The last couple of times we stayed in the Marais, we tried to visit the Carnavalet Museum but it’s never been open. Today that changed. The museum is about Paris. Currently, there is a temporary exhibition on about the struggle for women’s rights called Parisiennes citoyennes which we visited. We still haven’t actually seen the museum because the exhibition saw us at information overload.
The exhibition was excellent. From 1789, Paris was the epicentre of the women’s movement in France. Lots of protests, action and death surrounded the fight for equality. One piece of male controlled stupidity followed another until women stood up and said they’d had enough. The exhibition highlights the heroines of the continuing fight.
For example…
Above is a photograph featuring Nelly Roussel, rehearsing with the cast of By Revolt in 1903. She’s on the right, looking at the camera. Roussel was a Malthusian, believing that the population size should be managed by birth control and that bearing children shouldn’t be something all women had to go through if they didn’t want to. She wanted choice.
She was politically active and spoke to great crowds of people. Clearly she frightened the men in power because she wasn’t recognised for 75 years after her death. And, to make things even worse, the patriarchy insisted that it was a woman’s national duty to have as many children as possible.
A first wave feminist, Roussel believed that sex should be enjoyable for women and not just for reproduction. Ultimately, she wanted to give women control over their own bodies and sexuality. How ironic when viewed against the Roe v Wade reversal. It seems that men are still afraid of women.
Possibly my favourite bit of the exhibition was my re-discovery of Niki de Saint Phalle. There was a short film with her clearly getting annoyed with an interviewer when he asked her about her work. He seemed to think all artists were influenced by others. Niki set him straight, saying she was her own artist, having taught herself, and created from her heart and her head. She also asked whether a male artist would shoot paintings as she had.
On 12 February 1961, Niki performed the first of her Shooting Paintings in Montparnasse. She shot a support which released paint and objects, creating an artwork by random means. Well, apart from the bullet. One of the ‘victims’ of these works was her arsehole of a father who thought it reasonable to rape her consistently from the age of 11.
Coincidentally, she worked alongside Jean Tinguely to create the piece we saw outside the Moderna Museet on Skeppsholmen in Stockholm.
Mind you, the funniest thing I saw was a short, black and white, silent film featuring an ironic look at a world where the traditional roles of men and women were reversed. I particularly enjoyed the women all sitting around in a bar, drinking when their husbands came in, arms full of children, asking them when they’d be home and being unceremoniously ushered out.
Of course, we’ll now have to return to the Marais, so we can actually see the museums permanent collection. And I’ll have to revisit the Museet Moderna to see if I can spot any other Niki de Saint Phalle works.
We were so exhausted by the exhibition that we retired to a small restaurant called Petit Place where proper French fare was consumed. We’d had café crème and croissant for breakfast so a French lunch made absolute sense.
Back at the apartment we recovered (Mirinda cleared out her work computer, mostly) while waiting for the time to tick around for us to go to our other usual Paris visit, the Duc de Lombard.
And, would you believe it, although we haven’t been since our last Paris visit, the guy that runs the place recognised us. We had been going each year (2018, 2019 and 2020) but were stopped by the pandemic. I have no idea how he recognised me given I now have a beard and very grey hair. I guess he must have recognised Mirinda then connected the dots.
Of course, the band we saw was superb. It was Sélène Saint-Aimé who leads with an amazing voice and great bass fingers. She was joined by Irving Acao on sax, Hermon Mehari on trumpet, Arnaud Dolmen on drums and the extraordinary Boris Reine-Adelaide who proves you can play a bongo with both hands and feet.
It was a very entertaining way to spend an evening. Mind you, it’s the first time I remember Mirinda saying she wouldn’t buy a CD. I really enjoyed it but, to be completely honest, they are really a style that is best appreciated live.
