Heureuse après-épiphanie de Paris

We were in the city of day- and night-light for two days longer than planned; seek not to know further, other than that we're back home now. Let's just say that it was total joy to walk for miles, discover more, eat well, and see two stunning exhibitions (Anselm Kiefer's Pour Paul Celan at the Grand Palais Ephémère, a new structure at the foot of the Champs de Mars, and a big Georg Baselitz retrospective at the Pompidou Centre, a serendipitous stumbling-upon - since I hadn't seen it advertised - to balance the other monumental, post-war German genius).

There were other surprises. I've always wanted to stay in a hotel on the Île Saint-Louis, and we did, very happily, at the lovely Hotel du Jeu de Paume, strolling out along the back and side of the building-site that is currently Notre-Dame, very well informed by the board-exhibition as to what's going on. We had taken a dear friend who's confined on a virtual WhatsApp walk around the Duomo in Florence, and decided to do the same here. So we all gasped when we rounded to the west front and found it lit up in blue

as are all the major landmarks of Paris right now to celebrate France's taking up the Presidency of the EU. I'd wanted to see the stars on the Eiffel Tower, but had to be content with blue in the distance with the dome of Les Invalides in front

and the following night, after a day of brilliance and blue skies, a crescent moon hovered above the Panthéon

where we'd hoped to see the homage to its latest incumbent, Josephine Baker, but the building was closed for three days so we simply enjoyed another exhibition around the periphery, offering so many images like La Baker in her prime with pet leopard

and her role as the only woman to speak at the March on Washington (she's with Lena Horne on the right). What a life she led, and what a great human being.

For this it wasn't a wasted visit. I also got to show J my favourite church in Paris, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont opposite the Panthéon, with its stunning choir screen.

Hadn't previously appreciated its  abundance of 15th and 16th century stained glass, either.

More serendipity came in the Montparnasse cemetrery where, having duly admired the outlandish monuments of Niki de Saint Phalle to two dear friends and the Baudelaire cenotaph,

I was just remarking on how prosaic the place mostly seemed when we suddenly discovered, not knowing it was there, the grave of Jacques Demy and adored Agnès Varda - the headstone covered with lipstick kisses,

a cat homage

and several potatoes left among the offerings - mine was a 3D 'lucky' card of Buddha which I placed between the stones and the middle potato, all I could think of but it somehow felt right -

just as there are metro tickets on the joint grave of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. 

Had to look this one up, and found that Saint Agnès was known as 'Dame Patate' and dressed up as one for her 2003 Venice Biennale installation Patatutopia, which used 700 pounds of tubers. This is a still from a documentary fim of hers I must see, The Gleaners and I. No wonder she's the film director who inspires the most love and affection of all.

After our Montparnasse wander, we finally visited the Catacombs, which was not quite what I'd expected but not uninteresting. Kiefer and Baselitz must wait on another blog instalment, but I must mention two last wonders which framed our visit - on the metro from the Gare de Lyon, a fellow singing melancholy French songs perfectly in pitch and sweet tone, not for money, and to balance it on the metro to the Gare du Nord yesterday afternoon, a chap with a murine companion, daintily ribboned. 

Paris can still surprise; this time it was not an anticlimax after Italy.

Floating through the Beyeler

The Fondation Beyeler in Riehn, just outside beautiful Basel and right on the German/Swiss border, is one of the wonders of the art world - indeed, as a building, the wonder among artspaces in my experience. I've already written over on The Arts Desk about how I felt I was floating, first through the phenomenal Odilon Redon exhibition - hurry, hurry, it ends in late May - and then through the wondrous rooms full of choice 20th century masterpieces from the stupendous collection of Basel art dealers Ernst Beyeler and his wife Hildy. Here's Ernst with Picasso at Mougins in 1969, courtest of the excellent Fondation Beyeler website.

Beyeler was inspired to commission Renzo Piano on the strength of his designs for the Pompidou Centre (along with Richard Rogers) and for the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, which in contrast to the Beauborg's 'originality and brashness' Beyeler admired for its 'quiet human scale'. A 'greenhouse' barrel-vaulted roof was rejected in 1992 in favour of what Roman Hollenstein calls 'an airy steel and glass construction with five parallel north-south "aisles" under an expansive, translucent roof with angled glass panels'. I've taken the liberty of borrowing a photo by Niggi Bräuning, Basel, from the website since we didn't have time to walk around perimeter of the lovely grounds.

What Beyeler writes of the Menil Museum is perfectly applicable here: each is 'a building which is completely in the service of art, with a single-minded focus on optimal use of light and a natural modesty that delegates artistic pretence in architecture to the background.' Paradoxically, that only makes one respect, even love, Piano's achievement all the more. He's taken influences from fellow Italian Carlo Scarpa, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, and made the end result both his humane own and everyone else's. Hollenstein even thinks Hadrian's villa at Tivoli is evoked by the porphyry columns hovering above the water near the entrance.

and I suppose there's a further mirroring in the conservatory that runs the length of one side. In our communal home for our old age we hope to share with friends who'll have us, if we live that long, this would be an ideal component (I can dream, can't I?).

This is a dynamic space, not least because every time there's a new exhibition one half of the single-storey building remains open. Which means, essentially, a rehang/repositioning for what's on display of the permanent collection (I was delighted, by the way, to see two of the Beyeler's Matisse cut-outs in the superb Tate Modern exhibition a few days later; but oh, the come-down in terms of the big rooms for the big pictures).

Thus one might have expected one of Monet's vaster waterlily paintings to be where older photographs show it, reflected by the pond beyond. Instead, here there are luminous pastels by Odilon Redon in the exhibition zone. Incidentally, I only took my courage into my hands right at the end to ask if I could take room shots without flash, not having found any postcards of the artworks en situ. The answer was a friendly 'yes, and with flash, if you like' - but I preferred not to. Everyone seemed to respect the space, and I hope I did too.

We first had our vision of Redon's genius in the Musée d'Orsay, and J has done some fine work, if I may say so, in pastels both copying Redon's originals and taking inspiration from them (I love one I dub 'Brünnhilde's Rock' which sits on the piano). Several of those masterpieces from Paris are here, including the heady Chariot of the Sun reproduced over on TAD. My other obvious favourite is the Buddha

later complimented by his deep blue death.

The phases of Redon's creativity aren't hard to chart. He was a late beginner,  leaving the architectural profession his father wished for him and first properly experimenting with charcoal technique in 1875, when he was 35. So the first two rooms, the only darkened ones in the Fondation, were devoted to the angels and monsters of the 'Noirs' and the lithographs. Most haunting is the all-seeing eye - there's one in a lithograph from the series Dans le rêve which could be an inspiration for a production of The Magic Flute. This Cube is rather more sinister.

and later in 1914 Redon returned to the theme in oils for Le Cyclope.

The first move from darkness to a special kind of light comes in the third room, with a work acquired by the pianist Ricardo Viñes - Matisse was another enthusiastic patron - part in charcoal, part pastel, described by Redon as 'columns all round an indeterminate stained glass window. To the right, below, an angel holding a sort of skull.'

As we move on, we find that it wasn't that Redon didn't depict real human beings in detail very often because, like Turner, he was incapable; there are three marvellous female portraits framed by flowers, followed by floral fantasias. Religion and mythology are very often the thing, though, from Mesopotamian and Greek themes to Parsifal and a Virgin linked to natural history. The exhibition is bracketed by four giant fragmentary landscape frescos painted for the Burgundian chateau of Baron de Domecy and a gentle room of mythic boats taking wing.

Then you're out in to the Beyeler Collection proper, elevated by the space around the Giacomettis,

a Mondrian with its yellow square mirrored in the rape field outside the window

and a Rothko 'chapel' at the very heart of things which makes you appreciate how crucial it is that Rothko's paintings are seen together (though I take the liberty of isolating this one).

The best is possibly the last one comes to, a vast room facing the other end of the garden from the entrance, mixing Beyeler's objects from Oceania and Africa

with two colossal canvases by Anselm Kiefer. Lilith is an apocalyptic skyscraper scape seen from above, while Your Age and My Age and The Age of the World (1997, the year of the Fondation's public opening, pictured on the left below) constructs a pyramid of oil, emulsion, shellac and ashes hung with terracotta fragments

Had we more time, we could have retired to the commercial world of the tea shop well set apart in the main farm building, but there were only minutes for a quick spin around the garden and then the tram back to Basel - of which more cries out to be described - and next the train to Zurich.

Next, here and on tomorrow's Radio 3 Music Matters, another rave about another miracle in a large space, Khovanskygate in the big top of Birmingham's Cannon Hill Park - simply one of the most amazing experiences, certainly the most singular, of my opera-going life.

Permission for reproduction from the Fondation Beyeler as listed above, with additional picture details and copyright acknowledgments as follows:

Odilon Redon, La Mort de Bouddha, ca. 1899
Pastel on paper, 49 x 39.5 cm
Millicent Rogers Collection
Photo: Davis A. Gaffga

Odilon Redon, Le Bouddha, ca. 1905
Pastel on paper, 90 x 73 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Odilon Redon, Le Cube, 1880
Charcoal on paper, 43 x 29 cm
Private collection  

Odilon Redon, Le Cyclope, ca. 1914
Oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 65.8 x 52.7 cm 
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Photo: Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

Odilon Redon, Temple vitrail, ca. 1900
Charcoal and pastel on paper, 87 x 68 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Red-Brown, Black, Green, Red), 1962
Oil on canvas, 206 x 193,5 cm
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
©2013, Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Robert Bayer, Basel