IRON AND IRONY

For a very short period during my childhood, a period marked by the rare gainful employment of my father, I lived in the Marais. In those days it wouldn’t have been unusual to see an elderly Cocteau taking a walk on rue Volta or James Baldwin browsing at a Hebrew bookshop on rue des Rosiers.

Of course, I wouldn’t have recognized either one of these luminaries. I was way too preoccupied with smoking my first cigarettes with my?bande de petits voyous,?my gang of similarly untamed ten year-olds roaming the streets of Paris.

For my generation, Pompidou’s Périphérique is less about traffic and more about boundaries. The imperious President envisioned an efficient urban system. Herodian in scope, classist at core, Pompidou had Second Empire ambitions without Second Empire aesthetics.

The small apartment we lived in between the fall of 1960 and the summer of 1961 was razed in order to accommodate the Beaubourg. I’m struck by the ironies of fate each time I see my three small paintings in the museum’s permanent collection.