The new Louis Vuitton museum, built at a cost of €100 million in the children’s park, the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne in western Paris, is close to completion. The project has been going on for years but an opening date has now been set, October 26th.It will house the art collections of the LVMH Moet Hennessy luxury goods group, as well as showing special commissions; it will also have a performance space. It all sounds very impressive, while the building is a very striking modern design by Canadian/American architect Frank Gehry, not unlike his creation of the fantastic looking Guggenheim museum at Bilbao in northern Spain.
Funnily enough, the Louis Vuitton brand of luggage has had a museum to itself in the town of Asnieres-sur-Seine, just west of Paris, for something like 150 years, in the great house that Louis Vuitton built for himself in 1860. This museum has vast collections of luggage going back over the years, but it’s not generally open to the public. This museum is open to clients of the company, as well as members of the media, and it also gets about 300 VIP visitors a year, but the general public doesn’t get a look-in. However, this new museum opening in October promises to be much more available. Incidentally, Asnieres is also famous for its pets cemetery.
Talking of art, there was a great happening at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris the other day. It’s currently showing Courbet’s 1866 painting, L’Origine du Monde, which features a nude model. The most striking point of the painting is the model’s luxuriant bush of dark black pubic hair. It created a sensation at the time the painting was unveiled and a couple of years ago, when Paris Match put the painting on its front cover, it caused an equal frisson. But the other day, a Luxembourg visual artist called Deborah de Robertis put on an impromptu show in front of the Courbet painting. Visitors got a great thrill out of seeing a real nude in front of a painted one, but she got bundled away by the attendants. Fortunately, the gendarmes were of a cultural frame of mind and decided not to take any further action.
Also on the subject of art, I see that Monet’s painting of water lilies, entitled Nympheas, created in 1906, has just been sold for a staggering €39.7million, the second best price ever realised for a Monet.
I was also intrigued by the anniversary this week of Picasso’s first show in Paris, in June,1901. He was 19 at the time, and while relatively well-known in Barcelona, he wasn’t known further afield. A gallery owner called Ambrose Villard staged the Picasso show in his gallery on the rue Lafitte in the 9th., a street that’s a mecca for art galleries. For that first Paris show, Picasso had 75 works on display, but in the course of over 80 years, he produced more than 50,000 masterpieces. He died in 1973 aged 91 and at Antibes and Vallauris in Provence, you can see a lot more of his heritage. And any day now, the Picasso museum in the 3rd arrondissement in Paris is due to reopen after years of renovation-it should be truly enchanting.
I found more positive news too from the Rhone-Alpes department this week. There’s a well-known railway line that runs from Bellegarde toDivonne, right on the border with Switzerland, 20km from Geneva. The line goes through very scenic landscapes, but it has been closed to passenger traffic since 1980. However,the railway station at Divonne is still there and there is much talk about the line reopening, which would be great news for tourists.
But another dispute is gathering pace-France wouldn’t be France is there wasn’t always talk of the trade unions mobilising. And when they talk about mobilising, it’s never just idle chatter. Since March,when the government announced it was going to cut the benefits and social security arrangements for people working part-time in the arts, the intermittents as they are known, the protest movement has been gathering pace. Earlier this month, when culture minister Aurélie Filipetti arrived to inaugurate a series of exhibitions in Picardy, she was confronted by 30 naked performers and street artists. Also earlier this month, a show in Lyon by Vanessa Paradis had to be cancelled as performers and technicians joined in the strike. The Avignon festival, which is due to start at the beginning of July, is still very much under threat.
The French know how to stage protests and these are normally very effective. In Brittany over the last few months, there have been substantial and widespread protests against the so-called eco tax on lorries. Now, that tax is being scrapped in favour of much more lenient tolls on trucks. It does after all pay to protest!
A different kind of protest was made in an empty luxury apartment in a town near Nancy in north-eastern France. Squatters broke in to the fifth floor apartment and filled a 6,000 litre portable pool with water. It only came to light when tenants living on the floor below noticed a leak in the ceiling, but when the authorities arrived the next day to drain the pool,it had vanished!
I see, however, that one recent advance in France has proved very shortlived. Helena Costa was appointed coach to the Clermont Foot club and she became the first female coach for a professional mens’ football club in the top two tiers of any European league. That was in May and now she has just resigned, for unspecified reasons.
But France is nothing if not ingenious, as demonstrated by two towns in the Dordogne region. Residents of Saint-Astier and Neuvic are being given the opportunity to own a couple of hens each; it seems that chickens eat up to 150kg of food waste a year, besides laying about 200 eggs annually. The scheme has already been set up in other nearby regions, including the Gironde and the Charente and if the new idea in these two Dordogne towns works, it will be extended right across the Dordogne region. Sounds a great idea, to get rid of food waste and create lots of eggs, all at the same time!
That also reminds me of a story about blackbirds. Last Saturday night, somewhere in north-western France, a man in his 70s heard rustling in his cherry tree and thought that blackbirds were pinching his cherries. He fired at them, but instead hit his 46 year old son, who had climbed the tree to pick some fruit for himself. He was lucky; he was hit in the cheek, an arm and a hand but wasn’t seriously injured.
In Germany the other day, an unusual happening attracted much amusement and hilarity. The university in the city of Tubingen has had a giant sculpture of a vagina on its campus for over a decade now, but the other day, a student who was fooling around managed to get trapped inside the sculpture. It took 22 firemen to free him! The young student won’t live that one down in a hurry!
On the subject of much more serious crime, there’s been a breakthrough in the case of Helene Pastor, the wealthy Monaco-based property heiress. Last month, while she was on a family visit to a hospital in Nice, she and her chauffeur were both gunned down. Both subsequently died. Now, her daughter and son-in-law, who is the Polish consul in Monaco, have been arrested, along with about 20 other people, including the two people suspected of carrying out the killings. Originally, there was much speculation about the involvement of the Italian mafia, but now, it looks much more like a family crime.
I also see that a campaign is under way to encourage people in France to be more friendly towards visitors. The trade minister Fleur Pellerin has said that too often, service is mistaken for servility. She said that the country needs to regain a sense of hospitality. Last year, a TripAdvisor survey found that Paris had the least friendly locals, the rudest taxi drivers and the most aggressive waiters. Not just a change in attitude is being encouraged, but changes in the antiquated Sunday trading laws are also needed. But this sense that French people delight in being rude to foreigners has never cut much ice with me. In my time, I’ve travelled the length and breadth of France and have spent much time in Paris and I can’t say that I’ve ever encountered serious problems like these. Perhaps sometimes a rather standoffish attitude, but nothing more serious. Mind you it helps to speak reasonably fluent French and to show empathy; the way some Americans in particular carry on would drive any self-respecting French man or woman to rudeness! The French should see the way some loyalists in Northern Ireland carry on!
Recently, the ace golfer Rory McElroy decided he was going to play for Ireland rather than Britain in the 2016 Olympics in Rio. Within minutes, he was on the receiving end of an absolute torrent of absolute and sickening online abuse from the twitterings of some so-called loyalists. It was all rather pathetic, to say the least, that they couldn’t disagree in a civilised fashion.
Talking about aggression, this week is the anniversary of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and we all know the outcome of that! This week was also the anniversary of the retirement of Eamon de Valera as the president of Ireland in 1973; Ireland’s elder statesman had had a remarkable political career that had begun in 1916.
But this coming Saturday, June 28th is the 100th anniversary of a notorious assassination, that of the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown, and his wife Sophie, inSarajevo, on June 28th.,1914.Just before this happened, there had been a failed assassination attempt on the entourage and it was decided that a diversion of the motorcade would be in order. But no-one told the Czech man who was driving the Archduke’s car and he drove the very long vehicle into a narrow street before realising that he would have to turn. While he was turning the car, the assassin was given the perfect opportunity to carry out the murders of the Archduke and his wife. On that chance happening, the future of the world turned and a little over a month later, the major powers of Europe were at war.
In the present day, events in Iraq are moving at a fast pace. What isn’t being given the attention it deserves is the effect this is having on the price of oil. At present, the price of a barrel of oil is hovering around the $120 mark but many analysts reckon the price of a barrel of oil could soar to around $150.If and when that happens, it’s going to mean a big shock for world economies and any chance of a recovery will fly out the window. Back in 2003,the Americans led an allied invasion of Iraq, at colossal cost, and 11 years later, it all seems to have been a total waste of time, money and many lives.
I read the other day, on the BBC website, about another military campaign that was equally unnecessary. In 1944,after D Day, the allies bombed towns and cities in northern France. Caen was reduced to rubble, as was Le Havre. In the latter port city, 5,000 civilians were killed and it was all totally unnecessary, as a few days later, Allied troops captured the city and could have done so without the prior bombing campaign. Altogether during the second world war, the allies killed 57,000 French civilians, almost the same number as were killed by Luftwaffe bombs in Britain.
On that note, to end, perhaps the English publisher, Felix Dennis had the right idea. He died the other day aged 67 from throat cancer. In his time, he had been a very successful magazine publisher-a current success is The Week compendium of the week’s news, which sells about 200,000 copies a week. That also reminds me of a rare good news story from the printed media in the UK. The Western Morning News, a well established daily paper in Plymouth, has just launched a Sunday edition. It’s great to see the printed media fighting back-it doesn’t have to be all digital.
But as for Felix Dennis, he once admitted that in his lifetime, he had spent close to $100 million on drugs, drinks and whores. Nothing like going out with a bang!