I went to visit, lit a candle to, Raymond Mason’s The fruits and vegetables leave the heart of Paris for the last time in the church of Saint Eustache last week. Mason’s Kodachrome haut relief sculpture commemorates the men and women of the great market of Les Halles, until 1969 or so, “the belly of Paris”. That gross organ is now at marché de Rungis, an enormous city-size green-grocery near Orly airport, to the southeast.
Unfortunately, Keith Haring’s tripartite engraving Life of Christ is on loan to Nantes.
I rode back and forth by Saint Eustache three times a week – my psychoanalyst had her office in a side street – from the day they knocked down the blocky old Forum des Halles and unblocked the view of the place until they bolted the new honey-comb steel Canopée roof on the Forum.
I rejoiced then and rejoice now that Saint Eustache really does look like a ship – and not just from certain angles and such-and-such light.
Quite a transitional object! And quite a baby.
Gigantic, elaborate and imposing as it is, and properly Gothic, too, Saint Eustache is a not a noted cathedral or an ancient basilica but a 16th-17th-century parish church built by and for local big wheels trying to make some sort of point.
“Eustache” may mean something like “gorgeous and fecund ear of wheat”, suggesting an early association with fresh and rosy Persephone – an agreeable contrast to that crabbed old witch of a psychoanalyst.
I was having a bit of a Jar Jar Binks moment.
I went to light my candle to The fruits and vegetables leave the heart of Paris for the last time in company: Karine, my partner, and our friends, Jürgen and Ute, visiting from Berlin.
News had come in that Russia had launched at least four live and 15 decoy drones against Poland. We were discussing that. Jürgen thinks Trump is abandoning Europe. Karine and I think the Panjundrum’s folded arms are prelude to a historic and ruinous Great American Betrayal & Turnabout Foul Play.
I had learned a day or so earlier, but not mentioned or acknowledged to anybody, that The Best American Poetry was shutting down directly and for good, faute de server and transfer costs.
“Beyond Words” posts such as this will have nowhere to go after 30 September. If you’re looking to read about dance performance and visual arts in the smaller and more important venues and residences in Paris and France, contact me and make a proposition.
I’ll miss David Lehman and Stacey Harwood – they were fine editors and publishers and will remain, I hope, friends.
Karine, Jürgen, Ute and I were taking advantage of the relative absence of crowds provoked by the endless trumpeting of the anti-Europe inspired “Bloquons Tout” strikes and riots to visit the Wolfgang Tillmans photographic exhibition, Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us, set up in Centre Pompidou’s now-gutted Information Center/Library. It was a bit of a shock to see the place pretty much sacked – it even has a slight echo; I frequently came here before the internet became a reliable (and more rapid!) research tool.
Wolfgang Tillmans is not so much a photographer as a heavenly painter. He uses lenses, chemicals and subtle mechanics as well as Picasso ever used a brush, paint, light, Dora Maar and all those other women. Maybe it comes down to his interest in perception – he seems to be constantly astonished that he can see. Looking at his work, I share his emotion.
Tillmans wills shape, feeling and sense into every conceivable two-dimensional approach and genre: big-scapes, pure abstraction, micro-scapes, still-lifes, narratives, portraits, neo-constructivism, realism – romantic and gritty – illusions, irrealisms.
What struck me most there in the dead library was the universalism of Tillman’s beauty in his things.
“Bloquons Tout” was a damp squib, Europe is waiting on the sequel to Russia’s attack, I’ve walked over an old bit of ground, lit a candle and that’s enough, The Best American Poetry is shutting up shop, but beauty is true and what’s true is beautiful and there are friends still and let's have a drink.
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I saw Wolfgang Tillmans’ Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us (an odd if not quite inaccurate interpretation of Rien ne nous y préparait − Tout nous y préparait, “Nothing prepared us for it – Everything prepared us for it”) on 10 September 2025. It closes 22 September and, with it, Centre Pompidou.