The artist Cesar in his Paris studio 1983
When I stepped into twentieth-century cultural history, Parisian cafes became my intellectual home from the very first moment. I remember lighting up my first Gauloises in Cafe de Flore, Le Dome, Deux Margot, La Coupole and dozens more. Boy did I look handsome. I had the cigarette dangling from my lips like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, like Bogart in Casablanca. I was American cool. The irony was that the French smoked Marlboro.
My twenty/twenty-first century has been like riding visual currents that dance in my mind like the moons’ tidal forces. I have stepped into “rabbit holes” that have run my mind ragged. I have felt at times like my mind has been invaded by a Hunter S. Thompson neurosis. Maybe something more harrowing was at play.
When sanity woke me up, my heart wished I had walked alongside Brancusi step by step to Paris. I just might have created something great in this life too.
My Paris was a place that I thought I could sit among intimate friends and talk about art, politics and girls. The city became home for my camera. It was a place where I eliminated all creative inhibitors. Every morning I would wonder what I would see. Would the camera realize what was triggering my excitement. Certainly this look back in time would be my evidence. I was there to photographically chronicle the art world of Paris. Those immeasurable adventures till this day touch me every time I look though my viewfinder.
Paris was where I first experienced the sensation of gamboling among a coterie of artists. Paris may have been yielding to the New York art world supremacy, but jois de vivre is sublimely french. A young photographer is best suited by discovering the importance of life’s passions before he/she experiences the chaos that awaits the future.
I was introduced to the artist Cesar Baldaccini, “Cesar” by the curator of the Pompidou in 1983. The meeting became for me a James Bond martini, “shaken...”
Cesar
This volcanic personality awakened me to creative possibilities. He was surrounded by lovers and other strangers. Yet it seemed as if he was only concerned with making my Parisian experience, a life’s moment.
I am always reminded of one of my photography heroes when I think back to that 1983 day. Embedded in my visual history is a story about the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosea receiving an early commission to photograph the famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Upon arriving at Mishima’s home, Mishima asked the budding photographer, “what would you like me to do?”. The youthful Eikoh suggested that Mishima strip down naked and the photographer would wrap him up in rope!! To this day it is an inspiration that I have never approached. I have not yet made the photograph that needs to be made.
Cesar was open to anything. I had photographed noteworthy artists like Jasper Johns Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and hundreds more. I was still in my creative infancy discovering the photographic equivalent (for what the surfers describe) as the mystical “stepping into liquid”.
For about a week I found myself sharing part of each day with Cesar (the French cinema award is named for him). One day Cesar climbed up to what I refer to as an interior widow’s walk. A perch I sometimes sat to watch him work or cavort among his circle. In his best English asked me if I was going to attend his exhibition at the Pompidou?
Cesar in his studio
A few days later I stood in my “Sunday best” surrounded by a contemporary French cultural elite: Jean Tinguley, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Leanora fini, Pierre Soulages, dealers collectors, curators, and moi! I was young and proud. The night came to an end. Cesar suggested that I come with him and a few friends for any evening finale.
Some people grabbed a taxi. Some walked. It seemed maybe one hundred fanciful personalities had gathered like Fellini s denizens from La Strada on the terrace of the Petit Palais. We wondered what the occasion meant as the clock neared midnight. Cesar waved his arms for us to gather round the balustrade.
A countdown began. We were ordered to look in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe. We heard “One” shouted. From the Place de la Concorde to the Arc... all of the street lights fell dark. Thirty-seconds later, as far as your eyes could see, Paris street lights reappeared in the hue of Yves Kleins most memorable blue as the night became midnight. The mysterious celebration engulfed everyone of us.
Cesar was the impresario that led this particular visual journey among Paris’s cultural elite Klein’s celebrants. The city was blanketed Yves Klein “blue” that night. I was forever elevated to a place where experience was limitless. Life forces, life’s engagements stay with your heart until you die. They remain to protect you and enable you.
Yves Klein “Blue and the arc de Triomphe