So an exhibition like mine, and all this, is like trying to explain after the Second World War what is the new image of Paris. My name is Serge Guilbaut and I’m retired now from the University of British Columbia in Canada. I was professor and head of the Department of Artistry and also of Curatorships. I’ve been working on the relationship between Europe and North America. I wrote several books and had some exhibitions. I was an artist in the 1960s, so I have my own retro perspective, as I call it. When I retired I was ready to organize this exhibition.
Well, the school of Paris is a very old concept. In the 20s you had a lot of people coming from different countries to Paris and so it became like a center of modern life, in a sense, right? Because in the late 19th century Paris was very modern, la Ville Lumière, and so lots of artists wanted to be there. What was going on there is that the French establishment wanted to have control of that foreign wave, let’s say, the new type of art. They wanted to control in some degree what was going on, and that’s why what we call the School of Paris is a group of artists that come from different places. But the establishment didn’t want to have in Paris all kind of languages and stuff. What was interesting is that they tried to explain that France is good for you if you are a foreigner because they will not control you completely, but they will try to make you follow some rules. Parisians say that Paris is a city of philosophers and Cartesianism. Cartesianism was important for them because it was trying to cut down Expressionism, for example. So if you were a German artist you would arrive and they’d say: “Oh, you’re too expressionist.” If you were a Spanish artist, they’d say: “Oh, you’re too exuberant.” So the French will calm you down. And they will produce a kind of universe or statement, a universe or style. So that’s why that concept of the School of Paris was created. I think it worked for a while, that the entire Western world would follow those rules. They would say: if you really want to be a good artist, you would go to Paris, right? And they will teach you how to become a universal one. But after the Second World War, what happened was that the world had changed dramatically and the French establishment realized that the only thing they had to show the world that they were still alive was their culture. And the Americans realized as well that in this new world the new only thing they missed was culture because they had all the powers, political, army, and so on, but they really needed to have this cultural power, they had to control this in order to show they were really the best in the world. So you can see after the war this battle between the two cities, I would say Paris and New York, was developing. And for a long time, I would say until the 50s, a lot of people working in Paris thought they were still on top of it. They had to wake up in 1964, when Russia won in the Biennale, that it was gone, it was over. But the shift really happened in 1958, when the art market in New York changed a bit and it was impossible for a French artist to sell their works in galleries in New York. In 58 it was ok, somebody like Soulages was very successful in his exhibition in the Kootz Gallery. But in 58 there is a crash in a sense of the French market and the collectors wouldn’t buy anymore French, and that was really the end. So it’s a very complex story the collection between the French and the New Yorkers. It seems very complicated. And viceversa. You had the feeling that it is a mess in Paris in the art scene and the political scene, and the literary scene, but that’s what is exciting. That’s why I think the art scene, even if we don’t talk about it anymore, the artists forgot about what was going on in Paris at that time. But it seems to me it was even more interesting than in New York because in New York by 1948, you cannot really be a realist or whatever because the control of the Museum of Modern Art or Clement Greenberg who said… They were looking for an image of a strong America, so some of them, like Pollock, make big paintings with violence, strong, and so on. Virile. So those are the qualities that are going to show the power of America around the world. And in Paris they cannot find one voice to try to rearticulate this. But also what I’m trying to explain with this is that as the critic in 1945 said, who said at the beginning of the show, I had this quote, he says that: “Without foreigners, the School of Paris does not exist. We need foreigners in order to.” Because the idea is always universal. If you can convince the world that you produce a universal language, you are the king of the world. They could not manage to do that in France, but what’s interesting to me is that the debates were more interesting that they were in New York because in New York you had to shut up or leave. That’s why Golub, for example, leaves the country in 51 because they cannot stand the type of work he does, and so he leaves. So that’s what I wanted to create in the show.
In those days, if you came from America it meant that you have been given GI Bill money to continue your studies because you have been fighting during the war. So some of them didn’t want to go back to America. John Koenig, for example, he’s in the army and he doesn’t want to go back to Seattle, where he used to live, because he realized that he wanted to be an artist in the States, but it couldn’t be possible because he was homosexual. It was really involved in all the creations of new art and modern art and abstraction, and so on, inviting all kinds of artists. Or the African American artists, who could not survive during the McCarthy era in New York. The painters came to Paris because they thought and hoped that was going to help them to become somebody, actually, to be themselves. And that is also kind of difficult because what they didn’t realize was that in France, even in the milieu of Bohemia and the new Avant Garde that’s created in the Quartier Latin, for example, they realized that the French are really interested in black culture, but if you are an Afro-American you better be a jazzman, rather than a painter because they don’t believe that you could do painting because that’s not your tradition. So your tradition is, yeah, New Orleans, crude music, dancing… That’s what you are. So what it’s interesting is also to notice that if you were an Afro-American from America, you are welcome and you can be a good friend. If you come from Africa or from French colonies, that’s more difficult. But even sometimes an Algerian artist like Khadda, for example, that we have in the show, because he’s Algerian, but the French say Algeria is a French department, so he’s French. So he goes to Paris and he has to struggle a bit, but he was a pretty good artist and also a good communicator in a sense. And so he produces work very large who are dealing with and talking to the new school of Paris that is being involved. What they have to do is that you kind of use the school of Paris tradition, but you add your own culture into it. Like in this case he uses shapes that reminds you of North Africa right instantly and things like that. I mean, he’s accepted, and his work, and so on and so forth. And then when the war ends in Algeria, then he goes back to Algeria. But Africans was present in Paris because they create an association or group of African intellectuals in Paris and that was quite successful and so we show the books, the catalogues, and so on. So that was pretty active and also pretty politically involved. So we try to show all those differences and all those tensions. Actually we call some of the rooms “creative tensions” to show the different types of directions that artists were going. For an artist, but at the same time France is divided also in different abstractions. But we didn’t want to show, for example, I could show Soulages or Mathieu to show the different expressions among French artists, but that would reduce totally the place, the possibility to show varied and diversified kind of artists. And in particular, for example, we’re going back to those Americans who were kind of hegemonic. Now we see them as hegemonic, but in those days, after the war, culturally they were not. A lot of people don’t want to go to New York, they still want to go to Paris, right? Maybe something like that in 54, after that it’s a different story. What the show presents is also the different crises that happen in the world, not only the art world. So immigration is key, is an important issue. And I know today it’s an important issue as well. That was interesting to show, that creativity from exile artists or exile persons is crucial for the development of one place, like Paris. It was very important.
The show in a sense is about trying to explain that there is a lot at stake in the art production in those days. And so if we know that there is a lot at stake, we have to able to make differences among artists, among art forms, because some of them talk about themselves only, about the terrible situation in which they live, like Wols, for example, or Bram van Velde, who realize that they are at the end of their lives already and they are young. Some others take political positions. They wanted to fight the others and so on. In abstraction is not easy to say that there’s nothing there or that it’s not political, that’s totally wrong. Everything is political. You talk, you sneeze and there’s connection with the politics, they way of living, with your believes. The art historians don’t do that enough. They try to present how artistry has changed in the last 25 years or something. Some are aware of the importance of manipulation of ideology and all that, but in some countries they don’t, what’s important it’s creation and the self and beauty and the taste and so on. So all this stuff has to be put into perspective, and the perspective has to be put into perspective and again to see, to learn and to understand what issues were important for artists and how they decided to fight them or to address them at least, or to go along with them. So that’s why shows are important. If we can do that, it’s a kind of reinforcement of democracy, in my mind, because the more aware of history and the importance of the past we are, the dumbest we become and dumbest is the opposition and the action we do. So profs and museums have to get together to debate those things for the public that should be more engaged and more involved in the description and understanding of the art past in order to make a better future.
