Kid Surrealism
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| The gargoyles of Paris' Notre Dame keep watch over travelers below. |
By Brenna Fleener
When the followers of André Breton published a surrealist map of the world in 1929, it was no accident that Paris was one of only two cities mentioned. During the preceding decade, the French capital had become for the avant garde a muse of particular stripe: a hotbed of the marvelous, the fantastic, the grotesque, and the illogical. For Breton, the movement's founder, and for many of his fellow artists and intellectuals like Dalí, Míro, Duchamp, de Chirico, and Man Ray, the urban fabric of Paris was embedded with all variety of surprises: Whether they were climbing the towers of Notre Dame or simply watching street life pass with "its cares and glances," for these Modernists Paris provided endless fodder for the imagination. In some ways, the artistic and literary "dreamscapes" created by Surrealist artists provided merely veiled images of the French capital, the original home of the marvelous and the sensory.
Even today, hidden beneath its veneer of chic, Paris retains visual evidence of its circus-like alter ego in the form of fantastical public sculpture, wild architecture, and thought-provoking installation art. These surrealist niches (and every arrondissement seems to have some) remind us — especially kids among us, who seem forever better attuned to the power of the surreal — that Paris has always been, first and foremost, a playground for the imagination.
Picking through this contemporary landscape with an eye to the surreal (and aided, hopefully, by the sharper eyes of, say, a five-year-old), we provide a list of our favorite moments of fabulation in the city of lights.
- The Nikki St. Phalle and Tinguely fountains at the Georges Pompidou Center are a playtime favorite. These colorful ceramic/mosaic sculptures of people, animals, and unidentifiable critters frolic (along with some real children, in the warmer summer months) in the fountains just outside of the Georges Pompidou center. The latter, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, is itself a surreal experiment in which the mechanics of building — the ductwork and structural trussing — are worn on the outside, begging the question of what's shown and what's hidden in architecture.
- The Gargoyles of Notre Dame. Used during the Middle Ages to frighten away evil spirits, the gargoyles of Paris' mother church became symbolic of mystery and the unknown during the 1920s. Kids love to circle the building and count how many different faces and glaring eyes extend spider-like from Notre Dame's already impressive towers.
- In the somewhat hidden courtyard of the Palais Royale, artist David Buren's playful black and white striped columns of varying heights seem to grow organically from the ground, at once echoing the classical columns of the portico that ring the piazza and making the open air space seem like a large, human-sized checkerboard, à la Alice Through the Looking Glass. This has become one of the most exciting places in the city for kids.
- Henri de Miller's Ecoute ("Listen") Statue in the Jardin les Halles epitomizes the surreal. A 70 ton statue of an enormous face and hand appears surprisingly on the border of the Les Halles gardens, at the center of the Place René Cassin. The white and black cobblestones of the Place follow a spiraling pattern, visual representations of the movement of sound waves as they approach the statue's ears, and a bit of landscape art that ritual send children spinning (and screaming) through the park.
- The Parc of Buttes Chaumont. Set on a hill in the 19th arrondissement, Buttes Chaumont was once a site for gallows and quarry for many of the city's buildings before being converted into a park by Baron Haussmann and the landscape architect Adolphe Alphand. Buttes Chaumont is now a fantastic world apart from the bustling city, equipped with a 32-meter waterfall, circular lake, 63-meter long suspension bridge, and a series of man-made grottos (that seem to have been borrowed directly from Pirates of the Caribbean) that lead up to a Sybillian temple at the crown of the hill. A taste of 19th century surreal city that continues to delight today.
Brenna Fleener organizes and manages Context: Paris tours of Paris, including kid-friendly walks of Surrealist Paris.