‘In the good old days, everyone was nostalgic.’
Few cities have been as idolised and idealised as Paris. I’m sure that I’m not alone in having covered the walls of my room with black and white memorials to the iconic Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees and Moulin Rouge. These images travel with me, ‘a moveable feast’.
Ernest Hemingway gave the city this epigram during the years that the flamboyant, feverish transition from wartime to modernity took place. The everlasting was gradually being knocked aside by the fashionable, under Baudelaire’s rallying cry, ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’.1 With ‘modernism’ as the artistic watchword, the Western world seemed to be departing from its Christian roots, replacing traditional devotion with nostalgia for church paraphernalia.
The streets of the Left Bank housed the likes of Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Coco Chanel became a popular name in fashion, Henri Cartier-Bresson began taking photographs, and the first complete edition of Joyce’s Ulysses was published. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how different the recent history of European art might have been had Paris not provided a space of convergence.
