I Got Her Wrong: Toulouse

Friday, October 17, 2014

     If French cities are women --as the feminine gender of the word --la ville-- would suggest, Lyon is an ageless beauty who keeps up the tradition of elegant silks, Carcassonne a mussed old lady who hasn't changed her make-up in fifty years; and Toulouse --Toulouse is a modern woman who updates her look each season and who knows what's going on in the world, the French equivalent of the female New York Times reader.

     Montpellier is a university town, so it would be a woman focused less on style than making a statement of one sort or another.  While all these concentrations have their merits, Toulouse projects ambition as no other city in the south --perhaps no other city in France-- does.  Airbus, the Franco-German aeronautic consortium, has its headquarters in Toulouse.  As a result, the big accounting firms, Ernst & Young and KPMG, have offices there, along with many other players in the big business of making commercial jets.  The style of the 19th century buildings is not much different from that of Montpellier --both have lovely ironwork balconies-- but Toulouse's are taller and made of red brick, rather than white building materials, as in Montpellier.

     The main shopping streets in the city center are pedestrianized, broad avenues with every high-end European brand represented.  The Garonne flows through the city, dividing the neighborhoods of Saint Etienne in the center from more casual Saint Cyprien on the other side.  It was in Saint Cyprien that I went for a lunch that could have come from an alternative restaurant in San Francisco: everything I ate at Les Temps des Vendanges was market-fresh, from the arugula salad with pomegranate seeds, tuna, and figs flavored with coriander and tarragon; to the hake with sweet potato purée and a mirepoix of carrots and onions chopped tiny; to the three cheeses --sheep, goat and cow's milk; to the just-sweet-enough creamy rice pudding I had for dessert.  The price for the four courses, VAT and tip included: about $50.

     After lunch, I went on to one of the major museums in Toulouse, the Musée des Augustins, an enormous former monastery of red brick. Its forty foot ceilings allow even very large paintings to be lined up on top of each other, a 19th century way of hanging works on canvas.  The garden in the central courtyard is planted with flowers and herbs that were part of the medieval cloister garden: it too, is very large.  The ground floor also includes three huge rooms of wonderful medieval sculpture.  Seeing the giant statues of the saints I was reminded of the omnipresence of the symbols of medieval Christianity: as so many people could not read, images conveyed the message the Church wanted to communicate.  I find the wood and stone carvings so lifelike and dynamic in their monumentality --and unthreatening, unlike Tilman Riemenschneider's unseeing holy men.  The French style has delicacy without their austerity.

     I save the retrospective of Orientalist painter Benjamin Constant for my day's end, and go on to the Fondation Bamberg, housed in another very large red brick building of medieval style.  I have never heard of the Fondation Bamberg, and once in its galleries, wonder why I hadn't: it contains a spectacular collection of Old Masters as well as early twentieth century New Masters.  I have to list some of the painters by name: Works by Lucas Cranach, the younger Breughel, Van der Weyden, de Hooch, Tintoretto, Veronese, Guercino, Clouet, Canaletto, Guardi, Longhi,  Pisarro, Fantin-Latour, Gauguin, Derain, Matisse, Vlaminck, Signac, Dufy, Sickert, Bonnard, Vuillard, Utrillo, Boudin, Sisley, Caillebotte, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec --and others.

     Georges Bamberg was from a German family from Cologne, but born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1915.  He began collecting at seventeen, and when he decided to open his collection to the public winnowed it to make it more coherent; notwithstanding, the collection is massive.  The paintings are displayed on walls decorated with green flocked wallpaper, with antique chairs and period lighting placed in the rooms to give the feeling of being inside a domestic interior.  The overall effect is staggering.  It is as if someone picked the paintings up the way we shop for the week at a supermarket: buying one of everything we think we'll need.  The abrupt division of the collection into two such distinct halves, Old Masters and early twentieth century art, marks it as a personal collection, not a museum --but what a collection!

     My last gallery visit of the day is back to the Musée des Augustins to see the Benjamin Constant retrospective.  This is not the Benjamin Constant who loved Madame de Recamier, but Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant, who lived from 1845-1902, and was one of France's most successful late 19th century academic painters.  He made his name painting Orientalist scenes of sultans, pashas, emirs, eunuchs and janissaries, women in harems.  When the vogue for them passed he became a celebrated painter of portraits, including a full-sized one of Queen Victoria, and another of Pope Leo XIII.  He was financially successful and well-regarded in academic circles, his gifts as a colorist melding perfectly with his handling of the exotic subject matter.  The colors jump out at you; the images, while clichés of imperialism, are luscious.  Perhaps that is why Constant was denied the Gold Medal of the pre-eminent organization of French painters, the Salon --of which he was an official, for many years.  He finally won it for a somber portrait of his handsome eldest son, Andre, dressed like a gentleman.

     I had put off visiting Toulouse all summer, as I had been put off Toulouse by my experience trying to get to Blagnac Airport during my first weeks in Caunes.  I had to pick up visitors there and being new behind the wheel, made a hash of both trips.  La Ville Rose, as Toulouse is known, held no interest for me.  Today, having time on my hands, and more confidence behind the wheel, I made the trip, which took ninety minutes.  I am so glad I did.