Word: beaubourg
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...French blue movies. Art or pornography? That's a question neither Michel nor her boyfriend had the opportunity to discuss that August evening in 2002 because Michel, who suffers from brittle-bone disease and gets around in a wheelchair, was barred by a cinema employee from entering the MK2 Beaubourg theater next to the Pompidou Center. The discussion that did ensue was about access rights for people with disabilities. And Michel is taking her case all the way to the French courts by suing the MK2 movie theater chain for discrimination. According to MK2 general director Philippe Aigle, a commission...
...Royal or the Bonaparte or the Mabillon. And though St. Germain is still full of wealthy and successful people, the artistic center seems to be moving back to the Right Bank, to the slummy area being rapidly gentrified between those two new cultural real estate projects, the flamboyantly ugly Beaubourg art museum and the unflamboyantly ugly Bastille Opera. "Try the Cafe Beaubourg," says one young American, "but I don't think anybody's writing any novels there." "Try the Cafe Coste in Les Halles," says another...
...wearing its entrails outside its skin. Its architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, had festooned its four sides with such a tangle of ducts, pipes, risers and shafts that it became the first steel-and-glass building to exclude almost all natural light from its cavernous interior. Since Beaubourg was meant to be (in the jargon of the day) a culturally transparent, non-elitist, participatory, anti-hierarchical, modular omnisensorium, it had no walls to speak of: walls were for palaces and prisons. Instead it had temporary screens, on which its Matisses and Miros hung transfixed like rabbits in the glare...
...destruction of Les Halles rallied the preservationists. The inadequacies of Beaubourg fed a mood of doubt about "radical" museum techniques. By the early '70s it was clear to the men of the Elysee that razing the Gare d'Orsay would be a major vote-losing blunder. The Gare d'Orsay stayed, Pompidou died, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the new President, inherited the problem...
Meanwhile, Orsay found its director at the Beaubourg: Francoise Cachin, a brilliant, Sorbonne-educated art historian whose specialty is Manet. The first issue she had to settle was the scope of the museum. What did 19th century mean? There was no way the Louvre was going to surrender its masterpieces of early 19th century classicism and romanticism. So Orsay's program must begin after the peak of the romantic movement. Cachin, Laclotte and the new museum's staff wanted to start in 1863 -- the emblematic year that saw the first Salon des Refuses, Manet's epochal Le Dejeuner...