See, when I go to the flea market, I find the occasional chipped cup in the middle of an ocean of junk. When my friend Jean-Michel Jaudel goes to, say, Puces de Vanves, he returns with treasures which he turns into somewhat surrealist collages in glassed-in boxes. They all share strangeness and wit in equal parts. Here are some.
Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower" is not only absolutely BRILLIANT - as I expected, having read Wright's articles in the New Yorker over the years. It is also unexpectedly hilarious at times, especially in the descriptions of Bin Laden's early Afghanistan forays with The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, also known (I swear I'm not making this up) as The Brigade Of The Ridiculous. The entire messianic vocation of the "Arab-Afghans", as the "combatants" of the Jihad against the Soviets came to be known (primarily among their friends and families) seems to be based on complete self delusion. Bin Laden's failed attempts to create a business empire in the Sudan in the 1990s are also straight out of John Cleese's vocational movies (the first half, the "this is the example you must NOT follow" part.) It doesn't make him less murderous, but it certainly provides key insights, next to the insane Salafist ideology.
Two portraits: the Woman In A Red Shawl -
and the painter himself.
For some reason, Vox is prompting me to make art posts. Anyway, this is another picture my father bought from his friend the painter Moïse Kisling in 1938. I sold it earlier this year, to help pay for the WonderFlat, my rather grown-up apartment just off the Champs-Elysées. It felt like a loss, but also like an achievement of sorts - this painting existed long before my birth, and will live on long after I die, so that I never really owned it; I somehow had it on a long lease. One of the members of the Ecole de Paris (a rather loose grouping of artists working mostly betweent the two world wars, it includes Vlaminck, Van Dongen, Pascin, Manessier, Modigliani, Soutine, Kikoine, Bazaine, Chagall, Derain, Foujita, and even Henri Rousseau as well as many lesser-known painters, and, bewilderingly, post-war artists like Poliakoff, Prassinos, Vieira Da Silva or Bernard Buffet), Kisling moved from Poland to Montmartre in 1910, which makes him an almost exact contemporary of a far greater artist (but, said my father, an infinitely more unpleasant personality), Picasso. He fought in the Légion Etrangère during WWI, and was awarded the French citizenship in 1915 after being wounded in the Battle of the Somme. After WWI he moved to Montparnasse where his neighbour and friend was Modigliani, and had, I am told, a fine time. He is well-known for his nudes, which I don't especially like (neither did my father, who never bought one) and his flower pictures, which are a favourite with Japanese collectors (don't ask; but my "Pois de Senteurs" was bought by a Tokyo gallery who immediately proceeded to take it to the Armory Art Fair in new York; I don't know whether they sold it.) The agent who sold it for me is a good friend who is himself an artist, Jean-Michel Jaudel, and I shall be posting some of his work later on.
This picture no longer belongs to us. My father, who bought it freshly painted from his friend the painter Moïse Kisling in 1937, sold it at auction around 1980 because he needed the money. I still remember it hanging above his bed, though, and if you look at the bottom left, you'll see damage it suffered while hidden during the war (my father was in London; the picture was somewhere in France.) I like this tear on the reproduction; it makes that vanished bedroom in our old Paris flat come alive, with its African decorative mats and sculptures, untidy piles of books, faded red Turkish carpet and photographs slid into the frame of the looking glass above the grey marble chimney. In hot weather like we have today, the white wooden shutters would be half-closed, the fifth-floor
Shezan holds down the Paris bureau of Echo Station (echostation here), but attended the ROTS premiere in the US, since she will never get used to calling her favourite characters "Dark Vador" and "Yan Solo". In her spare time she is writing a book for a French publisher on the post-9/11 Bush Administration in which she promises to include the words "Star Wars" somewhere.
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