist Colleague Friend

Ralph James Watt, a journalist, colleague, and friend, died Friday,16 August 2019, in Paris. Born and raised in Alliance, Nebraska, he was a graduate of New York University where he studied journalism and dug in his heels as a burgeoning iconoclast. As such, he fit in nicely among a group of Young Turk editors of the student daily newspaper, The Washington Square Journal. 

Ralph lived in Paris for many years, moving there shortly after his NYU graduation to be near his girlfriend from NYU, who had already moved to France. . When she moved to London, he stayed, working contract and

Ralph in Paris

freelance writing assignments.

He was his late 60s, or early 70s at his death at Hopital Salpetiere, Paris. He had been hospitalized there while being treated for 'multiple fractures.'

Ralph was unwell frequently over the years, and used a cane to support his overweight carriage. The resulting image gave him the air of a Romance poet as he did his best to navigate the byways of his neighborhood on the Left Bank.

The last time I saw him, in 2015 in Paris, he had just recovered from sprained foot, which had kept him confined to bed for a week. In a email I received from him a year later, he said, 'I have spent most of the year in hospital, due to major issues.'

Ralph was smart, learned, and a warm friend. An example of his generosity was exhibited during a long night out at a restaurant, Louis Vins. I was drinking then, and our bill—my bill actually since Ralph was my guest—was expanding as were our waistlines. On leaving, I settled the bill with the patronne, and we parted merrily on our way. Ralph insisted on walking. I took a taxi to my hotel on the Right Bank.

It was only when I got settled in my room that I looked at the restaurant receipt. There was something wrong! I was charged only 10 euros. Ralph had pulled off a neat trick. He had arranged the deception beforehand with the patronne.

—Richard Carreño

An Opposing View: He's Entitled

Albert Barnes and Paul Guillaume

By Robert Zeller

June 03, 2014

Albert Barnes by Giorgio de Chirico

 

My colleague Richard Carreño [at BroadStreetReview.com] compares the Barnes Foundation’s art collection, of which some 800 pieces were hung on permanent display in Merion, to that of Paul Guillaume in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. There are some important differences, however.

Giorgio de Chirico's portrait of Barnes.

 

Guillaume’s collection, as Richard points out, consists of 145 works. Barnes owned some 350 works by Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso alone. In addition to the works in the galleries, he had ten times as many in other repositories, notably his estate at Ker-Feal. These included works by Corot, Courbet, Millet, and De Chirico, the latter a portrait of Barnes himself. He wasn’t just hiding them; they simply didn’t fit in with the conception he had for the galleries. In the case of De Chirico, Barnes may simply not have wished to call undue attention to himself in what was designed as a pedagogical setting. Guillaume’s portrait of himself by Modigliani does hang in l’Orangerie. De gustibus.

Ben Franklin in Paris

Hôtel de Valentinois
Photo: WC News Service

'I WAS THE ONLY ONE LOOKING UP' 

By Richard Carreño

[WC News Service]

Paris

DURING HIS LONG life of eighty-four years, Benjamin Franklin was an inventor, postmaster, printer, librarian, scientist, politician, journalist. Here in Paris, though, the polymath Franklin reached his apogée, as an American freedom fighter, Society maven, intellectual superstar, statesmen, and, despite his age and age-related ailments, even as an envied roué and lady's man.

Franklin (1706-1790) was always peripatetic. This was all the more remarkable in that 18th century travel, both overland and overseas, was time-consuming and involved incredible hardship, planning, and danger. Franklin mastered it all, becoming arguably the most well-travelled American of his time.

 

Born in Boston, he wound up, via New York, in Philadelphia in 1723, where he married, raised a family, and blossomed as the Anglo-American luminary of legend.

TOURIST ALERT

THE GREAT PARIS MÉTRO SCAM

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]

Paris

While France remains on high-alert, following recent terrorist attacks, and its armed forces and national and local police deployed to block still more murder and mayhem (a potential bombing was thwarted just this past Sunday at Nôtre Dame), another zealous security force is working diligently underground here to deter another fierce threat -- this from unsuspecting tourists.

In fact, these agents are nothing more than a band of weasels employed by Paris's equally conniving subway system, the Métropolitan, or Métro, to ostensibly enforce a wide range of rules of regulations to maintain underground safety and order. Not a word of truth to it! The Métro police have, in fact, have a singled out docile -- often non-French speaking -- visitors as their prime target. The offense? Not retaining the paper ticket used at turnstiles to enter the subway network. The punishment? Strict fines.

I know. I was nailed this week. This, after eighteen months of residence in Paris (in the 60s) and more than forty visits in subsequent years. And I speak (and read) French.

Shame on me.

The OTHER Picasso Museum

Pablo Picasso
in Lucerne

WITHOUT THE CROWDS

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]
Lucerne, Switzerland
Many Pablo Picasso fans have already made the pilgrimage to the newly-opened Musée Picasso in Paris, and thus, surrounded by scores the artist's works, have encountered the hordes that flock to museum. Like most museums in Paris, these galleries double as tourist attractions, especially when they feature marquee artists (Picasso) or iconic paintings (Mona Lisa at the Louvre). The result are crowds. Big crowds. Sometimes, in the summer, especially, titanic crowds that can put off even the most hardy museum-goer. (Ssshh... The solution are skip-the-line tickets. Sometimes costly. But always well worth the expense).

 

Or, for true, die-hard Picasso dévotees, how does immediate access to one of the best, small collections of his works anywhere sound? And with no crowds. In fact, hardly any fellow museum-goers to contend with.

Lausanne's Métro

Photos; WC News Service/Richard Carreño

FRENCH TECHNOLOGY,
SWISS HUMOUR
By RICHARD CARREÑO
[WC News Service]

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Most subway straphangers consider themselves lucky if the train they're riding foretells an upcoming station stop with a PA update (too often muffled, too heavily accented, and/or generally unintelligible), or, at best, with a visual announcement that requires a neck-straining contortion to check it out. Lausanne's Métro has such methods beat: Welcome to the world's smallest city with a full-fledged subway. And, arguably, also the world's quirkiest, where approaching stations are announced by animal sounds. As from horses and cows. And rushing water, as in a waterfall.

Forget verbal announcements or visual legends. In their place, at alternating stations, are the amplified sounds of cows mooing and the hoof beats of stampeding horses. The pattern seems random: As I approached the Line 2's Croisettes stop, it might have been the horses that I was hearing. Thirteen stops away, at Ouchy, mooing might have been cued up. Either way, be forewarned to alight if your stop were next.

Picasso Museum, Paris

CROWD CONTROL

By RICHARD CARREÑO

Waiting
Photo: WC News Service

 

PARIS [WC News Service] -- The newly-reopened Musée National Picasso-Paris, closed for expansion and remodelling after an incredible (count em!) five years, is unarguably the world's most comprehensive and numerically superlative collection anywhere of works by Pablo Picasso, the prolific, long-time Parisian. There are, of course, many iconic pieces of the Picasso's canon elsewhere, with pride of place in museums from Madrid to New York. But for sheer number (more than four hundred objects) -- including great examples of the Spanish modern's oeuvre over a lifetime of artistic mastery --  the 'new' Picasso Museum is the place to show up. If you can get in. 

No, the Picasso is not a timed-ticket establishment. But I'm wondering whether it really should be. Actually, putting up with the longish entrance queue is the easy part. (Full disclosure: As a reporter, I got to skip the line in a visit earlier this month). What's harder for everyone, even those credentialed as press, is seeing the works with any ease. Forget contemplation. Communion? Not in this lifetime. Even just trying to get up close and personal with any of the art is a spirited, athletic art form in itself. In weaving and bobbing among other museum-goers (many seem to be garden clubers on private tours), being built like a line-backer will definitely help. So will a periscope to see over the heads of fellow galleristas.

Fondation Louis Vuitton

'Anchors Away!'
Photo: WC News Service/Richard Carreño

ALL HAT, NO CATTLE

By RICHARD CARREÑO

PARIS [WC News Service] -- The super rich and powerful get all sorts things named for them; their fabulous wealth underwriting  ego-centric municipal projects from hospitals and sports stadiums to theatres and, increasingly for those billionaire one-per-centers who also fancy themselves as art connoisseurs, eponymous museums that showcase their putative, ahem, 'connoisseurship.'

 

Step forward, please, France's richest man, one Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, who has also created what may be one of the the world's worst contemporary art museums, the newly-minted Fondation Louis Vuitton, a Frank Gehry-designed behemoth that rises up in Paris' principal park, the Bois de Boulogne.

The mega-million-euro museum, resembling an ocean-going ark with a very large prow, opened in late 2014. I got around to it earlier this month.

True, the museum doesn't bear Arnault's name. Never mind. Arnault is Vuitton, and, in the tony precincts of the 16th, Mayfair, and the Upper East Side, everyone knows it. That, seemingly, is enough for the vainglorious Arnault.

Janet Flanner

THE NEW YORKER'S FLÂNEUSE

By RICHARD CARREÑO

Flanner

Hotel Intercontinental

PARIS [WC News Service] -- For more than thirty years, The New Yorker, arguably America's most respected middle-brow general circulation magazine, surveyed this city and French life from a 12 feet by 15 feet perch overlooking the Palais Garnier, the wonderful Beaux Arts structure that houses the Paris Opera.

 

That is, until 1978, when 86-year-old Janet Flanner, the magazine's Paris correspondent known by her sobriquet 'Genêt,' who had occupied the pocket-sized room, suffered a fatal heart attack during one of her periodic visits to New York. It was, as they say, an end of an era.

Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature

Din Din
Photo: WC News Service

Get Stuffed
Paris (WC News Service) -- The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, or the Museum of Hunting and Nature, in Le Marais, is something like the Museum of Natural History in New York, even the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. That is, without the dinosaurs and dioramas. And size.

It's the sensibility. The Marais museum, at 62, rue des Archives, is smallish on three-floors, boutique like, and its exhibits are, for the most part, stuffed specimens of small animals hunted by rifle-bearing shooters. Its largest pieces are brown and polar bears and, on the top floor, two gorillas -- who seemingly are about to share the pleasures au table.

Actually, I had hoped for more about stag hunting, the French version of English and American foxhunting. Except for a few statuettes and oil pictures, not much.

Liliane Clever

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE CHARLIE HEBDO MASSACRE, EVEN HE SHOULD WORRY -- A LOT

 

JANUARY 7 WAS a very sad day for France. On that morning, the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo, a small, funny, silly, satirical magazine, left everyone of tears.

Reading Charlie Hebdo has been a rite of passage, since the 1960s, for many young people in France. In a way, it's like Mad -- but with bite and the feel and look of illicit, deep Underground publication. Both magazines share a similar demographic, young readers.

16eme

VILLA MONTMORENCY

It was created when buying in 1853 by the Company of Paris railway in Saint-Germain -led Pereire brothers , Boufflers Castle and its grounds (the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansart ) to the Montmorency family , to achieve the Gare d'Auteuil . The villa consists of fifty houses was built in 1860 according to the plans of architect Théodore Charpentier.  This private area of "single family homes campaign and accreditation" has rules condominium strict and binding defined in the context of a trade association that manages all since 1853 . A guard at the entrance controls access by checking the permissions to enter. The architectural style recalls the General seaside villas of Deauville or Arcachon late XIX ^th  century .

A Novel Look

The author, Paris, 1967

MY LITERARY ME

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]

Not many get to see themselves up close and personal in the pages of a novel.

 

Or, more precisely, who they were -- at twenty.

 

I did recently.

That view of me, at least, beyond what I saw, or imagined what I saw, more than forty years ago in a bygone looking glass, came in the form of a literary time-machine, a very long novel called French Lessons by popular chicklit-author Peg Craig. At times, the appraisal seems superficial. Also, penetrating. Except, of course, for a violent streak that she attributes to my literary me. Ouch!

I knew Peg Craig, in Paris in 1967. Not well. But evidently she was paying attention. A lot more than I was.

A friend recommended her e-book not long ago, noting that the Kindle-ready, down-loadable text (Amazon.com; $10) was well received when Craig published the book in 2012. Part fiction, part autobiography, the book is all girly-girly, told by a seventeen-year-old narrator who studies in 60s Paris. Gee, Pierre, I wonder how I missed that one.

Books Received: French Lessons

 

Her French Revolution

French Lessons

By Peg Craig

E-book available via Amazon for Kindle

Author Peg Craig introduces:

Meg is a pretty 17-year-old virgin. Her sheltered southern upbringing works very well in Alexandria, Va., but begins to prove burdensome when she is thrown into culture shock. This comical adventure begins with Meg failing to get accepted to any of the 20 colleges she has applied to when, by a twist of fate, she ends up being accepted to The Cathedral College in Paris, France. The tale takes place in one of the most interesting times in modern American….and French history, the one year between May 1967 and May 1968.

 

More Barnes Kvetching....

Dr. Albert Barnes

Albert Barnes and Paul Guillaume

By Robert Zaller Posted 3 June 2014 BroadStreetReview.com

Robert Zaller

My colleague Richard Carreño compares the Barnes Foundation’s art collection, of which some 800 pieces were hung on permanent display in Merion, to that of Paul Guillaume in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. There are some important differences, however.

 

Read More....

http://broadstreetreview.com/art-architecture/albert-barnes-and-paul-guillaume

 

Tale of Two Museums

Chez Paul at 22 ave Foch

L'Orangerie

 Musée de l'Orangerie and Barnes Foundation Share the Same Muse
By Richard Carreño Bio
[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

Paris

The stats have an eerie familiarity: Scores of paintings by Chaim Soutine, Pablo Picasso, Jean Renoir, Henri Mattisse, Henri Rousseau, Amedeo Modigliani and other Impressionists and post-Impressionists, and all assembled by a fiercely independent collector who pioneered new ground in introducing modern art to 20th century audiences. The Barnes Foundation collection in Philadelphia, maybe? In considering the numbers and artists, American museum-goers can be easily forgiven for free-associating with that Philadelphia institution, the world's largest repository such modern works. And, of course, they would be wrong. At least, in Paris.

Welcome to the Musée de l'Organerie, home of the Walter-Guillaume Collection, an array of 145 paintings that rivals the Barnes as a showcase of many of the same modern artists who once called upon Paris for inspiration and livelihood. For Philadelphians, especially those seeped in the lore of the Barnes collection and its visionary founder, the eccentric, taciturn Dr. Alfred C. Barnes, the Orangerie is a kind of foreign pilgrimage to a place that can rightfully be called the Barnes' French 'bookend,' even its precursor.

That the two museum collections are almost a matched set, in presenting a similar catalogue of artists and their works, is hardly coincidental, in that Barnes (1872-1951) and the Orangerie collection's founder, Paul Guillaume (1891-1934), equally admired and promoted the same favored artists. Similarities between the collectors, who were in equal parts friends, competitors, and business associates, don't stop there.

Long-legged Blonds




What no snails? Gary Lee Kraut filtring absinthe during a recent lunch
Photo: WritersClearinghouse News Service/Richard Carreño

In Praise of Tour Guides

By Richard Carreño

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

Paris

On my first trip to Europe, to London as a teen-ager in the early-60s, my father had arranged for our family to be guided about the city, my first experience with a touring service. We settled comfortably in a big car, shepherded by stoic 'right-you-are,-guv'ner' type driver in the buttoned-up standard uniform of that period and our guide, long-legged blond in a micro-mini. (Also standard issue. Remember Swingin' London?)

Sitting in the back seat, trying to ignore my younger sister, Roberta, I had the best view of London possible. Her legs.

In the fifty-odd years since, I haven't had much use for guided tours (long-legged blonds are another story); rather, navigating my way around the world under my own steam. Strictly do it yourself, you see. Some notable exceptions have involved visits to Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Israel.

Recently, I've changed my mind. About guided tours, that is.

Don't Go!

Welcome to the Mona Lisa conga line, snaking through galleries.
Photos: WritersClearinghouse News Service/Richard Carreño 

Louvre Visitor Survival Guide

By Richard Carreño

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

Paris

The Palais du Louvre, which used to house the royal families of France and now houses the art treasures of the country's citizens, is less a museum than a obstacle course. My best recommendation to any visitor to Paris: Don't go!

 

'Hey, Maude, watch the eyes
 -- and your wallet!'

Of course, if you must enter the admission maelstrom at the Musée du Louvre ('What, are you nuts,go to Paris and not visit the Louvre?'), there are ways to arm yourself against the hordes of tourists who crush the immense galleries, making the experience on any given summer day more like people-packing on a Tokyo subway than a serene, contemplative communion with some of the world's greatest artworks.

 

Strategizing a visit to the Louvre, the globe's most frequented museum, is of upmost importance. Nothing to take lightly. Almost 10-million souls (I'm sure you understand why I hesitate to call them 'art connoisseurs') visit the Louvre each year, also making this Paris landmark the world's single most-visited tourist site. Welcome to mile-long queues, shoving that makes the Times Square Shuttle seem like child's play, and packs of Chinese package-tour visitors who apparently have never learned in grade-school that jumping the queue in some parts of the world (that is, notably everywhere except the People's Republic of China, it seems) is a hanging offense. Welcome to crazy!

Video Gallery: NOTRE MONTPARNASSE

Notre Montparnasse: Paris