Explore Yesterday's Art Havens In Paris

Drunk on Hemingway, modern art and Woody Allen, an artist goes nosing around yesterday’s art havens in Paris

- Shaikh Ayaz

People sit in street side cafés as though facing a giant cinema screen. I pass coffee shops and brasseries, a recurring reminder of textbook Parisian quaintness in a city now fraught with the gilet jaunes protests. I am on my way to 25 Rue Benjamin Franklin—artist Zurab Tsereteli’s studio.

He’s already waiting for me, calm face belying both his creative anarchy and the political turmoil on the chestnut arbre-lined boulevards. The high-ceiling studio offers an unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower—so close you’d think you could lean out of the window and kiss it. The Georgia-born, Moscow-based artist, I notice, is wearing a red apron with the Eiffel emblazoned on it. It makes sense that the artist would allow himself this playful declaration of love for the city he’s chosen to paint in. And he paints here often. “These works are proof,” the 85-year-old says through a translator, pointing to a room full of his kaleidoscopic art. To walk around, you have to make space by moving the canvasses. Even if you manage to make your way, chances are you’d land on a forgotten dab of colour somewhere. When you finally walk out of Zurab’s studio, on to the streets with pigments sticking to your shoe, you are quite literally ‘painting the town red.’

The phrase launches him into a nostalgic trance, as he calls Paris a “moveable feast”—a symbol of freedom and comingof-age romance. Set in 1920s Paris, Ernest Hemingway’s book by the same name later became an inspiration for Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). A regular at Gertrude Stein’s salon on 27 Rue de Fleurus, Hemingway says, “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.”