The Guardian newspaper strikes again with "les fuck-offs"

It's all here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/19/britain-france-troubled-alliance

Two very useful English words that don't exist in French...

Delphine Autret, a Meribel-based translator, has emailed Culturissima the following humorous take on why English language is littered with so many French words... we particularly enjoyed the last paragraph.

It’s magnifical!

Further proof, if proof were needed, of two self-evident facts from the world of translation, namely:

i. translators are a waste of money because anyone can translate;

ii. every French man or woman that the Good Lord has so graciously bequeathed to us speaks perfect English.

Or maybe not...

Why head for the Med when you can spend August in Paris?

Paris' last remaining vineyard, Montmartre

Contrary to popular belief, not all of Paris closes down during the month of August. What does happen, though, is that as soon as July nears its end thousands and thousands of Parisians flee the city for their second homes in the country or on the coast.  And, let’s be honest, what could be more pleasurable than Paris without Parisians?

The city's residents, both young and old, are noticeably friendlier, more “cool” and “zen” as the French themselves put it, during August. Sure, some of the cafés and restaurants (and seemingly all of the boulangeries) pull down their shutters for the month, but just as many stay open. And though the main tourist sites – the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur, Paris Plage – still teem with foreign visitors, the morning streets are deserted. 

In Paris? Forget haute cuisine - head for le Petit Bleu!

If you're American and you're on holiday in Paris, you're going to want to sample some of the capital's finest French cuisine, right? Preferably washed down with a bottle of Bordeaux? Maybe in one of those literary cafés that line the Boulevard St German or somewhere along "the most beautiful avenue in the world", the Champs Elysées?

Montmartre, Paris

On the other hand, you could have the best meal you've ever had - and perhaps the cheapest, too - at the tiniest Tunisian restaurant in town, where you're welcomed as a long-lost stranger - and asked to nip across the road to fetch a couple of baguettes before you sit down.

Le Petit Bleu is the kind of place where a first-time tourist wouldn't dream of eating (it's not on the main drag), where a more seasoned visitor would like to eat (but it's a little intimidating), and where the old timer keeps coming back time and again.

"Madame Africa" unites Algeria and France

The basilica of Notre Dame d'Afrique, towering above the Mediterranean on the heights of the Bologhine district of Algiers, welcomed a small but unusual crowd on Monday.

Algerian dignitaries, European ambassadors and political leaders from Marseilles found themselves in the same pews as they celebrated the restoration, after three years of work, of the Christian edifice erected in 1872.  Until recently a symbol of French colonisation, the basilica is now one of the most visited sites in the Algerian capital.

"It's a chef d'oeuvre" said the delighted archbishop of Algiers, the Jordanian-born Ghaleb Bader, "a chef d'oeuvre that demonstrates the understanding and collaboration that exists between the authorities and the Church as well as between the religions and peoples on the two sides of the Mediterranean".

View from Madame Afrique

Each party has dug deep to finance the 5 million euros necessary for the project. The Algerian state, represented by the minister of religious affairs, the secretary general of the FLN (National Liberation Front) and the préfet of Algiers, has spent 560,000 euros, whilst the city of Marseilles, the département of the Bouches du Rhône and the region of Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur contributed 360,000 euros each.  The European Union was responsible for one million euros and private companies from Algeria and France made up the remainder with smaller donations.

And the result is there for all to see. Weakened by the shock waves of the earthquake that struck Algeria on May 23, 2003,  "Madame Africa", as the basilica is called here, has had a facelift. The project was entrusted to the architect Xavier David and the French company Girard, who were responsible for the restoration of Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseilles, which is contemporaneous with its Algerian cousin.  Their work has enabled the basilica's pale pink dome and its exterior Hispano-Moresque mosaics to recover their former lustre.
  
Neither the past nor the present intervened to spoil the day, with the Algerian authorities playing the appeasement card, and no one considered lingering in front of the mosaics dedicated to the monks of Tibehirine in the basilica's right-hand apse.  It has been a long time now since other signs of the past have been banished, such as a family ex voto from 1921.  Though still clearly visible on the right of the naive, the addition of a small piece of marble means that the ex voto asks Notre Dame de l'Afrique to protect "the whole of Algeria" rather than "French Algeria". In an aside Father Bernard Lebfèvre, the basilica's rector, stressed that: "There are only the visible wounds left, everything else has healed over".

For several days now, at the other end of Algeria, another restoration work has been under way: the renovation of the basilica of St Augustine at Annaba.    


The above article originally appeared in French in Le Monde and was abridged and translated by Dr David Winter of Culturissima.

Her body, muscular and almost masculine, bathed in light...

The Venus de Milo brings a smile to the Louvre

According to legend, Venus - known to the Greeks as Aphrodite - was born from the foam of the sea as she emerged from bathing off the coast of Cyprus. Be that as it may, the goddess of love serves as the model for the canon of beauty, an ideal epitomised in the Louvre's Venus de Milo.

The famous statue has just been restored, which comes as a pleasant surprise to the six million people (out of a total of eight million) who visit the Louvre each year with the stated aim of admiring the Venus de Milo together with the museum's two other jewels, Leonardo de Vinci's Mona Lisa and the Victory of Samothrace. The Venus, sculpted from white marble from Paros circa 120 BC, was found in 1820 by a peasant on the Greek island of Milos in the Cyclades and was given to the Louvre by King Louis XVIII in 1821.

This summer, the statue is radiating good health.  Her body, muscular and almost masculine, bathed in the light streaming in from the south-facing windows, has recovered the milky lustre of its origins. So, too, its energy and aura next to the gods and goddesses who surround it, Athena, Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus and others - Roman copies of lost Greek chefs d'oeuvres.

The smile that plays across her left cheek, almost teasing, contrasts sharply with the serious look sketched across her right side. The subtle folds of her toga, which could easily be made of real linen, fall to her hips and reveal a perfect bust.

Positioned in the centre of a carpet of red marble and mounted on a plinth (it is possible to walk all the way around her and view her from all angles), the Venus de Milo, six-and-a-half feet tall, stands sentinel over the 2,000 square feet of former royal apartments as they stretch towards the caryatids gallery.  She is the crowning feature of a new museum lay-out devoted to classical Greek and Hellenistic art (450-30 BC) devised by Jean-Luc Martinez (director of the Louvre's department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities) as a three-dimensional walk amongst the works of art.

Where are her arms?

At the head of the world's foremost museum of Greek art, totalling more than 45,000 objects, Jean-Luc Martinez has for the first time put on display works taken from the museum's reserve holdings or dispersed in other departments (ceramics, jewellery, numismatics, furniture). From now on these will be presented by geographic region to showcase the world of the Greek Mediterranean.

As for the Venus de Milo, she has once more found the place that she occupied from 1824 to 1848.  Since she first entered the Louvre, she has never ceased to be moved about. In the 1820s, following a controversy, it was decided not to attach the missing arms that had been sculpted for the occasion. Only her nose, left foot and big toe were re-attached.

"Whilst removing the old restoration work we noticed that the surface had been prepared for a marble adjunct that was never finished", indicates Monsieur Martinez. In 2009-2010 a scientific study brought to light the alterations and repairs that have been undertaken over two centuries.  It was decided to keep her nose, but not her foot. Fragments of marble are displayed around the goddess, including an outsized hand, which nourish the enigma... her arms are still unaccounted for.

This article first appeared in Le Monde, August 20 2010; it was translated from the French by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter.

Europe's "Cities on the Edge" fight back

On January 1, two years after Liverpool and three years before Marseilles, Istanbul becomes European Capital of Culture for 2010.  For five years these great ports, together with Bremen, Gdansk and Naples, have been trying to form a network of European cities "of ill repute". 

Marseilles: a "City on the Edge"?

They are the cities that love to be hated: rebellious and out of the ordinary, founded as ports but largely insular in outlook, they are cities of football and plunder.  But they are fighting back, turning to culture to help them on the road to recovery.  In 2010 Istanbul is European Capital of Culture, two years after Liverpool and three years before Marseilles. Almost by chance these three multi-cultural cities, together with Naples, Bremen and Gdansk, have embarked on an adventure known as "Cities on the Edge", a support network of the “most hated cities in their own countries".

Is it cheating?

Returning, very briefly, to the idea that the Brits might be more "aspirational" than the French, the two countries certainly have different codes of behaviour when it comes to things sportif.

So, for example, in beating Paris to secure the right to host the next Olympic Games, London clearly cheated. How? Because Lord Coe and his team - "perfide Albion" to the French - lobbied behind the scenes.

They did what? Um, yes, they went out of their way to chat up the presidents of the other Olympic committees.

Then, during the last Tour de France, the British cyclist Mark Cavendish, who won six stages on French territory, was guilty of something very close to cheating in French eyes.

What did Cavendish do? He took drugs? No. But his experience as a youngster as a track cyclist - where it’s possible to develop a very explosive style - gave Cavendish an unfair advantage in the mass sprint finishes that characterised this year’s Tour de France. And, what’s more, he had the best team on his side.

I’ve given up trying to put the Brit point of view: that, in both of the above cases, it’s the professionalism of Coe and Cavendish that helped them secure their prizes. You can’t win races on skill and innate talent alone - you have to have aspirations to go beyond what you were born with. In a sense, it’s your duty to do everything you can - legally - to win, isn’t it, if you’re in the position of professionals such as Coe and Cavendish?

“Ah”, reply my French friends, “but you don’t have more skill than us, just more money…”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Paris

One of Renoir's former homes in Montmartre,
with the Sacré Coeur in the background

I have the good fortune to live among the cobbled streets of Montmartre, within rioting distance of the Sacré Coeur and just a fifteen minute bicycle ride - all downhill - to the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.    My apartment overlooks a narrow, winding road that was painted by, amongst others, Cézanne, Picasso, van Gogh and the unfortunate Utrillo.

Lodged on the corner of our narrow lane is the pink façade of the famous Lapin Agile bistro, where the likes of Picasso, Utrillo, Derain, Braque and Modigliani once held court. It’s in this bar, formerly known as the Cabaret des Assassins, that a donkey once painted a canvas - Sunset on the Adriatic Sea - that ended up being hung in the prestigious annual Salon des Independents! It’s a lovely spot, too, to open a bottle of wine in the early evening in summer, as the sun comes streaming down the hill.

Picasso is never far from our thoughts here in Montmartre: to reach my local bar, I meander down the southern slopes of the hill past the Laundry Boat - Le Bateau Lavoir - where he once lived and painted.   There's another, more personal, connection, too: I bought my apartment from a chap - the make-up artist for President Mitterand's wife, as it happens - whose new next door neighbour, just five minutes away, is Picasso's former lover and the mother of his children, Claude and Paloma.  Her name is Francoise Gilot and, though Picasso died in 1973, Mme Gilot is still very much alive and kicking - and painting, too, as she is a celebrated painter in her own right.

Anyway, at the moment Culturissima is busy setting up two art tours for a major British client, a company that runs cultural and historic programmes across the world. The first tour is called "In The Footsteps of The Impressionists" and the second, "Renoir in Paris".  

The latter has been timed to coincide with a Renoir retrospective, Les Dernières Années, that will be held at the Grand Palais, just off the Champs Elysées, at the end of 2009.  This exhibition, details of which have yet to be released to the general public, will concentrate on the final period of Renoir's life when his nudes, later to influence Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso, drew their inspiration from the Old Masters.

Renoir's house in autumn, with
the Montmartre vineyard in the foreground

Although born in Limoges, Renoir se considérait comme un Parisien, according to his son. He lived part of his childhood alongside the former Tuileries Palace - and even used to disturb the Queen of France with his games! - before eventually settling in bucolic Montmartre, a world away from the new Paris of the demolition man, Baron Haussmann. One of Renoir’s first houses was in rue Cortot, now a museum and it was on the hill of Montmartre, with its vineyard, windmills and sweet-smelling gardens, that Renoir painted and here one can still see the Moulin de la Galette, the windmill immortalised in the eponymous painting on display at the Musée d'Orsay.  

The Old Women and the Young Women

Culturissima has just returned from two days in northern France on behalf of one of our British clients, a travel agency based just outside Cambridge that wants to put together a tour of Lille and its environs.

What are we going to report back?

First, that Goya’s twin canvases The Old Women and The Young Women are enough in themselves to attract the art-lover to northern France.  Yet Lille, where Flemish tradition meets French culture, and Valenciennes, the birthplace of Antoine Watteau, have many other exquisite treasures on display.

Lille’s Palais des Beaux Arts hosts the most valuable gathering of art in France outside Paris - not just the magnificent Goyas but also an outstanding collection of Old Master pictures and sculpture with work by Donatello, Rubens, van Dyck and Jordaens. The galleries also house an impressive selection of French 18th and 19th century gems with major œuvres by Jacques-Louis David. A short distance away lies the 13th century Hospice Comtesse, hung with 15th to 18th century paintings together with tapestries by Guillaume Werniers.

Valenciennes’ Musée des Beaux Arts pays ample tribute to the creative talent of the town’s two most famous sons, Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The museum is also the setting for a notable group of Flemish 17th century paintings, in particular Rubens triptych of St Etienne and Descent from the Cross.

The focal point of our afternoon in the cathedral town of Tournai was the Musée des Beaux Arts, designed by the Belgian art nouveau architect Victor Horta. The museum’s holdings stretch from the early Flemish tradition to Monet and Seurat.   And our final day was spent re-visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Villeneuve d’Ascq, set in a verdant sculpture park and endowed with prized work by Picasso, Braque, Modigliani and Miro.

Having fun in Paris and London

Puppy love in a Paris bar

A propos nothing, they're just not aspirational are they, them Frenchies? Not in the same way as, say, your typical Englishman - or woman - is. 

Or maybe your "average" French madame or monsieur is aspirational in a way that my Anglo-Saxon mind can't quite fathom?

I've just come back to Paris from a couple of days in London, you see, and one of the things that struck me the most was the way Jo English wears the latest fashions, drives a good car and owns his own house. Or if he doesn't, he - or she - wants to.

Most of all, though, the Londoners I bumped into were intent on having a good evening out with their mates.  At six o'clock the streets are choked with people mobiling or texting one another: "What you up to tonight? Yeah, me and Dave and Bob are meeting the girls at that new bar and then we're off down..."

Okay, so I spent most of my time on Clapham High Street, but even on a Wednesday evening, there was a buzz: the guys and the girls are all dressed up, they're showing off their tans, talking loud, drinking hard. In six years here in Paris, I've never witnessed that kind of atmosphere, where groups of blokes and birds are out "on the pull" or "on the razz". Londoners invest so much energy (and money, no doubt) in letting their hair down - there was no trouble, no aggression, no-one kopped off with anyone... but the drive was there. 

In an equivalent bar in Paris, the music wouldn't be so loud, the glasses of beer wouldn't be so large, the skirts wouldn't be so short - and the girls wouldn't even have bothered to wash their hair for such a run of the mill night out!  What's more, your typical Parisian wouldn't have just come back from three weeks in Goa or whatever else is hip at the moment. In fact, he would still be on holiday - it is August, after all - and he would have taken his "vacances" in the family property in Normandy or in his parents' home down on the Mediterranean coast.

To me, London's a bit startling, a bit "speed" - but you can see why young people are attracted to the British capital because it's dynamic, it's animated, people are going after what they want, sometimes excessively, sometimes admirably.

And then there's the food - even that's aspirational in London! In a run down pub, a guy was ordering from the menu, "... and I'll have that with the fresh salad with the lightly-roasted Mediterranean vegetables". Uh, with what? Or in the supermarket you buy pea and coriander soup with a hint of something-or-other. 

Most of all, if you're still with me, the English aspire to be anything other than English. 

Go on holiday in England? Pull the other one, mate. Eat typically English food? Go to a traditional English pub (unless, of course, it was in the country)? You must be joking! The whole of London seems bent on being European - or what the Brits consider to be European, because the reality is that none of these bars, none of this food (the French eat "steak frites", right, and couscous, none of this ponced-up English fare), none of these fashions exists outside England! 

And, of course, your Frenchman eats French food and doesn't go on holiday abroad 'cos French food is the best and the French landscape the most beautiful.