India in Paris
Published January 24, 2012From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.
Gabriela Plump
Rue du Faubourg Saint Denis in Paris.
There are times when Paris is touched by other cultures. The touch may be temporary — like a spritz of perfume. Or it can open up a well-established world hiding in plain sight.
This is Paris’s India moment.
In December, Karl Lagerfeld took inspiration from India for his Paris-Bombay collection for Chanel, which included Nehru jackets, sweaters that draped like saris and opulent beading and embroidery. “Paris-Delhi-Bombay,” which examined India through the prism of 50 Indian and French artists, was the Centre Pompidou’s most ambitious exhibition of the past year. And on Jan. 27, the Petit Palais museum will display nearly 100 paintings and designs by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Having begun to paint late in life, he created a large body of works on paper — bold, bright visions of fantasy and mystery.
In fact, Paris has long contained pockets of Indian culture. The Musée Guimet , for example, houses a small but serious collection of Indian art, including sculptures of wood, clay, basalt, bronze, sandstone and schist dating from as early as the third millennium B.C.
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The Koan of Joan
Published January 11, 2012From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.
Solve Sundsbo/Art + Commerce
A 2007 depiction of Joan of Arc by Solve Sundsbo for Numéro magazine.
Today is the 600th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, the cross-dressing, teenage virgin-warrior-martyr-saint. So what better way for President Nicolas Sarkozy — three months away from an election and mired in Europe’s economic crisis — to feel good about France than to make a pilgrimage to her birthplace?
Not that there’s much to see or do in Domrémy-la-Pucelle, an economically depressed village of fewer than 200 people. Joan’s “house” — a tiny, odd-looking edifice with yellow-brown stains, an unkempt garden and a statue of Joan that’s missing a left hand and a right arm — was built sometime after her death. There’s a private museum a few hundred yards away (closed today), but no gift shop to buy a Joan of Arc T-shirt or sword.
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