Goodbye Paris, Hello New York

For a fortnight, French newspapers and art journals have been sputtering with rage. The ostensible rub, as summed up in the Paris newspaper Libeeration, is that "a clique of dealers from overseas has, with the delicacy of a bulldozer and the discretion of an atomic bomb, given the Venice Biennale's most authoritative prize to the 'made-in-U.S.A.' stuff one calls 'pop art.' France won not a single prize of any importance. So much the better. French art has nothing in common with this trash." Hotheadlined Les Lettres Francaises: AMERICAN OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE SCHOOL OF PARIS--

THE FAKE DADAIST ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG CROWNED IN TITIAN'S HOMELAND. Le Figaro held its nose at THE GREAT POP ART MANEUVER; AN ATMOSPHERE OF THE APOCALYPSE.

So much heat, obviously, had to come from more than a mere biennale. And although it may have been indiscreet of him, the U.S.'s commissioner to the Venice festival, Alan Solomon, diagnosed the real embarrassment: "The fact that the world art center has shifted from Paris to New York is acknowledged on every hand."

A Place of Entertainment. To have an American say that was infuriating to the French--and to have a Paris art dealer agree raised the chilling probability that it is true. As he closed down his Paris gallery permanently on July 1, Daniel Cordier circulated a letter that scathingly measured Paris' decline. "The dimensions of this city," he wrote, "are not compatible with the scale of modern civilization; it has become a holiday resort, a place of entertainment, and is becoming less and less a center of creative activity. In order to interpret our period, an artist has to be familiar with its realities, its sensibility. These can be felt better and more intensely in New York."

The gradual shift of world art centers from Paris to New York is not new; only the angry French cultural double take is. The shift began in 1956, when Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art sent abroad a show that introduced Pollock, De Kooning, Kline and abstract expressionism to England and the Continent. European critics at once recognized that the postwar New York school had the innovative strength, technical skill and independent-minded vision to go its own way without regard for the school of Paris--which, since the cubism, surrealism and dadaism of the first quarter of the 20th century, has contributed nothing conspicuously new.

Anxiety & Affluence. Not only has Paris slipped creatively, but it has also declined as a market. Play-safe French collectors never bought modern art, even French impressionists, on a big scale; and Paris art dealers always counted on Americans to buy moderns. Now that first-rate moderns are created in New York, Americans--and many Europeans--buy them in New York.*Moreover, as Cordier says, "the art market is particularly sensitive to fluctuations in the stock market," and the Paris Bourse failed to recover from the 1962 slump as strongly as the New York stock market.

"Although the French congratulate themselves on carrying the torch of civilization, there is a lack of interest in art," says Lawrence Alloway, curator of the Guggenheim Museum. "The attendance for the entire run of the recent Dubuffet show in Paris--granted that it was not at the height of the season--was 8,000 to 9,000. Here at the Guggenheim, we have that many people on a single Sunday." Alloway believes that "schools of painting flourish under anxiety and affluence," and New York has both. But Manhattan Critic Harold Rosenberg argues that on balance, "the concept of a world art capital is obsolete. Art flourishes in New York because New York is a kind of global city, a kind of momentary focus of global art which exists everywhere. There are historical analogies to show that there have been places where everything was working and suddenly all the life went out of it. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth.' We can't make predictions about inner qualities."

*But London tenaciously holds first place as the big-money auction market. Sotheby's of London, long intent on extending to New York its primacy in art sales, is this week trying to acquire Manhattan's top-ranking Parke-Bernet Galleries. Christie's, London's other major house, plans to stage what will probably be the biggest auction ever (estimated proceeds: up to $5,600,000) when it sells off the late Captain George Spencer-Churchill's fabulous Northwick art collection of 500 old masters next December.

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