Paris from fresh perspectives: EXILES AND EXPATS

BY CHOOSING PARIS FOR ITS LIBERTY, FOREIGN REBELS, INTELLECTUALS AND ARTISTS MADE THE CITY PART OF THEIR COUNTRIES' STORY

Examples:

With the defeat of the Polish rebellion against Russia (in 1830), 4000 refugees arrived and "Paris became the cultural capital of Poland."

-- Pacale Fautrier, Chopin, 2010

Chopin in Prince Radziwell's salon by Henryk Siemiradski, 1887 / zoom

The composer Frédéric Chopin knew and helped the exiles, though he himself came for personal reasons. The host in the center of the painting welcomed him as a Pole as well as for his music.

A generation later, the political writer Alexander Herzen published a weekly that gave the only uncensored Russian news — from Paris

Leaflet drawing / Internet, no more information

The paper, known as Kolokol ("The Bell"), was published in French and Russian from 1855 to 1867 (after 1865 from Geneva). It influenced the emancipation of serfs in Russia (in 1861).

Fyodor Dostoevsky learned from it that the man who had condemned him to death in his youth for criticizing the Czar owed his post as judge for betraying earlier revolutionaries (Dostoïevsky by Leonid Grossman, Fr.ed. 2023)

The failed Russian revolution of 1905 brought Lenin, Trotsky and many more: Paris was less expensive than London and the police less attentive than in Geneva.

Lenin in Paris by Sergui Yutkevich, Soviet filmmaker, 1981

Lenin lived on the city's southern border from 1908 until 1912. There he published Proletari, a Bolshevik newspaper that was smuggled into Russia, while confronting both factions and landlords distrustful of the scruffy foreigners who tracked mud up the stairs.

-- Lenin in Paris by Jean Freville, 1968 (in French)

Iran’s religious and political leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s last place of exile before becoming his country’s supreme leader was a Paris suburb (Neuphle-le-Château, in 1978-79).

Zoom

He addresses the media in front of the home that is still a pilgrimage site.

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Artists came to experiment and live as they like. Most settled on the relatively inexpensive fringes: Montmartre from the 1870's and when rents rose toward 1900, Montparnasse.*

* Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris tenderly recalls American expats in 1920's Montparnasse.

Adapted from an Internet map

Most stuck together...

To Live and Paint in Montparnasse by F. Vicenti, "Christie's newsletter," February 2019 / zoom

From left to right, Brancusi, Chagall, Léger, Kandinksy, Man Ray, Braque, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Modigliani, Picasso, Gauguin. Only Léger and Chagall were French.

...detached from a town that ignored them too: Take the works set in Paris by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Fitzgerald's fiction is set in the wealthy neighborhood familiar to Americans, between the Arc of Triumph and the Hotel Ritz (he himself lived on rue de Tilsitt, steps from the Arc). Exception: Babylon revisited (of 1930) in which the explicitly unfamiliar left bank is the setting for his protagonist's disorientation.

Fitzgerald did not like the French, says Hemingway, and had contacts only with subordinates.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald in "A Moveable Feast"

Hemingway's last narrative, A Moveable Feast (of 1964) is a nostalgic celebration of the Paris of his youth. French people are picturesque or caricatural figures who appear in the background.

Like a pretty girl in a café, a goat milk vendor with his herd, a waiter with a huge moustache, a hotel-keeper and a book-seller who literally judge books by their covers. The only non-anglophone is the Bulgarian painter Jules Pascin, recalled by a saucy conversation with his models.

-- People of the Seine

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Jazz, however, pierced frontiers

The night clubs of Montparnasse and Pigalle (south of Montmartre) made Paris Europe's capital of jazz. It still is.

Le Pigalle, artist unknown, 1920's, Musée Carnavalet

Notice the lesbians, a reference to Parisian freedom.

A 1930's poster of "Rico's * Creole Band" adorns a studio wall of the French painter André Girard

* Havana's Filiberto Rico (1910? - 1976) introduced the rumba to Paris in the 1920's.

Robert and Gabrielle Casadesus with their son Jean (back turned at the piano). Photo taken for the Bell Telephone Hour in 1967 and kindly sent by the couple's grandson.

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Today the great majority of Parisian artists are of foreign origin.They come for the city's beauty and the way of life associated with it, and because...

Paris is less expensive than New York or London.

Centralization and state aid to culture bring an exceptional concentration of museums and performances, at modest prices.

The prestige of a Parisian address is useful at home and where they exhibit or go on tour.

Living in the heart of western Europe helps artists and performers radiate out through exhibits and tours, and it facilitates international contacts.

There are many other artists in all domains.

Among those I knew or still know... *

* From organizing exhibits and performances, from 1985 to 2005

China's T'ang Haywen, in Paris from 1948 until his death in 1991. His paintings were exhibited at the Musée Guimet (the Asian exhibition site) in 2024:

Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet (March 6 - June 17, 2024)

He lived in a maid's room of a sixth-floor walk-up, and made ends meet by teaching Chinese calligraphy. He did not seek success and his current celebrity would have seemed to him inconceivable.

Pamela Spurdon

The energy of his works comes from pairing the tangible and the void.

Chicago's Ursuline Kairson, who arrived in Paris with the Broadway production Bubbling Brown Sugar, became lead singer at the Paradis Latin cabaret... etc: