Where's the Light?(art in Paris)

As Gene Kelly said in the old movie musical "An American in Paris," "Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, you'd better give up and marry the boss's daughter." From the mid-18th century on, the City of Light's powerful Academy and magnificent Louvre Museum were command central for traditional art. When Edouard Manet outraged the academicians with his peasant-and-nude painting "Luncheon on the Grass" in 1863, Paris assumed leadership of rebellious modernism, too. Even if he had to get to Rome to draw the classical ruins or sell work to an English aristocrat, no young artist could take himself seriously unless he put in time in Paris. As portrayed in the current London exhibition "Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968" (at the Royal Academy of Arts through April 19), artists were fascinated not so much by Paris's Baroque artiness, but by its electric lights, steam trains and--mais oui!-- Eiffel Tower. In the 1920s, Paris was perhaps the most happenin' city of all time; it bubbled with the creative energy of both its own (Braque, Delaunay, Leger, Duchamp), and visitors like Picasso, Brancusi, Mondrian, Kandinsky and Man Ray. Some of the old magic still lingers today, which is why, for instance, the prominent contemporary- art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac opened his only gallery outside Austria in Paris. "It's the most cosmopolitan city in Europe," he says.

But as far as real clout in today's art world is concerned, Ropac might as well be singin' in the rain. Hardly anybody journeys to Paris anymore specifically to see cutting-edge art. Although the French do have a contingent of high-profile contemporary artists, none of them enjoys the international prominence of, say, Britain's Damien Hirst or Germany's Gerhard Richter. Paris has little of New York's naked mercantilism, London's trendy conceit or Berlin's punkish bitterness-- not necessarily desirable civic attributes, but each apparently necessary for the creation of significant contemporary art. Indeed, to the art world, Paris over the decades has degenerated into a theme park for middle-class masterpiece-browsers. "We've certainly lost something," says Royal Academy curator Ann Dumas. "Those cafes are still there in Montparnasse, but they're just tourist places now."

What happened to bring about such a marked decline in Paris as an artistic capital is a combination of the unfortunate and the misguided. The stock-market crash of '29, the overrunning of Europe by the Nazis in the early 1940s, the ghastly realization of what happened during the Holocaust and the advent of the atomic bomb happened to a lot of great cities and their art communities. But because Paris had so much to offer, it also had the most to lose--its important artists--and it lost many to immigration to the United States. Jerome de Noirmont, a gallery owner in Paris, says, "The U.S. had liberty and a strong economy and literally created a market that attracted artists until the 1970s."

After the turmoil of 1968, Paris took a reformative hand in helping to do itself in. First, there was what one British critic has called the "brain-denting" French philosophical-psychosocial theory of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Baudrillard. Then the government of Francois Mitterrand precipitously raised taxes--which devoured the kind of private fortunes necessary for risky art-collecting and drove collectors to London, Brussels and Geneva. And although a substantial portion of ...