Exhibitions

Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-4968 (Royal Academy, till 19 April)

Frantic tour

Martin Gayford

Are cities exhibitable? The evidence seems to be piling up that they are not. The year before last, Centuty City at the Tate focused on numerous towns around the world, without really saying much of interest about any of them. Now Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968 at the Royal Academy takes just one of those and considers it in massive detail. And, though not quite the disaster that Century City was, the result is not a terribly coherent, easily digestible or convincing exhibition either.

In a way. this exhibition is the successor to the generally excellent series that the RA put on in the Eighties and early Nineties, dedicated to the art of four countries — Britain, Italy, Germany and America — in the 20th century. At the time. France was not included, it was widely presumed, partly because the subject was overwhelmingly complicated in the first half of the period, and partly because it declined embarrassingly in the second.

Those two difficulties still apply, even if you restrict the range just to Paris, the centre of the French and for — over a long time — the international art worlds. Moreover, the whole enterprise becomes all the more problematic precisely because Paris was such an international base. Do you include artists such as Salvador Dalf, Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly who all worked for a period in Paris'? Or do they really belong to the stories of Spanish or American art?

The exhibition's solution is to bung them all in — as well as transients such as the Englishman Walter Sickert — but as a result it resembles a dish with too many diverse ingredients, superficially attractive, but not really satisfying. One is frequently unsure as to whether a certain exhibit truly belongs. Ellsworth Kelly, for example, whose work is quintessentially American in its Shaker simplicity. told me a few years ago that, in Paris, 'I saw the scene, and I realised that I am not European, I am not French ... I had to think of something new.'

So the show is trying to deal with two subjects simultaneously: French art in the 20th century. and the international artistic community known as the School of Paris, which in the first part of the last century included at least half the major artists in Europe — and beyond — at one time or another.

The result is a slightly frantic tour through a great deal of art history. Dadaism, for example, occupies a strange structure slightly resembling those much loved cylindrical Parisian newsstands, set up in the middle of the grandest room at the Academy. Some of this works well enough. The room entitled 'Cubism and the Modern World' — meaning Cubists and the Cubistish — looks handsome, gathered around Robert Dektunay's wonderfully fractured 'Tour Eiffel' of 191 l. The Surrealist room looks fine, too. And scattered here and there are many marvellous loans. It is worth the price of admission just to see Soutine's great 'Carcass of Beef' from the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

One of the aims of this kind of grand survey exhibition is to put the famous and familiar next to the obscure — and see what happens. Sometimes an exhibition can resurrect the unfashionable or unknown. But here the impression is more often of the great being jostled by the justly forgotten.

Thus, in a slightly rag-baggy room entitled 'The Nude in the Studio', a rather choice work by Modigliani is accompanied by a series of weak or downright horrible nudes by artists such as the Japanese Foujita and Marcel Gromaire. Soutine shares a small space with Jean Fautrier, an artist who gets a lot of exposure in this exhibition without really justifying it. The overall effect is to remind one of how much mediocrity there was sheltering under the grand umbrella of the School of Paris.

In the first part of the exhibition, too, much is compressed into too little space, so the big central room has to include an indigestible mix of Art Deco, Duchamp and the Dadaists in the newsstand, and abstraction. The result is a heterogenous jumble not unlike the Summer Exhibition though with very distinguished exhibitors — jazzage Picasso and Tamara de Lempicka at one end, Mondrian and a flotilla of followers down one side wall, MirO, Picasso again and other more surreal abstraction on the other. In the centre of this array of dissimilar blooms — the art equivalent of a herbaceous border — there are island beds, so to speak, of Brancusi and the Dadaists.

It all suggests that a lot was going on in Paris but doesn't really help to sort out what or why. Later on the impression is reversed — you start wondering whether there was enough being done in Paris to justify all this space. This is where the conception of the exhibition is controversial.

No one doubts that Paris was a hugely fertile international centre — capital of the arts — up until the second world war. Very few would claim that Paris was the true international art centre much after that. A museum director to whom I put the question wondered whether the Parisian reign continued as late as 1948, before plumping for 1945 as the cut-off point. Granted that there was a cultural interregnum during the war, that makes 1939 the true end of empire.

As a result the second half of the show has a air of anti-climax. Of course there were still important artists in Paris (and still are). But here the ones who stand out are exactly the ones you would expect: Nicolas de Staa Serge Poliakoff, Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Giacometti, Many of the rest look very weak. There may be a case to be made out for Parisian abstractionists, such as Jean Bazaine, or the Stalinist Realist wing of the French art world, but this show doesn't really make it. It all ends not with a bang, but a tinkle as Jean Tinguely's mechanical 'Ballet of the Poor' goes off every few minutes shaking various dangling objets trouyes

That's quite fun. Indeed, it would have

been an interesting idea to look more closely at French art in the Fifties and Sixties — which may deserve reassessment. But, again, this exhibition doesn't really have enough space to do the subject justice. And the classical rooms at the RA are highly unsympathetic to the messy, provisional look of much of the art of that era (just as they are extremely well suited to Old Master and grand figurative art). So this is an exhibition to go to in search of plums — of which there are plenty — but the pudding itself is too rich, and contains too many poor ingredients to be easily digested.