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PARTISAN REVIEW
commingled: old furniture and majolica with the very newest paint–
mgs.
In her book about Picasso, Gertrude Stein describes how old–
fashioned Montmartre had been when Picasso lived the re during his
early years in Paris. She says the last time she was on the rue Ravig–
nan the street "still had its old charm, the little square was just as it
was the first time I saw it, a carpenter was working in a corner, the
children were there, the houses were all almost the same as they had
been, the old ateli er building where all of them had lived was still
standing." She wonders if, since her last visit, the atelier building has
been torn down, and continues, "It is normal to build new buildings ,
but all the same one does not like anything to change and the rue
Ravignan of that time was really something , it was the rue Ravignan
and it was there that many things that were important in the history
of twentieth-century art happened." The timelessness of the old
square with the carpenter (who cou ld be the Joseph in the Merode
altarpiece) is the backdrop against which the Negro period and the
first collages were created. Ironically , the modern world of modern
art was invented in a city - Paris - still steeped in the nineteenth
century. There is the paradox of several gene rations fleeing rigid
American conventions to an older world, whe re one could embrace
the new and finally feel free.
Henry James's
The Ambassadors,
a novel played out in the dazz–
ling Paris of the Impressionists, contains the classic exposition of the
freedom of the past: the old world as a source of the liberating les–
sons that art can offer to life. Lambert Strether , the bachelor come to
Europe to save his fiancee Mrs. Newsome's son Chad, is brought by
the American boy who's been living it up in Paris to the house of the
great sculptor G loriani (said to be modelled on Whistler). The set–
ting is the heart of the Faubourg St. Germain: "a small pavilion,
clear-faced and sequestered, an effect of polished
parquet,
of fine
white panel and spare, sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and rare."
The atmosphere is perfect for a revelation - in the garden there are
singing birds, and all around "grave
hotels"
that stand for "a strong,
indifferent, persistent order."
Even before Strether meets the sculptor , "he had the sense of
names in the air, of ghosts at the windows , of signs and tokens , a
whole range of expression all about him , too thick for prompt dis-
i
crimination." And then there's Gloriani himself-"a face that was
like an open letter in a foreign tongue." James is perhaps a bit ironic
about the whole thing; the Italian background of the sculptor, who
"migrated, in mid-career, to Paris," gives a certain over-rich glow.
