The Cold War

March 4, 2014

     When I wrote about "White Nights" a few posts ago, I was thinking about whether the fomenting crisis in the Ukraine was not the Cold War redux.  Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB, fits the bill as head of "the Evil Empire" as Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union: teetotaling, treacherous, isolationist.  For students of history, the invasion of the Ukraine to protect Russian citizens threatened by the government that has replaced Yanukovich, harks back to Hitler's invasion of Poland to protect German citizens supposedly under threat by Polish machinations.  It is of course fitting that Poland is in the lead in calling for harsh sanctions against Russia.  Poles lived Russian rule and resisted it unafraid of the hardships required to throw off Soviet domination.  Whether Western Europeans will be capable of similar resolve remains to be seen.

     With the temperature at seven a.m. this morning at 14 degrees, it is hard not to dwell on the hardships of life in much of Russia, where the deep freeze is the norm.  In the Baltic, summer essentially ends August 15, as Bill and I learned when we booked a cruise of that sea that began on that date.  Stopping for the day in Visby, a Swedish island favored by that country's wealthy (Ingmar Bergman had a home there), it is known for its roses, which were still blooming the morning we visited.  By afternoon, however, we were in the midst of a hellish rainstorm which stranded us on the island overnight.  Violently windy and cold weather is a norm in the north of Europe during the same days citizens of Mediterranean countries are lolling on beaches.  Being raised in these climes affects the mode of thinking of people, some historians have argued.  Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama's book about the role of landscape in forming the mindset of the German people, explores the idea.  I don't know if someone has done a similar book about Russia and Russians, but living this frigid winter in New York, it seems likelier to me that a certain inflexibility might creep into the attitudes of people forced to live much of the year in extreme cold, a contempt for those whose day-to-day is not quite as driven by what is outside the window --the "decadent West", as I think Putin has referred to us.

     In need of psychic balm after the labors of my tax season, I decided to reward myself by visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the exhibit of photographs of Charles Marville, "the official photographer of Paris", who plied his trade just before, and during, Haussmann's massive reconstruction of the city.  Atget's early career overlapped with Marville's later, but the two men's work could not be more different:  Atget's images have a sharpness only the improvements to the technology could have brought about, they are documentary.  Marville's are "painterly", the efforts he made to create the image are visible in the photograph.  This is apt, because Marville began working in the infancy of the medium, when the reliability of the entire image varied with 1. the patience of the subject to stand in front of the camera for several seconds while the image was exposed; and, 2. ability of the photographer to compensate for the  lack of technical aids to convey accurately such essential backgrounds to images as clouds.  For instance, some photographers took separate photos of clouds, then amalgamated them to images of the streetscapes below them to create the overall photograph they wanted.

     Among the most interesting photographs in the exhibit are of public toilets.  There were different styles, some enclosing the whole body, others permitting the head and shoulders of the toilets' users to be seen, the distance between consumers of the service no greater than that over a garden wall.  These toilets were replaced with others providing users greater enclosure.  The older ones reflect a lesser concern about bodily functions than the newer, and are a reminder that in earlier times it was not unusual for bodily functions' exertions to be carried out in the plain view of others also bowing to their bodies' demands.  In French, the public toilets were called vespasiennes, in homage to Vespasian, the Roman emperor, who first made public toilets pay.

     The Financial Times of last weekend contained an admiring essay by Ariella Budick, "The ghosts of Paris past", about the Marville exhibit.  Funnily, I got more pleasure out of reading the article than actually seeing the exhibit.  The review used two photographs from the exhibit, "Rue Estienne' (1862-65); and, "A lamppost at the entrance to the École des Beaux Arts" to illustrate it.  The photographs are set against the FT's softly salmon-colored paper, giving them a greater feeling of timelessness than the Met's prints --set on white mounts-- do.  Reading the reviewer's evocation of the cacophony of drills and hammers that built such monuments of "old" Paris as the Palais Garnier, I could imagine how disruptive Haussman's grand plan for the city was of the lives of the people who worked at les petits métiers --the tanners, the sellers of old clothing and furniture, the tin merchants-- all the people who served Paris' poor.  Both groups were uprooted in consequence of the creation of Paris' Grands Boulevards.

     One of the most interesting photographs is of the two squat pillars that marked the entrance to the old Les Halles --the food market that preceded the creation of the cathedral of glass that was itself torn down in 1971, when the market moved to Rungis, in Paris' suburbs.  The two columns dated to the market's creation in 1183.  When Haussmann targeted them for destruction, there was no outcry.  On the other hand, when Les Halles was torn down (replaced by a modernist nightmare --a failed shopping center) it was denounced as "architectural suicide".  Nonetheless, it was accomplished.

     Open war between architectural preservationists and modernizers is the stuff of our times, a drama of  "the heroism of modern life", as Baudelaire called it.  Sometimes the preservationists overshadow the modernizers, sometimes the modernizers force preservationists to yield to the imperatives of modernizing technology.  Whether we admire Haussmann's ambition or reject it as megalomania, photos of the city of Paris before and after Haussman force us to reflect on the price of modernity. Indeed, at the time of Paris' rebuilding, some critics observed that the "new" Paris was simply a place in which the wealthy disported themselves in the playground of the city's center, while the poor, rendered invisible, were pushed to its margins.

     Plus ça change, plus la même chose, non?