We Look About Us At the Cafe du Dome

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 230, 17 December 1927, Page 10

We Look About Us At the Cafe du Dome

(Written for THE SUN by

Leslie Greener.)

41 ARCON! Deux cafes natures.” V T The little round tables are packed close, five rows deep on the broad pavement. Who would think there was need of so much accommodation for the drinkers when Paris is so empty? Everybody is away at the sea, they gay, or in the mountains, now that it is high September. But Paris can never be empty, for those who live in it go off, if they can, in the season of dust, and their place is taken by the strangers from the mountains and the countryside. who come to breathe its summer vapours for a space. And then there are the foreigners who have saved their shillings and their cents and their marks to walk the hot boulevards with their kodaks, or to sweep goggle-eyed, swaying like plants in a pot, past the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre in great-bellied “rubberneck” chars-a-bancs.

We are in the L*tin quarter. Hard-by is the Boulevard Saint Michel—“Boul’ Mich’ ” for affection. Closer still is the Montparnasse Station, whence lucky folks can go to Brittany. Before □ s the French taxis yap their way along the Boulevard Raspail. The Cafe du Ddme. where we sit, is the centre of all things in the Quartier Montparnasse. Here gather the strangest human beings in Europe. Here sit and chat the extremists in all things, in politics and art, in religion, and in victuals. Here comes a man clad only in a brown blanket, a tall strong man with a golden beard, and hair that curls to his shoulders. He does not believe in stuffy trousers and hard-boiled collars. We look from the shining brown skin of his arms to the dark pipes that enclose our limbs, and reflect on what white flabbiness lurks within, afraid of the sunlight. Nobody heeds this giant from the Old Testament. He leans on his staff and gazes around without concern, then steps with light sandalled feet into the stream of modern motor-cars, a« heedless as though he were but crossing one of Jordan’s fords. Our coffee has arrived —black velvet in tall glasses. That is the way it tastes best, and it will revive us without harm after long hours of strained necks among the pictures. We have stopped at exhibitions every 20 yards along the streets, even in this out-of season. Often enough it is just a* this time that one can see the best work of all the year at private shows; for the poorer artists are able to hire the galleries at summer rates. Pity it is that in the winter, when tlie buyers are most numerous, the rich dabblers in paint have them all booked up. Strange and wonderful are the examples of modern art displayed today. We have not been brought up to see such sights. In Paris it must be our endeavour to unlearn all that we ever learned about looking at pictures, if we would try to understand the “modern” movement. Otherwise we

will go prepared to jeer, and as like as not come away no wiser than we went. We must expect none of those things to which we have been accustomed: “Truth to Nature,’' “Tone Perspective.” “Appeal of Subject.” Then, maybe, we shall begin to comprehend. In truth, the “modern” movement is as old as the hills. The ancient Egyptians did not draw their quaint and attractive figures of kings and beasts in the “Egyptian style” because they did not. know' how to portray modelling

and relief. They made flat designs because they found in them the essence of beauty, that essence which is no more to be described in words, or weighed, or separated, than is the electricity that converts your diningroom lamp from a shape of porcelain and wire into a thing of life and usefulness. However ornate it may be, whatever it may have cost, it is dead until the mysterious current flows to it. It is even so with a picture, and it is more often the simplest and least ornate of canvases which glows wdth that equally mysterious current that gives it life as a work of art.

In Paris to-day it is the bewilderment of seeking the true from the false currents which is the despair, often enough, of us newcomers. Artists have shed for ever the pictorial representation of nature. The camera can do that better than the cleverest craftsman, and the kinema completes the feeling of reality. Artists are seeking to give a subtler pleasure to their beholders than mere illusions of the “pick-it-off-the-canvas” kind. They seek to make them feel through sheer design,, through shape and colour alone: And it is only by seeing many pictures, and approaching them with

no prejudice in our mind, that we can at length arrive at knowing which are the true, and tasting the pleasures that they hold. Of course there are a thousand charlatans to every sincere artist. The fact that painters use nature only as a basis for their designs, and often twist unashamedly, has given the chance to every seeker after notoriety, to every half-baked intellectual, and to every rich dabbler who can finance a private show of his dreadful works. These folks are incapable of drawing

In the academic manner —the true artist must always know how to draw nature before he can adopt her —and they are devoid of taste. Their works hang by the hundred in the dealers’ shops, where rich but uninstructed foreigners buy them, blissfully happy at the idea of having something at the same time “modern” and Parisian. It is to be admitted that good picture* are sometimes sold by chance, but the odds are very much against them. Round about us at the Cafe du Dome sit the painters and the charlatans, and that endless string of hangers-on who adopt the Bohemian life to cloak some great or little chronic sin. Those who look most like real artists, those men and girls in broad black hats and flowing ties, have probably never dipped a brush in their lives. Or, worse still, they have done so! The plain fellow's in shabby suits, with civilised hats and sometimes a beard, are more likely to be the men whose works have appealed to us w'hen now r and then we have come across them shining soberly amid the freakish flood that overwhelms the galleries of Paris to-day. Paris.