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I have left my page of 2024 enthusiasms here, to remind myself of the past – a very recent past, but it feels irretrievably long ago now.
Like so many others, I feel everything has changed. There is a new, unknown, unpredictable world, and the power of this transformation feels overwhelming. It is too soon to know what it is, or how it will affect us in how many different ways, but we felt it coming and now it is here. And it is bizarre and will terrify you if you let it.
Although I held onto a certain optimism, 2024 began with a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. In spite of endless confusion I kept on painting, but became increasingly frustrated with what I was doing. I spent six overwhelmingly important weeks in Paris in March-April. I arrived there sick and exhausted and although I slowly improved it was still a struggle. Part of it was the physical body, but of course that is also intricately involved at a cellular (or gut) level with the mental state. Being back in Paris was a reminder of a “me” who once existed, and a demand to find a new “me” for this new era, coming into being.
I was looking for a new way of relating to painting, but instead I found myself wondering how it is even possible to paint, let alone to write about “art” anymore. In Paris, I had been waiting for months to be able to go to the new block-buster Mark Rothko restrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. After booking tickets far in advance I was too sick on the day to go. This was a profound disappointment, but reflecting on reviews and commentary about the show, I honestly do not know if anything I might say would add value.
Rothko came back into my thoughts recently when I read, in a piece by art critic John McDonald, that some or perhaps many of Rothko’s paintings are highly fragile and may not be faring so well for technical reasons. Moving them around from place to place may be a bad idea. It is possible, perhaps likely, that there will never be another Rothko retrospective on this scale, or even at all.
The other Paris “blockbuster” concerned a different historical turning-point, or so it is now described. The Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism show was held at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from March 26 to July 14, 2024, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition. It had just about every still-accessible painting from the original show. Again, you had to buy tickets well in advance and line up on the day for an identified entry session – some lines were there for hours, in the cold spring wind and sometimes rain. Inside, hundreds of the “ordinary” exhibits drew your attention before you got to the actual Impressionist show, and the cramped viewing spaces were so crushed and crammed with people that it was almost impossible to see any paintings.
I haven’t felt able to write anything about this show, or the other art I saw in Paris, especially the gorgeous pieces tucked away at Le Petit Palais, which was a far more rewarding experience. But Le Petit Palais came to mean something more. On a second visit, hoping to catch pieces I missed, I felt dizzy and anxious and once outside the building finished up having a panic attack. I will one day write about having a panic attack in Paris, but it won’t have much to do with the paintings, rather the chaos of the crowded city in the immediate weeks before the Olympic Games and my own profound sense of disconnection from a city I had loved and lived in for so many months at different times in the 1970s and 1980s and now was trying to navigate without using the Metro (due to its endless stairs and crowded corridors).
This stay in Paris opened a different experience of the city. In an old-style apartment in the highly unfashionable Thirteenth Arrondissement there was a mix of old and alarmingly new, markets and malls, people from Asian and African backgrounds integrated into the texture everywhere. I shopped and walked and ate moving through buildings and places and people and angles and colours and spaces. Here was street art on a grand as well as small scale.
I met artists selling their paintings to the public in booths at an art market near the Métro Edgar Quinet. They were approachable, interesting, great to meet with. Many have studios in the Belleville art district, far on the northern ourskirts of Paris. Just as is the case in Sydney and every other global city, there is nowhere to find cheap studio space anywhere near the central parts of the city. There are lots of small galleries and collectives out at Belleville, but I didn’t have the energy or time to go and visit them.
I started to think about how to paint this Paris, so far from my visions of the Australian wilderness which has obsessed me for a decade. I am still thinking about it. It might be my new series, but it will take me very far both conceptually and technically from anything I have done so far. Am I up for the challenge? Can I go back to Paris, to the Thirteenth, and do it again, but with more strength and better understanding?
Meanwhile vast troves of irreplaceable contemporary paintings have been immolated in the fires in Los Angeles. John McDonald has written a great piece on this: see “Art Market on Fire”, #575, on his Substack, published 17th January. He thinks about the impact of the loss of great art collections from the millionaire prestige homes on Pacific Palisades. Movie stars and others in the high-flying world of LA have invested fortunes in great art. We have no idea yet of the detail of these losses. John thinks it might lead to a new and greater art boom.
Rich people may have lost art but many artists have lost their studios, materials, and whole bodies of work. Other artists are trying to put together a list of those who have suffered these losses to help find new ways to help them. How will they ever recover? Is there anything other artists can do right now to help them? See the account in the Guardian and check out the financial assistance sites already set up, listed on Wikipedia.
I am writing this still very early in 2025. The shock and awe of US politic reality is beginning to sink in but here in Australia we are pretending nothing is happening. The football season is about to start again, and there is not much new to see in the Galleries. So, I am going to think about art again by looking at artists’ writings. A lot of artists have left diaries or interviews and letters. I am going to read or re-read them, and think about the relationship between art, life and writing when the artist is the source of the commentary. And go on painting, of course, but Paris? Not yet, I don’t think.
Annette Hamilton Art Writing from Australia 