Jed Perl
TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS
Air travel , which enables us to move from culture to cul–
ture in hours rather than days and weeks, may ultimately have the
effect of dissolving the very differences that we travel to discover.
The central areas of Paris remain a sacred enclave, on certain streets
of which one can imagine oneself back in the days ofChardin, or even
ea rli er. And ye t the drive in from the airport, through the sort of
subu rbs Godard u sed as the setting for the future in his science–
fi ction movie
Alphaville,
isn't much different from the trip into
countl ess cities in America.
Perhaps the flattening-out of differences between one culture
and a nother is part of the general disappearance of contrast as a
principle in social life. The rich and the poor dress more alike than
they used to; the city and country dweller share more and more
habits; a nd so forth . The expatriate tourists of Hemingway seem
almost impossible today, not because there are no more people with
money, but because the reliable waiter, always there with the next
glass of wine, a nd the bank clerk , always there to send the mail on to
Cannes, Biarritz, San Sebastian, a re now most likely off on vaca–
tions of their own. The setting that created a backdrop for a certain
kind of privileged life has disappared . Mastercard doesn't replace
this ; it works against the prerogatives of the leisure class.
Pa ris first attracted visitors from America who felt how dif–
ferent the life there was from the life back home. Paris was an inex–
pensive, ma rvelous place to go. And the French avant-garde em–
braced foreigners, in particular Ame ricans , because some of these
visit ors were responding enthusiastically to everything that was new.
When M a tisse had his school it was said that there were only Scan–
dinavian a nd American students (among them Max Weber) . Sarah
Stein took notes, and Matisse trusted her-he brought his own
paintings for he r to look at. For Americans the attraction of Paris lay
in the audacity with which new art sprang from an ancient soil. This
fertility is what Gertrude Stein, too often maligned as a critic of art,
unde rstood .
In
her and Leo's and (later) Alice's apartment things
Editor's ote: This essay is excerpted from
Paris Without End: On French Art Since
World War I
by J ed Perl. Copyright
(1;1
1988 by Jed Perl. To be published by North
Point Press in October.
