exhibition of African Art in Paris.
Earlier, as the Belle Ãpoque reached its climax in 1900, a younger Picasso was hurriedly sketching the clients and prostitutes dancing at the clubs of Montmartre, just as Toulouse-Lautrecâs âJane Avrilâ was appearing on advertising columns around the city, thanks to the new techniques in colour printing. It was somehow symbolic that the Moulin Rouge, built in 1885 as a windmill, should be converted to a dance hall in 1900, when the famous red sails came to signify not an advancing technology but a different aspect of the new century â hedonism, sexuality and the pursuit of pleasure. These places of entertainment advertised themselves as refuges from the modern and the technological, as places where the primitive and instinctual could find free and uncensoredexpression. Paris, which Benjamin called âthe capital of the nineteenth centuryâ, 1 was a place of exemplary order and impressive social control. Yet part of that order was the permitted existence of lieux de plaisir â âplaces of pleasureâ â on the margins of the city, behind the Wall in Montmartre and later in Montparnasse.
From time immemorial, the rich society of Paris adopted a neutral space where all classes could rub shoulders, see each other, talk to each other, without making any more contact than the pursuit of pleasure demanded. 2
And apart from talking and seeing, the bourgeois and the shopgirl or the demi-mondaine could dance the sensuous dances of this new age together. Dance manuals provided diagrams for urban Europeans on how to dance the cakewalk, just as, before the decade ended, classes and manuals would allow them to learn the tango.
While in Buenos Aires the contact between the outer, marginal areas and the modern city was limited to clandestine trips in the darkness, Paris was more liberal and perhaps less hypocritical in its pursuits of pleasure. Transgression lay across the boulevard, and the artists of the underworld, like Toulouse-Lautrec, were uninhibited in their representations of the diverse crowds of men gathering in the brothels and nightclubs. His portraits of the women, waiting for their customers and chatting desultorily, evoke people much like the 20â30,000 prostitutes gathered by then in Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, the first decade of the century saw the first cracks in the social barriers that had kept the Buenos Aires that saw itself as Paris apart from the marginal barrios and immigrant communities. But the full breakthrough would be made in the French capital itself.
There was a bizarre conjunction between a Paris that stood for the gamut of technological progress, as represented in the GreatUniversal Exhibition of 1900, and its fascination with the primitive and the exotic. The exhibition itself erected circuses and performance spaces replete with symbols and images of the other distant world. 3 Paris was as fascinated by the machinery and technology, whose most glorious expression was the Métro, as it was by the colonial world, with its dark-skinned people and its echoes of the primitive. The Arab world concealed all that was mysterious and dangerous: Africa was the home of an uninhibited sexuality, the Far East was impenetrably (inscrutably) âotherâ. And though Latin America remained more remote perhaps from France, the vision of the transatlantic world was equally distant from the civilized society of Paris, and equally exhilarating. The seduction of the primitive and the exotic was not exclusive to France, of course â but it was intensified there in social and sexual mores. 4
There were meeting points between those two worlds, crossroads where the primitive and the modern met and co-existed uneasily for the briefest of moments. In France the archetypal place of encounter was in Marseilles, where ships brought Africa, Asia and the Americas to the very threshold of the most advanced modern world. It was the
Earlier, as the Belle Ãpoque reached its climax in 1900, a younger Picasso was hurriedly sketching the clients and prostitutes dancing at the clubs of Montmartre, just as Toulouse-Lautrecâs âJane Avrilâ was appearing on advertising columns around the city, thanks to the new techniques in colour printing. It was somehow symbolic that the Moulin Rouge, built in 1885 as a windmill, should be converted to a dance hall in 1900, when the famous red sails came to signify not an advancing technology but a different aspect of the new century â hedonism, sexuality and the pursuit of pleasure. These places of entertainment advertised themselves as refuges from the modern and the technological, as places where the primitive and instinctual could find free and uncensoredexpression. Paris, which Benjamin called âthe capital of the nineteenth centuryâ, 1 was a place of exemplary order and impressive social control. Yet part of that order was the permitted existence of lieux de plaisir â âplaces of pleasureâ â on the margins of the city, behind the Wall in Montmartre and later in Montparnasse.
From time immemorial, the rich society of Paris adopted a neutral space where all classes could rub shoulders, see each other, talk to each other, without making any more contact than the pursuit of pleasure demanded. 2
And apart from talking and seeing, the bourgeois and the shopgirl or the demi-mondaine could dance the sensuous dances of this new age together. Dance manuals provided diagrams for urban Europeans on how to dance the cakewalk, just as, before the decade ended, classes and manuals would allow them to learn the tango.
While in Buenos Aires the contact between the outer, marginal areas and the modern city was limited to clandestine trips in the darkness, Paris was more liberal and perhaps less hypocritical in its pursuits of pleasure. Transgression lay across the boulevard, and the artists of the underworld, like Toulouse-Lautrec, were uninhibited in their representations of the diverse crowds of men gathering in the brothels and nightclubs. His portraits of the women, waiting for their customers and chatting desultorily, evoke people much like the 20â30,000 prostitutes gathered by then in Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, the first decade of the century saw the first cracks in the social barriers that had kept the Buenos Aires that saw itself as Paris apart from the marginal barrios and immigrant communities. But the full breakthrough would be made in the French capital itself.
There was a bizarre conjunction between a Paris that stood for the gamut of technological progress, as represented in the GreatUniversal Exhibition of 1900, and its fascination with the primitive and the exotic. The exhibition itself erected circuses and performance spaces replete with symbols and images of the other distant world. 3 Paris was as fascinated by the machinery and technology, whose most glorious expression was the Métro, as it was by the colonial world, with its dark-skinned people and its echoes of the primitive. The Arab world concealed all that was mysterious and dangerous: Africa was the home of an uninhibited sexuality, the Far East was impenetrably (inscrutably) âotherâ. And though Latin America remained more remote perhaps from France, the vision of the transatlantic world was equally distant from the civilized society of Paris, and equally exhilarating. The seduction of the primitive and the exotic was not exclusive to France, of course â but it was intensified there in social and sexual mores. 4
There were meeting points between those two worlds, crossroads where the primitive and the modern met and co-existed uneasily for the briefest of moments. In France the archetypal place of encounter was in Marseilles, where ships brought Africa, Asia and the Americas to the very threshold of the most advanced modern world. It was the
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