The Last Days of New Paris

a spoon covered with fur: The spoon that Thibaut half expected to find often accompanies a similarly furred cup, he said, and is of course manifest from Meret Oppenheim’s famous assemblage, sometimes known as Breakfast in Fur. A reasonable minority of the spoons left in New Paris are, apparently, now furred.

“ ‘Those who are asleep…are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.’ ”:Géographie nocturne’s opening line, which Thibaut quoted, is from Herakleitos. It, along with La Main à plume, was printed in 1941.

“Ithell Colquhoun?”: Colquhoun, in our reality, was an unusual and minor artist who had been expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940. She retained a lifelong fascination for the occult, particularly Kabbala, and was a member of various magically inclined orders and groups over the years. She was later the author of the odd hermetic novel Goose of Hermogenes.

“ ‘Confusedly…forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.’ ”: Robert Desnos’s description of the forest dates from 1926, from the piece “Sleep Spaces.”

those rushing futurist plane-presences: Launched with a manifesto in 1929, “aeropittura”—“aeropainting”—was a heavily fascist-influenced iteration of second-generation futurism in Italy. It was associated with Benedetta Cappa, Enrico Prampolini, “Tato” (Guglielmo Sansoni), Fortunato Depero, Fillia and Tullio Crali. It offered its quasi-abstraction in breathless service to imagined speed and bombastic propaganda, and to quasi-religious fascist iconography, such as Gerardo Dottori’s 1933 portrait of Mussolini, Il Duce. It was the frenetic angular plane-presences of aeropittura that appear to have manifested occasionally in New Paris.

“Fauves?…The negligible old star?”: The fauvism of André Derain, referenced here, was tolerated and, to a degree, celebrated in the Vichy regime. New Paris is home to a few too-bright figures walked vaguely from his images. A short and elliptical six-line poem by Gertrude Stein gives its name — and, in New Paris, its unpleasant manifest quiddity — to the manif known as the negligible old star.

A giant’s pissoir: It was Paul Éluard, in 1933, in the collective discussion on the “irrational embellishment” of Paris, who suggested the transmogrification of the Arc de Triomphe into a urinal.

a great sickle-headed fish…a woman made up of outsized pebbles: The fish with its huge orange crescent head was one of many manifs emerged from the vivid monsters of Wilfredo Lam. The figure of the stone woman cropped up more than once in Thibaut’s testimony. He sketched it for me, and it was from that that I was able eventually to identify the manif as Meret Oppenheim’s 1938 painting Stone Woman. And there is, indeed, something particularly arresting about the simple image, even among so much strangeness. I’m not able to express exactly what it is. But I think it may lie in the fact that because we have heard, many times, in fairy tales, of people being turned to stone, and because we’ve seen statues, we know what we think something called a “stone woman” must look like. But Oppenheim’s reclining, resting woman is composed instead, jarringly, of a handful of loosely coagulated pebbles. We sense their tactility, we know how they will fit in our hands. But the chop of the water at her ankles shows that the woman is appropriately tall, and that these carefully rendered smooth stones are wildly out of scale. That problematic of scale, as much as the fact that the woman is rock, is what is so jarring.

the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones: Breton’s suggestion for the “irrational embellishment” of Palais Garnier, the opera house, was that it become a perfume fountain, and that its staircase be reconstructed “in the bones of prehistoric animals.”

Le Chabanais: The extraordinary and macabre fate of Le Chabanais is manifest from Tristan Tzara’s proposed “embellishment” of 1933. Of the famous brothel, he demands, “[f]ill it with transparent lava and after solidification demolish the outside walls.” This, horrifyingly, is what has occurred in New Paris, setting around all those within. They are frozen, suspended, staring and unrotting in eternal surprise, like insects in amber.