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PARTISAN REVIEW
winter it was Pissarro, Derain, and the circle of painters around
Apollinaire.) No art movement of the past is too radical to be assimi–
lated into what the Gaullists think of as
La gLoire
and what Giscard and
his people, with their monarchial airs and civil-service mentality, like
to call
Le patrimoine.
(Officially, 1980 was
L'annee du patrimoine,
a
piece of cultural chauvinism that has nothing whatever to do with art. )
When de Gaulle addressed Sartre as
cher maztre
and refused to let him
be jailed for subversive agitation, because even he was "also France,"
the writer understood that he was being rendered harmless: trussed and
stuffed for public display.
French cu ltural bureaucrats love anniversaries. Last fall they were
busily celebrating the centenaries of the death of Flaubert and the birth
of Apollinaire, two of their more rebellious and unconventional
writers. Less predictably, they soon turned in a smaller way to the death
of Dostoevsky and the birth of Musil-notable testimony to the steady
decline of French cu ltural insularity. The Musil exhibition took place
at the Beaubourg, a unique institution which, in its first four years, has
gone out of its way
to
contradict all patrimonial and narrowly
national assumptions about cu lture. Its most ambitious shows have
been hyphenated ones-Paris-Berlin, Paris-New York-and last year's
big winter show, a grand revaluation of realist tendencies in art and
literature between 1919 and 1939, seemed designed
to
undermine the
textbook view of the primacy of the School of Paris and its modernist
aesthetic. The exhibition was a confused one, with art ranging from
Edward Hopper
to
George Grosz to Nazi propaganda, so that the term
realism finally lost all meaning. But it had the provocative abundance
and variety that people have come to associate with this irreverent
institution.
One thing about the Beaubourg is typically French: its massive
scale. It's a big modernist gesture in a city full of medieval, classical,
and beaux arts gestures. Otherwise, the building, with its plaza full of
jugglers and fire-eaters, its exposed, multicolored heating pipes, and its
huge but surprisingly casual crowds, is an odd mixture of Lincoln
Center and a sixties "happening." Is there another museum in the
world where people feel more relaxed, where books and art and films
seem more accessible?
Despite the size of the building, which dwarfs the surrounding
landscape-including the chic, renovated Marais and the disastrous
sunken shopping center which replaced the markets of Les Hailes-the
Beaubourg resists the usual French conceptions of monumentality.
Before I saw it I knew it only as a building with all of its guts exposed. I
had no idea how much this idea of openness and participation
