A Memory: Outside

A Memory: Inside

A Memory: Perspective

Every year the Grand Palais is given over to an artist whose task is to fill it. The yearly exhibition goes under the name of Monumenta and has been home to artists such as Anselm Keifer, Richard Serra and Christian Boltanski. This year was the turn of British/Indian Artist Anish Kapoor. I was a bit worried about going as the Frog really didn't get the point of Promenade by Richard Serra and didn't see how I could spend so much time fascinated by slabs of bronze. Well as you can see Leviathan was not a slab of bronze and I loved it so much that the next few week's memories will be made up of pictures of the Leviathan. Hope Anish doesn't mind.

Weegee

The Musée Maillol is a small private museum not far from the more famous Musée D’Orsay on the left bank. It houses the permanent collection of sculptures, oils and pastels of Aristide Maillol as well as the odd work by Picasso, Kandinsky and a host of others, but more interestingly what brings me back again and again are the temporary exhibitions.

Weegee, the current exhibition is a collection of more than two hundred of Arthur Fellig’s most famous photographs. As a press photographer in the early 1930’s Fellig virtually lived in his Ford Coupé for a few years listening to the police band on the radio and turning up at the scene of violent crimes often before the police. It was this almost prescient ability which earned him the name Weegee (based on Ouija).

Weegee’s photos range from shocking to humorous, reality with a certain twist. There were times where the blood spilling over the edge of the curb or the white teeth grinning out from a carbonised body made me cringe, whereas a photo of a dead gangster in front of a movie theatre showing ‘The Joy of Living’ made me laugh out loud. Weegee’s photos are more than a press photo; in many of those murder scene photographs it’s more interesting to look at the expressions of the onlookers than at the corpse that dominates the foreground. In one shot at the opera sits a priest with thick round spectacles and because of the quality of the light he seems to be surrounded by pale faced, pebble eyed vampires (or maybe that was my overactive imagination). His portraits of the stars also have an ability to speak volumes, he’s captured Veronica Lake looking like a goddess, Dali is slightly out of focus and wobbly and Sinatra looks like a good time boy.

Weegee had an ability to convey a story with each of his photos. There’s no sense of invasion, other then when he’s trying to capture the faces of arrested criminals, and even there he manages to create beautiful shots of hidden faces.

The exhibition runs until the middle of October, just in case you happen to be in Paris before then. I would totally recommend it.