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Les Rencontres ont besoin de leur palais de festival! Le nouveau directeur face aux défis qui trainent.

July 5, 2021 By Bradbury in Culture

L’entrée du Siège des Rencontres

Christoph Wiesner, le nouveau directeur des Rencontres d’Arles, tout de noir vêtu sur la scène du Théâtre antique d’Arles le 29 août dernier.

L’écrivain du XIXe siècle Alfred de Musset dit que le costume noir était un symbole morbide du deuil de la perte des illusions. Christoph se refuse toute illusion sur les défis ardus, marchant sur les traces non pas d’une, mais de deux légendes.

Palais – Un Mot que L’on Craint de Dire

Pendant 15 ans, François Hébel a dirigé le festival avec un éclat athénien. Selon lui, l’Etat n’a jamais fait de dépenses d’investissement aux Rencontres. “Le festival de Cannes a son Palais, Avignon des salles de répétition. Nous, nous sommes des boy-scouts qui campons par terre.”

Pendant cinq ans, Sam Stourdzé insuffle un nouveau souffle au festival en réunissant photographie et art contemporain, musique, architecture et littérature. Un record de 145 000 visiteurs est venu à Arles en 2019 pour l’édition exceptionnelle du 50e anniversaire. Il est ironique que Sam Stourdzé à la fin de son mandat soit arrivé à la même conclusion que Hebel. « Les Rencontres ont besoin de leur palais de festival comme Cannes a le sien, » Sam a prononcé.

Les tâches incombent à Christoph Wiesner: trouver auprès des différentes collectivités publiques les financements nécessaires à la rénovation des Papeteries Etienne afin de garantir un lieu de stockage et des ateliers de longue durée pour ses expositions. 

La Cour Fanton

De plus en plus difficile, c’est trouver un palais – les bureaux, les salles de conférence, et les théâtres bien équipés de toutes les technologies. Et à l’extérieur, un espace bien aménagé pour les présentations et les débats en plein air – plus moderne, plus grand, et plus convivial que la Cour Fanton.

Du coup, ce n’est pas la tache!

Mécanique Générale@Luma Arles

Le Mécanique Générale ©Hervé Hote / Luma Arles

La Fondation Luma a proposé aux Rencontres un espace permanent aux Ateliers. Ce lieu – le Mécanique Générale – serait mis à disposition pour cinq ans et serait le plus grand espace consacré à la photographie en France – d’une superficie de 4 518m² dont 2 930m² de surface pour accueillir des expositions, des performances et du cinéma. Un joli cadeau de Maja Hoffmann.

Par comparaison, Le Jeu de Paume à Paris est un lieu d’exposition consacré à l’image et à la photographie d’une superficie de 1 200 m² avec une salle audiovisuelle, un café et une librairie.

Le Mécanique Générale représente le deuxième immeuble réalisé par Selldorf Architects à Luma Arles. En 2019, les Rencontres ont présenté des centaines d’images au Mécanique et ses prix du livre : Les Prix des Livres et le Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award.

©Hervé Hote / Luma Arles

Le Mécanique présente à la fois une opportunité et un défi aux Rencontres: obtenir de grandes expositions ou collections de musées du monde entier qui seraient présentées avec tous les équipements et commodités d’une exposition d’un grand musée: un kiosk / librairie, les visites audio-guidées, les conférences, les films, et un petit café.

Voilà les expositions au Mécanique Générale ici.

Bonne visite cet été.

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Frank Gehry: A Long Voyage Towards a Second French Renaissance at Luma Arles

July 2, 2021 By Bradbury in Culture

© Adrian Deweert / Luma Arles

Note: Luma Arles opened June 26. Obtain Tickets to reserve time slots to visit Frank Gehry’s tower from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 pm (last entry). Ticket includes entry to all exhibitions and public garden:

The Backstory

Impatience is a particular hazard for world class architects who strive to design art institutions. The competition is strenuous. Then upon being selected, getting the structure built is an even more strenuous bovine affair. It is axiomatic among architects and builders in France that nothing comes easy, and never on time.

Almost any perfervid admirer of architecture who tracks the “grands projets” in France has, down the last decade, endured aggravation over the delays in Frank Gehry’s immense 15-story structure covered with glass canopies for the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne, Frank’s first French renaissance, which opened to blaring fanfare in October, 2014,

Yet, the legal wrangling for that project did not approach the interminable delays bordering on bewilderment over Luma Arles where the centerpiece is Frank Gehry’s luminous tower – his second French renaissance.

Here is Frank’s voyage from inception, to approval, to celebration at the groundbreaking, aided along the way by the engagement of the arts patron Maja Hoffmann, founder of the Luma Foundation that funded the vast 24-acre complex. Ms. Hoffmann drove herself to achieve something of consequence that endures. It is an engagement that fueled her persistence, her intractability in pushing ahead against unforeseeable arduous circumstances. 

Voilà, the curtain opens.

An Attachment to France – The early 60’s

In 1960, Frank Gehry moved with his family to Meudon, a Paris suburb. Outside of his work with architects in Paris, there were tours arranged by the architect Mark Biass, a lifelong friend from his days at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The visits made up a kind of gazetteer, places and their structures, old and modern, each with their own aura and style. Modern buildings in Paris, the icons of Notre Dame and Chartes, the cathedrals of Autun and Tournus, the creations of Le Corbusier in Paris, the monastery La Tourette in Évreux, and the Chapel at Ronchamp.

In France, Gehry fell under the spell of great architecture. The grandeur of its exalted structures dizzied him. The creations were an epiphany, confirming what he sought to feel about architecture, that it was an art of its own.

In the summer of 1961, there were things that mattered and things that one must do. Turning away a job offer in Paris, Frank Gehry yielded to the gravitational pull of Los Angeles where he was to set up his own office and pursue a singular identity.

France was vital in this rite de passage, as well as revealing to Frank Gehry that creating great works is, in a sense, to rescue them from time.

Paris: The American Center – the 1990’s

In 1991, the American Center in Paris accepted an offer to relocate to Bercy, a French quarter along the Seine where wine warehouses were being refashioned for shops and restaurants.

The Board of the American Center commissioned Frank Gehry to design a new building facing the Parc de Bercy.  Opened in 1994, with sweeping curvilinear surfaces and a jutting Cubist profile, the building was shuttered in 1996 due to financial overreach and mismanagement.

The structure stood ghost-like for the next nine years. The Ministry of Culture acquired the building, and extensively refurbished the interior to house, since 2005, La Cinémathèque Française. The exterior and key public interiors are virtually unchanged, and the building serves its new program as if designed for it, expressively.

Note: The American Center was one of the last structures designed by Gehry and Partners before the firm adopted its CAITA software. (Source: Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, Paul Goldberger)

A Pang of Melancholy: 2003

On April 25, 2003, at Bard College, about an hour’s drive up the Hudson Valley from Manhattan, a throng of notable and cultured people gathered in a pastural setting to commemorate the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry, the famed harbinger of formless structures.

The stories of Frank Gehry’s architectural masterpieces preceded him, most notably of Guggenheim Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall.  His volcanic talent connects him to an upper world, an aristocrat of his profession.

While everyone at Bard was quavering in excitement at the architect’s creation – undulating canopies of stainless steel, reflecting light skyward, and others caressing two concert halls – Frank Gehry was, for a transitory moment, gripped with a pang of melancholy, the recognition of France having passed him by.

This uninvited emotion asserted itself in a conversation between Frank Gehry and Frédéric Edelmann, the architecture critic of Le Monde, the leading French daily newspaper. As Edelmann recounted their exchange, Gehry said that he harbored regrets about never being invited to design a structure in France since the American Center in Paris, his only commission on French soil.

Note: At this time, Frank Gehry’s renewal in France was in his line of sight. In 2002, Bernard Arnault, chairman of the French luxury group LVMH, met with Frank in New York City. Shortly afterwards, Bernard proposed to Frank to take on a commission to design a structure for the LV Fondation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Design work would begin in earnest in 2005. (Source: Goldberger ibid).

Sketches of Frank Gehry: 2005

Maja Hoffmann, the Swiss-born a pharmaceutical heiress (Hoffmann-La Roche) and patron of the arts, meets Frank Gehry during the filming of Sketches of Frank Gehry, directed by Sidney Pollack, a documentary she co-produced. Maja tells Frank that she has an idea en tête for him in Arles. Without any details, Frank signaled that he would be on board.

Arles Delegation meets Frank Gehry in New York: 2007

In 2007, Frank invited Maja to a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In Nov. 2007, Maja organized a trip to New York where Frank Gehry would meet with the Mayor of Arles Hervé Schiavetti and power brokers in the art community. In an exchange with the Mayor, Frank assures him that “I will be worthy of your Roman heritage.”

In December, 2007, the Luma Foundation announces a proposed project at the Parc des Ateliers, a 24-acres site that was once clusters of workshops (ateliers) for railroad maintenance and repair, near the center of Arles.

Maja Cuts a Deal – 2008

On June 20, 2008, the Luma Foundation signed an agreement with AREA PACA concerning financial arrangements and costs. The Foundation was identified as an “acquisition candidate” for the Parc des Ateliers.

An Initial Design Gets Sabotaged – July 2008

On July 6, 2008, Maja Hoffmann and Frank Gehry presented the project in Arles in the presence of the Minister of Culture Christine Albanel and Arles mayor Hervé Schiavetti. Frank Gehry proposed structures of varying heights located near renovated clusters of ateliers (workshops).

July 2008, the initial design for Luma Arles with the Grande Halle cut into two structures.

The Grande Halle, the largest industrial building on the site, had been renovated with a budget of 5.8 million euros by the region, and inaugurated in October of 2007. The design presented called for the Grande Halle to be cut into two structures. The architects who directed the renovation mounted a public protest: media interviews along with threatening legal action. A revised design was mandated.

Second Design Shown in Paris and Venice Biennale: 2010

In 2010, Maja and Frank go on the road to present a second design for Luma Arles at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris from July 1 to 3, with Frank hosting a conference on July 1. On August 25, the Luma Foundation presented maquettes of its project at the Venice Architecture Biennale, with Frank reminding the audience that the design was a work in progress. Photos of Maja Hoffmann and Frank Gehry in Venice on ArchDaily.

The design featured two linked towers located near the Grande Halle.

The second design: Two linked towers next to the Grande Halle

Le Choc. A Rejection: 2011

In an unnerving decision, in March, 2011, the National Commission for Historical Sites and Monuments rejected two of the five building permits because the towers siting over an ancient Roman cemetery could threaten Arles’ Unesco World Heritage classification. In addition, the towers obstructed views of a medieval church. The French Ministry of Culture concurred and recommended that the towers be repositioned on the site.

Steeling herself, Maja Hoffmann stated, “We are convinced that large-scale cultural projects involving private and public partnerships are possible in France and we want to find ways to make them workable.” The way to make Luma Arles workable was strenuous: a third redesign by Frank Gehry of the tower, and relocating it on the site.

The Last Time: Third Design Presented in 2012

A beleaguered, yet determined, Maja Hoffman told a French photography website, that “twice,” and “without consultation,” public authorities have changed the criteria of the building permit and the area concerned.  In a minatory bark she said, “It goes without saying that this time will be the last.”

In December 2012, the “last time” arrived when a third revised design of Gehry’s tower and the Parc was formally presented by the project director Eric Perez, and Maja Hoffmann of the Luma Foundation. 

The new design featured a single soaring 170-foot tower with a stone backbone, enveloped by a 54-foot glass rotunda and a landscaped courtyard, with 230 underground parking spaces. The tower was moved from its original proposed site close to the Avenue Victor Hugo.

Maja Hoffmann, hardened as she was (or is undoubtably is) by five years of delays and tedious negotiations, refused to release to the press the final designs until such time that the construction permits were issued.

The Green Light: 2013 

On July 10, 2013, Arles Mayor Hervé Schiavetti announced that the construction permits for the Luma Foundation had been approved and signed. There remained various administration procedures and the sale of land to complete before construction could proceed.

The final design of Luma Arles

A Joyous Groundbreaking: 2014

A Joyous Trio: Mayor of Arles Hervé Schiavetti, Maja Hoffmann, and Frank Gehry.
Credit: City of Arles

“Arles is such a beautiful city. I have tried not to blemish its beauty.” Frank Gehry (Les Inrocks)

On April 5, 2014, a large crowd assembled in the Parc des Ateliers for a groundbreaking ceremony to hear accolades from Maja Hoffmann, Frank Gehry and the mayor of Arles. It had been nearly six years since Maja and Frank had unveiled the original design in July, 2008.

The sentiments they expressed that day had a melodic tone, rather than celebratory. Getting through the whole arduous experience produced an evocation of immense relief (soulagement), like marathon runners at the finish line, breathless. Les Inrocks magazine quoted a sardonic Frank Gehry, “The French are a complicated people. Maja knows how to get it done.”

And get it done, she did.

© Adrian Deweert / Luma Arles

Of Marilyn, Tavel, and the Colour of Love

May 10, 2021 By Bradbury in Vin et Cuisine Tags: Provence, rosé, wine

Marilyn Monroe by Philippe Halsman

Marilyn Monroe by Philippe Halsman at the Jeu de Paume, Paris

 

Paris – It was like an apparition, the photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Her regal features: the Bambi eyelashes, the moist parted lips, the seductive open mouth, a vulnerable and welcome glance, and the slow-burning sensuality of America’s sexy waif-goddess.

The vivid colours – rich hues of ruby, raspberry and cherry – bathed me in the warmth of life, rising up like glowing flames whose images rained over me like a first love affair. Then, suddenly, it came to me, an epiphany: Marilyn Monroe is a rosé incarnate, a Tavel rosé mind you, the most carnal of all rosés. What they share, Marilyn and Tavel, is an archetypal beauty evoking the colour of love.

Chanel No. 5

On your palate, Tavel rings with berry and cherry flavours, with a hint of Marilyn’s lustiness triggered by a velvety spiciness. An elegant discreet ‘nose’ greets you with aromas of berries, dried flowers, peach, tangerine and rose.  The latter is a heart note of Chanel No. 5, Marilyn’s favourite fragrance.

As Luca Turin reminds us, “We do not wear Chanel No. 5 because Marilyn Monroe wore it; we wear it for the same reason that Marilyn did: because it’s gorgeous.” Voilà: you don’t drink Tavel because it’s Marilyn Monroe incarnate; you drink it for the same reason we all do: because it’s a gorgeous rosé.

Tavel wines once wetted the lips of Popes, who resided in Avignon in the 14th Century rather than in Rome. The parched scrubby landscape and worn sun-bleached structures are like a ghost of an earlier, more glorious world.

Centuries have bleached the inexhaustible stones of Provence, yet Tavel brings forth with each new vintage a gleaming rosé of irresistible rapturous sensuality, an aura of Marilyn’s purest beauty. When stationed on a Provencal table along with a few roses, the bottles shimmer with an amorous, muted raspberry glow.

 

Three among the five original Chateaux in Tavel in the 14th Century

Three Tavel wines whose properties date to the 14th Century

Tavel Rosé: A Voluptuous Color

The voluptuous color of Tavel is born from a centuries-long tradition, a vinification process unique to the appellation.

The so-called cold maceration is the softening of grapes by soaking. The soaking endures from 12 to 48 hours, whereby the color, flavor and tannins are transferred from the grape skins to the wine juice. The weight of the skins and the must release the ‘free-run juices’ that are drained off into a vat.

Then, the juices are separated from the skins by a light pressing of the grapes.  The free-run juices contribute aromas, fruit, and acidity, with the pressed juices providing richness, structure and color.

A temperature-controlled alcoholic fermentation lasts about 20 days in cement cuves, followed by the wine being aged in enamel-lined, stainless-steel cuves for 18 to 20 months.

The result: a rosé more powerful, more tannic and darker than other rosés. The trend today is to produce blends that are a lighter shade of pale.

Some producers tout the absence of color in a rosé as modern-day hip sophistication. They go further. Paleness connotes quality, so they say. Don’t be taken in. These blends are mere whispers compared to the clean whistle of a Tavel rosé.

Tavel: A Gastronomic Rosé

In many appellations, rosé is made from parcels of lower quality, whereas in Tavel – the only appellation in France devoted uniquely to rosés – winemakers include grapes from the mature parcels in their blends.

Tavel winemakers choose from among nine grape varieties (cépages) for blending vintages, with Grenache the predominant grape (up to 60%).  Tavel rosés do not require guzzling before the summer fades; their structure allows for a year or two of cellaring, their freshness ever present.

Enriched with smooth tannins and lingering spiciness, the rosés of Tavel are a gastronomic delight. Marry Tavel with grilled fish and chicken dishes, Asian cuisines, ratatouille, a goat cheese salad, and Provencal cuisine.

There’s more to Tavel than a late afternoon insouciant buzz. It is a rosé enjoyed “a table” in the soft darkness of limpid nights, flooding your palate with the immaculate flavors of the sun-drenched terroir of Tavel.

 

Tavel: Richness Bestowed by Three Distinct Terroirs

 

Terroirs of Tavel: Olivet (1), Vallongue (2), Vestiges (3)

 

Tavel, a tidy tract of 2,300 acres on the west bank of the Rhone. Marginally higher and somewhat drier than Châteauneuf-du-Pape (CDP) to the east, Tavel would have yielded red wines lighter than CDP. Consequently, rosés offered a promising niche.

There are three terroirs in Tavel: each of which has distinct attributes of soil, stone and mineral deposits, each of which contributes to the richness of the Tavel cuvées (blends).

Olivet (1): A terrain on the map of gray greenish hues lying to the southeast of the village where the oldest estates in Tavel first cultivated vines on the accessible terraces and gentle slopes of light and permeable sandy soil with small pebbles. This terroir produces wine with a smooth texture,  subtle aromas, and a strong bouquet. Yields are higher and alcohol is lighter than wine of the other two terroir.

Vallongue (2): North of the village, this terrain appears in brownish tones on the map, sharing with neighboring Chateauneuf-du-Pape the “galets ronds” – the round quart-sized pebbles brought by the Rhone during the Quaternary era. Wines feature higher alcohol, distinct pigments, and a firm and smooth structure.

Vestiges (3): West of the town, this terroir, which is slate-colored on the map, is one of the most arid in the region, with impoverished soil that requires a deep root system The terrain is covered by lauzes, flint-shaped white stones. The wines are dense, taut, and high in minerals, blended for fruity aromas and complexity.

Among attributes of wine, minerality is one of the most difficult attributes to define. I defer to the brilliance of Steven Spurrier, the UK wine legend:

“I suppose it (minerality) is easier to describe what it is not, that is, it is not fruity, nor acidity, nor tannins, nor oak, nor richness, nor fleshiness. I think it (minerality) is just there, a sort of lifted and lively stoniness that brings a sense of grip and a sense of depth, but it is neither grippy (which is tannin) nor deep (which is fruit).”

Voila, the diversity and complexity of Tavel to explore. Estates produce cuvées from grapes of all terroirs, as well as ones exclusively from a single terroir.

Tavel: A Rosé of Intimacy

A tasting of the Tavel rosés at Le Château de Manissy, Nov. 2016

The usual approach to drinking rosé is that it be seen first, and then sipped. Tavel, however, can not be seen that way. It demands an examination by sight, sniffing and tasting.

Tavel is luxurious and luminous, yet not precious. Approachable and affordable, it can take awhile to work its way into your consciousness.

Once it does, Tavel is a rose of intimacy, by which I mean it is filled with the detail of history, of elegant aromas and of a smooth richness that lingers in your mouth. And in your memory.

Where Tavel stands among roses is where it has always stood, and you carefully place its heritage where it belongs, before the rest.

Looking for Tavel Rosé

Domaine Maby has top-rated vintages. Recent tastings of  a sublime Cuvée Tavel Roc-Epine from Domaine Lafond, and a gracious Domaine Corne-Loup Tavel Rosé by Geraldine Saunier. For a grower producing a single cuvée, Prieuré de Montézargues. The Château de Manissy offers a Cuvée des Lys blended exclusively for the U.S. market. A lovable drink is Château de Trinquevedel, imported by Kermit Lynch. Château d’Aqueria appears on many shelves and wine lists. Feeling stylish, the cuvée La Reine des Bois from Le Domaine de la Mordorée is worth swiping your plastic.

There are dozens of other estates. Learn more about Tavel here.

Couleur Tavel: Celebrating the Essence

Couleur Tavel is an annual festival when the town of Tavel quivers with excitement: music, art, theater, sublime cuisine and tastings galore of Tavel rosés from the appellation’s producers.

The festival runs from 4:00 p.m. until midnight on the third Saturday in July. Facebook here.

Luma Arles: Reserve Tickets to Visit Frank Gehry’s Second French Renaissance and Triumph.

May 5, 2020 By Bradbury in Culture

Frank Gehry-designed tower at Luma Arles opens on June 26.

Breaking:

July, 2022: Tickets to reserve time slots to visit Gehry’s tower from  10:00 a.m. to 6:00 pm (last entry). Ticket includes entry to all exhibitions and public garden:

Spring, 2020: Luma Arles and Les Rencontres d’Arles entered into a partnership on exhibition space for the photography festival at Luma Arles beginning in 2020, announced former mayor Hervé Schiavetti at Paris press event announcing the 2020 festival program. Agreement is for five years. Alas, agreement delayed until 2021.

Gehry in Arles

At first approach from the Avenue Victor Hugo in central Arles, there is something about Frank Gehry’s stainless steel-cladded tower glistening amid the faded camel, umber, rose colors of a timeworn landscape. It sits defiant, like a remonstrance.

Perched on a plinth and rising from 54-foot glass atrium, the soaring 170-foot tower is a 53,000 square-feet surface of metal panels supporting more than 10,000 blocks of gleaming hammered stainless steel.  

The nexus of a complex, known as Luma Arles, the structure will be home to the Luma Foundation, created by Maja Hoffmann, a pharmaceutical heiress (Hoffmann-La Roche) and high-spirited (fougueuse) patron of the arts.

The Luma Foundation supports independent artists, and facilitates discourse and inventiveness by sponsoring cultural, educational and the environmental initiatives.

You can take Frank Gehry’s tower as a twisting tornado, as one architecture critic put it, or you can dismiss it as a beer can (une canette) like certain locals do who don’t get anything.

Or you come to understand it as I do, as the legacy of an indissoluble engagement to art and to the environment — the empowerment to create and preserve unalterable beauty.

Engagement: The Environment 

A Swiss doctoral student, Luc Hoffmann (1923-2016) came after the war to the Camargue, the wild humid delta of brine lagoons and marshes, that stretches from the south of Arles to the Mediterranean sea. At first sight, he was in its thrall. For his thesis, he studied the chicks of the common tern. So, it began. A lifelong engagement. His dedication to the Camargue was pure, even angelic. Luc Hoffmann was like a revolutionary: one gave, everything, for the cause. His visionary existence required a base: he acquired the Tour de Valat estate in the heart of the Camargue. In 1954, he set up there a biological research institute that incarnates today the founder’s incorrigible determination. His passion for nature never faltered. Luc Hoffmann co-founded the World Wildlife Fund, and set up the Mava Foundation to fund conservation projects. 2012 saw the advent of the Luc Hoffmann Institute devoted to sustainable development.

Engagement: Art and Culture

In 1956, Luc Hoffman relocated the family to the Camargue. Over the course of the years, he exemplified to his children a life that had always been lived in accordance with a passion for engagement. For them, it must have been like learning some heroic language. Maja Hoffmann attended a school that her father established on the estate. She had a stint working at La Tour du Valat. Her father revealed an engagement to the world of nature to her, call it conservation; she came to add the universes of art, culture, education and human rights. In the end no one of them less precious than another. These values assert themselves in the Luma Foundation, which may be appreciated as a vital part of Maja Hoffmann’s own self-concept — deep convictions that are emotional and visceral, borne at a young age. Among the inhabitants of Arles, Maja Hoffmann is, simply, une fille du sud. (a girl of the south). For them, this trait is the predominant element in the donnée of her biography. As someone framed it to me in Arles,  “Tout s’explique,” (explains everything). Her engagement is the ineluctable emotional force that drove her to do something of consequence that endures, as her father devoted his fortune to preserving the Camargue and the environment. It is an engagement that fueled her persistence, her intractability in pushing ahead against unforeseeable arduous circumstances — the impersonal and the personal. Among the ways of her family that Maja Hoffmann brought to Luma Arles are: discretion is good taste; words, well-chosen, are important, and the slightest ostentation is classless. So, our narrative begins. Voilà, the mis-en-scene.

Arles: Overwhelming Antiquity

Roman Amphitheater in Arles, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site

On warm and muggy nights in Arles, the pace is languid. People sit at ease on the terrace, in awe of no one. There are no temptations as much as consolations of a leisurely evening.

In Arles, vestiges of an ancient past dismantles modern memory into sepia tones. The weary antediluvian panorama seems resistant to any fresh coat of modernism.

Perched on the Rhone in Southern France, Arles is a town where every public surface wears a patina of antiquity – cramped lurid biscuit-colored edifices and decaying gray stones.

Arles sided with Caesar over Pompey (Marseille), an alliance that brought prosperity in the 4th and 5th centuries. During 1888-89, van Gogh resided in Arles, memorializing the town in 300 paintings. Once a thriving port, Arles was relegated to a backwater with the arrival of the railroad. 

Lacking any industrial base, Arles has struggled to prosper. Inhabitants refer to the town as broke (fauchée), its institutions starving (au pain sec).

Unemployment, which ran over 15% in recent years, now has dipped below 14%. Among the youth, the out-of-work tops 30%. A quarter of residents are retired. The haute bourgeoisie of Arles live elsewhere, in villages in the Alpilles like Saint Etienne du Grès and Mausanne.

“Arles is a town which is often forgotten..One time a year it reawakens for the photography festival.” Maja Hoffmann (Le Monde)

I know three Arles: One, the first ten days of July when the photo festival has splashy events; two, the other summer weeks when the festival brings in a steady stream of visitors, and the last, in the winter, a mirthless town of cold naked stones where inhabitants measure out the days in exact portions.

Journalists write about Luma Arles from afar, forgoing a visit. For one, Paul Goldberger, biographer of Frank Gehry (see below). And Art News, whose reporter last month misidentified Arles as “marshy wet lands” and as home to the Tour du Valat. No, it’s the Camargue.

Arles: Photography Magnificent

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.” Susan Sontag, On Photography

With art, inspiration is everything. One knows that instinctively. It hung over Lucien Clergue (1934-2014), and his friends in Arles like an unpronounced duty (un devoir). Lucien Clergue, a lifelong resident of Arles, was the first photographer to be elected to the Paris-based l’académie des Beaux-Arts, and to serve as its president.

In the late 1950’s, Clergue began to pester his childhood friend Jean-Maurice Rouquette, the curator of Arles’ Musée Réattu, about the absence of any museum in France with a dedicated collection of photography. In 1961, Clergue traveled to New York. His first stop was at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to view Guernica by Picasso. As Clergue recounted in an oral history:

“At MOMA, to my great surprise, you had to go through rooms displaying black and white photographs to reach Guernica. I said to Jean-Maurice that to view the world’s greatest contemporary painting, you have to walk through photography. That moment in New York was capital in making us move forward.”

In 1965, the two men organized a mailing to photographers worldwide asking them to donate prints for the photography collection at the museum. Only two photographers refused to donate: Cartier-Bresson and Avedon. Other prints of Edward Weston were donated by Jerome Hill. With enough prints to display in a room, the Mayor of Arles was persuaded to give his consent for the the second floor of the Musée Réattu to be dedicated to photography. Before long came an opportunity for Arles to enlarge its footprint in photography. The annual Festival of Arles, caught up in the revolutionary fervor of 1968, was the target of calls to revamp its dull format. In an oral history, Roquette reminisced:

“We said that the only thing we have that is free is photography. We proposed bringing three photographers to present slides of their work in the reception room at City Hall. There were lines out the door until 3:00 a.m. The next year we set up about 400 chairs in the courtyard of the Musée Réattu. And it took off like that.”

With a photography festival in gear, Clergue began to network with photographers. In 1971, he made a world tour. In Carmel (CA), he met Ansel Adams. With its sparse resources, the nascent festival sponsored a trip for Ansel Adams. In 1974, Adams taught a workshop at the festival. When he returned home, Adams gave a press conference at which he applauded Arles for doing amazing things for photography . Adams’ participation at the festival was an imprimatur, a watershed moment that bequeathed Arles an unalterable destiny: a fervid summer festival for world photography  –  Les Rencontres d’Arles – that attracts today over 100,000 visitors. In the beginning: folding chairs.

Luma Arles: A Timeline

2004: Luma Foundation

Zurich-based Maja Hoffmann launches the Luma Foundation, named after her children Lucas and Marina.

2005: Frank Gehry

Maja Hoffmann meets Frank Gehry during the filming of Sketches of Frank Gehry, directed by Sidney Pollack, a documentary she co-produced. 

2006: Economic Development Zone

On July 17, the City of Arles approves the creation of an economic development zone – ZAC des Ateliers – for the development of the Parc des Ateliers.

2007: AREA PACA  

On June 12, the City Arles appoints AREA PACA, a regional manager of large public projects, to oversee and manage the development of the Parc des Ateliers.

2007-2008: A Bright and Shining Future for Arles

In 2007, Frank invited Maja to a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. She saw the “Bilbao effect” au premier rang. In Nov. 2007, Maja organized a trip to New York with the Mayor and others to meet with Frank Gehry. In December, 2007, the Luma Foundation announced a proposed project at the Parc des Ateliers, a 24-acres site that was once clusters of workshops (ateliers) for railroad maintenance and repair, near the center of Arles. On June 20, 2008, the Luma Foundation signed an agreement with AREA PACA concerning financial arrangements and costs. The Foundation was identified as an “acquisition candidate” for the Parc des Ateliers.

Frank Gehry’s original design of a two-tower structure for the Luma Foundation, Arles

Luma Arles will be anchored by a 170-foot structure designed by Frank Gehry. This structure would serve as the headquarters of the Luma Foundation, and include exhibition space, a library, classrooms, archive storage, artists’ residences, and a cafe. Six existing structures will be renovated for exhibition space by Selldorf Architects in New York.  The landscape architect, Bas Smets in Brussels, will design a 10-acre public park with hundreds of trees. The project at the Parc des Ateliers will be financed by the Luma Foundation with an original contribution of  €100 million ($115M). Note: The investment today approaches €200 million. In July, 2008, Maja Hoffmann and Frank Gehry presented the project at Les Rencontres d’Arles, in the presence of the Minister of Culture Christine Albanel and Arles mayor Hervé Schiavetti. Frank Gehry proposed two-linked towers on varying heights located next to the renovated clusters of ateliers. The Luma Foundation’s campus will accommodate exhibitions during the annual summer photography festival.

2010: Venice Biennale

The Luma Foundation presented the maquette of its project at the Parc des Ateliers at the Venice Biennale. Photos of Maja Hoffmann and Frank Gehry, and of the presentation on ArchDaily.

2011: Le Choc. A Set Back

In an unnerving decision, in March the National Commission for Historical Sites and Monuments rejected two of the five building permits because the towers siting over an ancient Roman cemetery could threaten Arles’ Unesco World Heritage classification. In addition, the towers as obstructed views of a medieval church. The French Ministry of Culture concurred and recommended that the towers be repositioned on the site.

Steeling herself, Maja Hoffmann stated, “We are convinced that large-scale cultural projects involving private and public partnerships are possible in France and we want to find ways to make them workable.” The way to make Luma Arles workable was strenuous: redesign of the tower by Frank Gehry, and relocating it on the site.

2012: Le Parc des Ateliers

The Parc des Ateliers is drab and dreary vista. A grid of washed-out buildings and burned-out workshops stretch across a parched dirt surface sprinkled with scruffy haphazard plant life and weedy stubble. Many artists have complained about exhibiting in the worn-down ateliers which are at times flooded by summer storms or turned into furnaces on hot days. In 2012, the German photographer Andreas Gursky refused to exhibit at the festival in protest to the conditions.

The Parc des Ateliers in Arles before renovation by the Luma Foundation

2012: The Last Time

A beleaguered, yet determined, Maja Hoffman told a French photography website, that “twice,” and “without consultation,” public authorities have changed the criteria of the building permit and the area concerned.  In a minatory bark she said, “It goes without saying that this time will be the last.”

In December 2012, the “last time” arrived when a revised design of Gehry’s tower and the Parc was formally presented by the project director Eric Perez, and Maja Hoffmann of the Luma Foundation. 

The new design featured a single soaring 170-foot tower of twisted aluminum foam with a stone backbone, enveloped by a 54-foot glass rotunda and a landscaped courtyard, with 230 underground parking spaces. The tower has been displaced from its original proposed site, moved closer to the Avenue Victor Hugo.

Maja Hoffmann, hardened as she was (or is undoubtably is) by five years of delays and tedious negotiations, refused to release to the press the final designs until such time that the construction permits were issued.

2013: The Green Light 

On July 10, Arles Mayor Hervé Schiavetti announced that the construction permits for the Luma Foundation had been approved and signed. There remained various administration procedures and the sale of land to complete before construction could proceed.

Final design of Luma Arles with the Frank Gehry Tower and the Ateliers

2013: François Hébel 

Over the course of several years, I thought that I was watching some mordant tragedy playing out in Arles in which two driven individuals, both uncommonly self-possessed, were symbolically opposed. It was not merely that the world had set the two of them at odds. The end game meant that one of them must lose if the other were to win. In 1986, François Hébel took command of the Les Rencontres d’Arles. He launched the display of photographs in the dilapidated railroad workshops. The Parc des Ateliers evolved into a distinctive terrain at the festival. In 1987, Hébel brought to Arles the personal narrative of love and loss of Nan Golden: “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” The iconic show brought a sunburst of aesthetic esteem to the festival. Despite two smashing years in Arles, Hébel left to direct Magnum Photos. François Hébel returned to Arles in 2001 as director of a festival heavily in debt with 95 percent of its funding from public sources. Attendance was averaging 9,000 per season. Maja Hoffmann supported the arrival of Hébel by creating, in 2002, the Prix Découverte, an annual prize recognizing young talent in photography. By 2013, Les Rencontres d’Arles had a robust balance sheet with 40 percent of funding coming from visitors, 40 percent from public funds, and 20 percent from sponsors. Attendance was exceeding 90,000.

2013: The Unraveling 

The Parc des Ateliers, a thread woven into the tissue of the festival, became the cause of a long unraveling. Turning backwards to my visits to Arles before 2013, I recall hearing murmurs in the wings (les coulisses) that Hébel’s attitude towards the Luma Foundation had calcified into mistrust (méfiance). What haunted François Hébel was losing control over exhibition space in the renovated ateliers. Aggravated he was by Maja Hoffman’s intention to display at Luma Arles art from her private collection and from the family collection stored in Basel, and works acquired by the Foundation. There was another source for his pent-up frustrations. Hébel saw Arles as an orphan, ignored by carriéristes in the Culture Ministry who channel funds to glitzy festivals. In July, 2013, he put his sentiments, sarcastically, to Le Monde:

“The Cannes Film Festival has its Palace. We are boy scouts camping on the ground.”

François Hébel fought back. He pitched an International Center for Photography that would occupy the ateliers, permanently, sustained by a budget of 34 million euros. In effect, his audacious project would banish the Luma Foundation from the ateliers. I heard a gallery owner remark, “Quel culot!” (What nerve!) The denouement: construction permits were approved in July, and in the fall PACA, the regional government authority, agreed to sell the land of the ateliers to the Luma Foundation for 10 million euros. The coup humiliant (a humiliating blow) came on October 22 when the Culture Ministry rejected Hébel’s alternative proposal, preferring the private initiative of the Luma Foundation. Anti-climatic the moment was on Nov. 5 when Hébel shot off an impassioned five-page letter to Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Festival, in which he announced his departure after the 2015 season, and elaborated on his frustrations and discontents.

Some exits are unforeseeable, even unimaginable. I submit that it was François Hébel’s hubris that put him in an untenable position. It blinded him to how unforgiving the machinery is behind progress. Alas, his letter to Jeanneney came off as petulant, his resignation as poignant, since his reign in Arles had an Athenian brilliance. A prince had fallen from the heights.

2014: The Groundbreaking

A Joyous Trio: Mayor of Arles Hervé Schiavetti, Maja Hoffmann, and Frank Gehry. Credit: City of Arles

“Arles is such a beautiful city. I have tried not to blemish its beauty.” Frank Gehry (Les Inrocks)

On April 5, a large crowd assembled in the Parc des Ateliers for a groundbreaking ceremony to hear accolades from Maja Hoffmann, Frank Gehry and the mayor of Arles. It had been nearly six years since Maja and Frank had unveiled the original design in July, 2008.

The sentiments they expressed that day had a more melodic tone, rather than celebratory. Getting through the whole arduous experience produced an evocation of immense relief (soulagement), like marathon runners at the finish line, breathless.Les Inrocks magazine quoted a sardonic Frank Gehry, “The French are a complicated people. Maja knows how to get it done.”

2014: Sam Stourdzé Named New Director 

In the community of French photography, you can pile the elite directors of festivals, museums and exhibitions into a minivan. Among those with a reserved seat was Sam Stourdzé, director of the Élysée Museum in Switzerland, an institution dedicated to photography.

His appointment as the new director of Rencontres d’Arles was announced in April, 2014, a week after the groundbreaking. 

While Stourdzé lacks Hebel’s narcissism and quirky talent for publicity, he brought to Arles the impassioned, yet rigorous, management style of a museum director. In his first festival season, 2015, he reduced the number of exhibitions to 35 from 50.

In 2016, Stourdzé more than doubled the number of artists exhibiting, from 113 to 250, at 25 locations. Attendance remained glorious, topping more than 100,000 visitors.

Of tantamount importance is a harmonious relationship between Les Rencontres d’Arles and the Luma Foundation, which has assured Stourdzé and his team of the festival’s autonomy. 

2015: Arles’ Clout in French Photography

In the winter of 2015-16, I caught myself saying that it’s not hard to see how the surging currents of French photography all flow through Arles.

The Jeu de Paume, Paris, had an exhibit of Philippe Halsman, co-curated by Sam Stourdzé. One stop on the Paris Métro put me at the Grand Palais for a retrospective of the Arlesian Lucien Clergue, co-curated by Christian Lacroix, a native of Arles, and François Hébel.

2016: Frank Gehry Structure Named

The building designed by Frank Gehry was designated the working title of “The Center for Human Dignity and Ecological Justice” to embrace the intertwining principles of human rights and the right to a healthy environment.

2017: Annie Leibovitz Exhibit

The Luma Foundation acquired the archives of the American photographer Annie Leibovitz – The Early Years, 1970-1983. The photographs were on display in the Grande Halle of the ateliers from May until 24 September. A mild irony: François Hébel hung some photos of Annie Leibovitz in 1986 when the ateliers were first used as exhibit space.

2017: Les Rencontres d’Arles 

Les Rencontres d’Arles organized exhibits in the Parc des Ateliers in L’Atelier des Forges, and La Mécanique Générale. The numbers: 125,000 visitors (up 20% from ’16), 250 artists, and 40 expositions in 25 locations.

2018-19: Les Rencontres d’Arles 

Rencontres d’Arles wrapped up its 2018 season by announcing a record attendance of 140,000 visitors, an increase of 12% from 2017. There were 36 exhibitions in the formal program, along with another 24 in associated programs.

2019 was a record shattering summer with 145,000 visitors at 51 exhibits to celebrate the festival’s 50th anniversary.

Paul Goldberger: The Frank Gehry Biography

Down through four decades from his perch at the New York Times and The New Yorker, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger covered Frank Gehry, who was…”arguably the most famous architect in the world…” he wrote. His intimacy with the man and his work made him a natural to pen a biography.  With a pleasant flowing style that is an expression of his congenial personality, Goldberger chronicles, with entertaining details, the journey of Frank Gehry in “Building Art” (September, 2015). Goldberger reveals the gift France gave Frank Gehry: a glimpse of what architecture could be. Gehry spent a year in Paris in the early 1960’s working with architects. The Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, and the creations of Le Corbusier were an epiphany, confirming what he sought to feel about architecture. The American Center in Paris was Frank Gehry’s first project in France. Opened in 1994 with sweeping curvilinear surfaces and a jutting Cubist profile, the building was shuttered in 1996 due to financial mismanagement. It now houses a national museum of cinema. In 2004 came the opportunity for Frank Gehry to renew his attachment to France. Bernard Arnault, chairman of the French luxury conglomerate LVMH, approached him to design a museum for the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The Foundation Louis Vuitton was inaugurated in October, 2014, six months after construction began on Frank Gehry’s structure in Arles.

In his book, Goldberger’s noted Luma Arles in a compact 220-word summary.

Street Art by Beni at Luma Arles; Frank Gehry Tower in the background

Luma Arles: Toward an Opening in 2021

There is a communal psychic energy dispersing whatever resentment lingers as attention turns toward the future, and to the special calculus of art and prosperity that Luma Arles prefigures. To what extent will Arles experience a Bilbao Luma effect — the Frank Gehry tower as une Bilbao à la française? Luma Arles, I predict, will do huge things for Arles as a year-round destination for culture by offering enlightened ways to see and organize the world. Here is a roundup on news items:

Info Centre: Located at the entrance to the Parc des Ateliers on Avenue Victor Hugo. Visitors may sign up for public tours of the construction site. Sketches of Frank Gehry  is on view, along with models of the project.

Actes Sud and ENSP: A major French publishing house, Actes Sud cancelled its plans to take up residence in Luma-Arles. The new Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP) now occupies will take up new linear structure, designed by the Nice architect Marc Barani, across the street from the Gehry tower.

Bouffe: Two restaurants opened at Luma Arles: La Cuisine des Forges and Le Réfectoire, under the direction of Camarague chef Armand Arnal. 

Hotels: Maja Hoffmann purchased two hotels in Arles: Hôtel du Cloître, renovated and open, and l’Arlatan, under renovation.

President Emmanuel Macron: Emmanuel Macron choose Arles as his first outing with a cultural agenda. On July 17, 2017, he visited Luma Arles accompanied by Maja Hoffmann and local dignitaries.

Francois Hébel: He is currently the Director of the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

Tributes: The team of curators and artists who are working with Maja Hoffmann to actualize Luma-Arles are: Tom Eccles, Bard College Director (New York), Hans Ulrich Obrich, co-Director of the Serpentine gallery (London), Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and artists Philippe Parreno (Paris) and Liam Gillick (New York).

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When Success is Not Enough: Dauphin of Wine Legend Alexis Lichine, Sacha Lichine Decants His Emotions

April 1, 2020 By Bradbury in Vin et Cuisine

Whispering Angel Rosé bottled by Caves d’Esclans

“No one gets over anything.” Jim Harrison

N.D.L.R.: This article published pre-Covid

Alexis Lichine: The Pope of Wine

I can not count the times, down the years, to come across a memoir by an unfamous offspring of a famous personage in the literary or art world, premised on some anger at the real or perceived shortcomings of the father.

I never thought of a twist on this phenomena asserting itself in the wine world. An ambitious son, Sacha Lichine, who leveraged a heritage into unimaginable riches, emoting on the memory of his wine industry legend father, Alexis Lichine, in the French newspaper Le Monde. At first read, I was bouche bée (astonished).

In the early 80’s, at a café on the rue Saint Honoré, I met up with a strawberry blonde actress in from Hollywood. She thought that I, with my minor roles in French cinéma, could lead her to an audition with an A-list director like Bertrand Blier. 

Suddenly, she had to run to the gare to catch a train to Bordeaux. Her destination: Château Prieuré-Lichine. Her host: Alexis Lichine. When crossing streets, her beauty crushed hearts beneath her heels.

Author of the Wines of France

A Russian-born naturalized American, Alexis Lichine seized the wine world by its trunk. He commanded at various times every branch: retail salesman in NY, leading importer of French wines, author of “Wines of France” and “Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits,” owner of Château Prieuré-Lichine in Bordeaux, and other properties. He was an incessant advocate for French wines in the U.S. and on French TV.

Alexis Lichine had a reputation, even at un brave âge, as a noceur, a lover of parties and beautiful company – “les demoiselles,” as he told People Magazine.

Known as the “Pope of Wine,” Alexis Lichine could be brash. And difficult, to which he confessed: “Of course I am difficult. Marlene Dietrich once told me that people who know what they want are always accused of being difficult.”

When I relocated to Manhattan to sell wine at an upscale shop near Central Park, one spoke there of Alexis Lichine in the hushed tones reserved for kings.

The great Frank Prial of the New York Times gave this salute to Lichine upon his death in 1989. “We had come in the end to think of him as a kind of Monument Historique, dominating the wine scene the way the Eiffel Tower dominates Paris…Imperious, querulous, egotistical…He was one of a kind and we shall not see his like again.” 

Sacha Lichine: To the Château Born

Sacha Lichine grew up in Manhattan, attending the Lycée Français, and spending summers in Bordeaux.  Alexis and his mother divorced in the early 1960’s. 

At an early age, Sacha came to know the wine world and its ways. He organized tours to posh restaurants in France and was a sommelier. Assignments followed at a wine brokerage and a wine importer, and setting up a distributorship for Louis Roederer Champagne in the Caribbean.

All the while, a self-absorbed Alexis reveled in the social frenzy and the grandeur. He split his time between a 14-room apartment on the Upper East Side and Bordeaux.  Father and son were like two neutral countries: occasional friction but no combat.

Sacha had worked his way up, and seemed to know everything about wine. Yet, there was a yearning for more attention and affirmation. With the years came a mellowing that, as Frank Prial noted, brought a coming together in Bordeaux.

Sacha returned to the Château in 1987. When Alexis passed away two years later, Sacha was well-armed to assume control of the Château Prieuré Lichine. 

Sacha expanded production and upgraded the cellars at the Château. He diversified his investments in other wineries and a wine brokerage. Whatever passion there was, it became used up. With Bordeaux no longer lustrous, Sacha moved to Switzerland. In 1999, the Château was sold for a reported $28.8 million. There were debts.

It was to be in the Var, the sun-parched département between Provence and the Riveria, where his true ambition found its place. Sacha’s destiny would remain in wine, rosés rather than reds.

Sacha Lichine of Château d’Esclans in Signature Pink Shirt

The Pasha of French Rosé

In 2006, Sacha Lichine purchased the Château d’Esclans near the the village of La Motte in a vast area of Le Var known as L’Arriere-Pays Varois.

Sacha’s first move was to launch a rosé called Whispering Angel. It is a négociant  [nay-goh-SYAHN] wine produced by purchasing grapes from multiple vineyards. Whereas production at an estate is limited by the surface area of vines, a négociant may increase supply by buying more grapes from other vineyards.

What mild irony comes calling when one recalls that Alexis Lichine urged French vineyards in Burgundy, Alsace and Beaujolais to produce estate-bottled wines by not selling their grapes to négociants. 

The rage for French rosés is manifest in a 55% sales growth in two consecutive years, with more than 800,000 cases from the Provence appellations. Wildly poured (pre-COVID) in South Beach, New York City, and in the Hamptons, Sacha Lichine’s wines represent 20% of all Provence rosés sold, and 25% of their value. Anthony Bourdain loved to quip that rosé is “Hampton’s Juice.”

Whispering Angel: Pale Rosé

Snazzy promotional images for Whispering Angel feature playful young women, who are “the best agents for the brand,” Sacha told Le Monde. The wine’s other seductive selling point: paleness, the paler the better.

From an initial 160,000 bottles, production of 2016 Whispering Angel is nearing a stupefying 5 million. Sacha exports more than 2.4 million bottles to the U.S. He aims to do 12 million. His only frustration is supply – French laws limit the planting of vines. On the Chateau’s website, the ever humble Sacha makes a rather dubious claim that Whispering Angel is “reputedly become the world’s greatest rosé.”

The Chateau d’Esclans vinifies three estate-bottled rosés of distinction. If you ever catch a woman sipping the estate’s Garrus rosé, she is either well-loved or very rich ($95.00 a bottle).

Shunning his father’s taste for bespoke suits, Sacha favors pink shirts, owning a closet-full, mind you. In Town and Country Magazine, Jay McInerney lauded Sacha’s festive side:

“…an irresistible force, a Falstaffian figure who probably drinks more Château d’Esclans than any of his customers and who savors every meal as if it were his last. After spending a long night with him in Miami, I can vouch for his joie de vivre and endurance.”

With his fantastic success and supreme independence comes a certain edge that is dismissive of the wine world, as Sacha told Le Monde:

“It’s the snobbism that I don’t like. All these people who talk about wine in a pretentious way that one cannot understand”

Success Is Not Enough

Sacha learned to swim in the turbulent waters of sheer ambition, and to stay erect amid gusts of narcissism and megalomania.

There were traits of the father that the son took on, among them not to mince words, defiance in ignoring conventions, and the cordial European art of hospitality (l’art de recevoir). To these one can add an essential trait: to sell wine, one must faire du charme (be charming).

In Le Monde, Sacha remarked that his days in Bordeaux have left a sour aftertaste:

“I am from Bordeaux, but I do not like their mentality, the incestuous side. One talks behind your back; everyone wants to take the wife of another.”

These sentiments resonated with those of Alexis who, according to Frank Prial in his book Decantations, “mocked and raged at what he considered the secrecy, the snobbery and the petty jealousies” in the Bordeaux wine scene.

There were early hurts, never forgotten, like fading scars never quite vanished. During the interview with Le Monde, Sacha emoted about intimate details, the dregs of his inheritance.

“I have much respect for him, but he was a very bad father. He was too tough, emotionally abusive*. He did not care for his wives, nor for his children. The world turned around him and his affairs.”

Then another eruption, this one more graphic:

“I have a selective memory. At 14, one pushed my head down into a toilet, and flushed it. That I do not forget.”

Sacha, like Alexis, lives life in accordance with success, relishing its intensity, its pleasures, and its boundlessness. That said, for any son or daughter of a great man, one always exists, in a large or small part, in the shadow of the one gone before.

Success is not enough for breaking free from the iron chains of memory. The writer Jim Harrison cautioned us: “One never gets over anything.”

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*The term Sacha employed was “pratiquait le tabassement émotionnel.” Tabassement is derived from the verb tabasser, which means to hit repeatedly with force, to thrash, literally, to beat up. Pratiquait means practiced. 

The Manicured Caste Style of Emmanuel Macron; The French President Changes Fashion Houses

December 2, 2019 By Bradbury in Société

Official Photo of Emmanuel Macron in Manicured Caste Look

The 19th-century writer Alfred de Musset mused that the black suit was a morbid symbol of mourning for the loss of illusions.

He may have been onto something. The post-crash Sarkozy presidency ushered in a era of austerity with chronic joblessness – the vanishing of hope. Nothing changed with Hollande.

Voilà Emmanuel Macron: a caste-like robotic uniformity of sleekness and symmetry: an all-solid colour-coordinated look of well-cut suits in black and dark blue tones, white and solid blue shirts.

Ties are matching solids or similar two-tones, 3” in width or narrower, hanging no lower than the belt buckle. No stripes. No patterns.

L’heure bleu by Emmanuel Macron

This caste-like uniformity in l’habit du pouvoir (the dress of the powerful) among the powerful retinue serving the nation is shaped at a young age at grandes écoles. A male bonding by means of cloth is omnipresent.

This voluntary role playing is boring, a bit like no-calorie frozen yogurt – no real fun unless you load on juicy condiments. I have been asking around about what fragrance Macron prefers. Guess: Guerlain.

At his inauguration, President Macron wore a blue marine suit, from Jonas & Cie, located on rue d’Aboukir in Paris, a solid white shirt and a narrow solid blue marine tie.   The cost of the suit is a modest $500.

Breaking News: Emmanuel Macron has left Jonas et Cie, Paris. His new fashion house: Smuggler, Limoges. A statement on the Smuggler website: “The timelessness of the style is due to the strength to affirm and respect who we are on a daily basis.”

Gilles Attaf, the CEO of Smuggler, promotes the brand as totally “Made in France.” Cost of Smuggler suits is in the 800 to 1,200 euros range. 

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Arles: L’heure a sonné pour Jim Harrison. Le maire Patrick de Carolis a confié un dossier aux conseillers municipaux pour rend hommage à Jim qui avait un grand attachement à la Petite Rome des Gaules.

September 22, 2019 By Bradbury in Culture

Grand Hôtel Nord-Pinus, Arles. «C’est mon hôtel préféré au monde. » dit Jim Harrison.

«Nous avons eu une bonne dose de nature pendant une journée en Camargue, puis nous nous sommes rendus au Nord-Pinus d’Anne Igou à Arles, mon hôtel préféré au monde, sans exception.» – Jim Harrison

À son décès en mars 2016, Jim Harrison, le prodigieux écrivain et poète, a reçu en France l’admiration autrefois réservée aux rois – un véritable tsunami de distinctions et d’hommages dans la presse écrite et audiovisuelle. La France l’a pleuré comme l’un des leurs.

L’année précédente, une équipe de télévision française avait interviewé Jim dans ses repaires occidentaux pour documenter sa soif de vivre dans de grands espaces et à table (un appétit Pantagruélique). L’adoration française a engendré un surnom: Le Mozart de la Prairie.

François Busnel –  l’animateur et producteur de l’émission littéraire hebdomadaire La Grande Libraire sur France-5, était un grand admirateur de Jim Harrison qui était sur le plateau de l’emission plusieurs fois.

L’amour était réciproque. «La France est tellement en avance sur la façon de vivre la vie au jour le jour», a écrit Jim dans ses mémoires, Off to the Side. C’était une imagination colonisée, fantastiquement, par le vin et la nourriture.

Et naturellement, «… la France est devenue une retraite et un soulagement», où la bonne nourriture était devenue «un réconfort dominant dans sa vie».

Au milieu des années 90, Jim a écrit qu’il allait en France deux fois par an, car ses livres se portaient mieux en France qu’en Amérique.

L’écrivain américain Jim Fergus a décrit comment être à Paris avec Jim Harrison était «comme se promener avec Mick Jagger». Jim était «incroyablement célèbre en France», a-t-il ajouté.

Le magazine L’Obs a demandé à Jim pourquoi les Français le comblaient d’une telle vénération. Sa réponse:

«Pourquoi un pays choisit-il d’adopter un écrivain étranger? C’est peut-être parce que je parle des grands espaces sauvages. Les Français n’ont pas besoin d’entendre parler de New York, car ils ont déjà Paris – une ville bien plus intéressante que New York.»

Dans un épisode de «Parts Unknown» tourné avec Jim Harrison dans le Montana, Anthony Bourdain évoque en notes parfaites ce sentiment:

«Certaines personnes doivent vivre dans de grands espaces où le ciel est éternel. Là où tout le monde doit se pencher sur la terre. »

Jim Harrison en 2007 avec une bouteille de Bandol de Domaine Tempier. Credit: Jeff Topping/The New York Times/Redux

L’attraction gravitationnelle du Sud

Le sud de la France, où l’huile d’olive remplace le beurre du nord, a eu une attraction gravitationnelle sur Jim Harrison. Lorsqu’il sentait l’éclat de la pression sociale à Paris, il «courrait se mettre à couvert à Arles ou à Marseille».

Jim Harrison a dérivé vers la Bastide du Domaine Tempier à Bandol pour se mêler aux parangons d’une sensibilité culinaire accrue. Pendant seize années consécutives, Jim s’est aventuré au Domaine pour déguster les vins de Bandol et la cuisine provençale de Lulu Peyraud, rejoint parfois par Richard Olney, Alice Waters et Kermit Lynch. Ils étaient les conservateurs d’un plaisir richement texturé, comme Jim l’a rappelé:

«Lors d’un déjeuner interminable avec Olney et l’importateur de vin Kermit Lynch et sa femme Gail, photographe, j’ai goûté une succession de 15 ans de Bandols.»

Il y avait des voyages à Collioure, près de la frontière espagnole, pour rechercher les manuscrits du poète Antonio Machado, et pour se délecter des «vins splendides» du Domaine La Tour Vieille qui «tuaient la douleur de la goutte.»

Dans une interview à Nice-Matin, Lulu Peyraud a raconté que les derniers voyages de Jim ont inclus des hommages littéraires: un à la tombe de René Char, le poète, à L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, et un second aux cimetières d’un autre poète, Garcia Lorca, en Espagne.

Toujours Arles

C’était à Arles que l’âme de Jim était à l’aise. Perchée sur le Rhône, Arles est une ville où chaque surface publique porte une patine d’antiquité et les vestiges d’un passé ancien démantèlent la mémoire moderne dans des tons sépia. Jim a écrit sur son attachement affectueux à Arles:

«Je vais souvent à Arles où je loge habituellement dans un petit hôtel pour écrire – Le Nord-Pincus. L’hôtel dispose de chambres assez grandes pour y écrire. C’est mon hôtel préféré au monde. »

«L’effet du sud est immédiat. Une fois en écrivant pendant une semaine au splendide hôtel Nord Pinus à Arles, je suis devenu chaque jour moins sombre et tourmenté, de sorte que ce que j’écrivais là-bas était inhabituellement jubilatoire. Sans aucun doute, si j’écrivais tout un roman dans le sud de la France, je perdrais ma réputation gagnante de mélancolie.»

«La ville avec son antiquité écrasante est contenable pour que vous puissiez marcher ses frontières. Le marché est d’une splendeur polyglotte, moins bourgeois que les marchés d’Avignon et d’Aix-en-Provence, dont la vivacité vous mettra en appétit.»

«J’ai souvent pensé que si je recevais l’avertissement précoce que je décéderais tôt ou tard, je me rendrais à Lyon et je mangerais pendant un mois solide…. Peut-être que je nagerais jusqu’à Arles pour mon dernier souper.»

L’heure d’apéro – La Place du Forum

Le Grand Hôtel Nord-Pinus

Lieu emblématique d’Arles, le Grand Hôtel Nord-Pinus trône sur la place du Forum, le centre social de la ville.

Les atmosphères du Nord-Pinus sont caste boboïde chic mélangé de la nostalgie des jours glorieux. Les souvenirs fanés sont entassés d’un âge d’or des artistes et des écrivains. Les logements sont spacieux et bien aménagés. Vous ne vous sentez jamais pressé.

En juillet 2019, j’ai dérivé vers le Nord-Pinus. La saison estivale amène des tables entassées sur toutes les surfaces planes de la place du Forum.

Je me suis retrouvé dans la riche décoration de l’hôtel. J’ai regardé des photos de célébrités sur les murs du bar. Icônes françaises habituelles. L’image de Jim Harrison était absente. En sortant, je suis passé à la réception ou j’ai laissé ma carte à la réceptionniste avec un lien d’un article que j’avais publié sur Jim.

Le lendemain, j’ai rencontré un journaliste français, Eric Besatti, sur la Place. Ensuite, je suis retourné à la réception du Nord-Pinus. Ma présence fut accueillie avec une certain froideur. La réceptionniste affichait de la désinvolture à propos de Jim.

J’étais déconcerté. La réception glaciale ne correspondait pas à la mémoire récente. En 2017, j’ai écrit à la direction de l’hôtel pour confirmer certains détails des séjours de Jim à Arles. La réponse s’est conclue par:

«…nous allons y réfléchir en HOMMAGE à notre cher JIM. Il nous manque mais heureusement, son esprit est toujours très présent. Nous ne manquerons pas de boire un verre à sa mémoire; il aurait aimé.»

Par hasard, il y a le commentaire d’Instagram sur lequel que je suis tombé fait par une femme française, qui, entrant dans l’hôtel il y a quelques années, a été reçue ainsi:

 «…jai été accueillie par une adorable femme de l hôtel ravie de rencontrer une fan de Jim Harrison …. elle m’a fait visiter l’hôtel et les endroits où Jim passait du temps. Elle m’aurait même fait visiter sa chambre si celle-ci n’avait été occupée. … J’en suis encore reconnaissante et émue!»

En fait, aujourd’hui son esprit n’est plus présent. Jim Harrison a glissé dans l’oubli au Grand Hôtel Nord-Pinus.

En partant, la réceptionniste m’en a expliqué la raison: l’hôtel est sous une nouvelle direction. La nouvelle propriétaire de l’Hôtel Nord-Pinus est Maya Hoffmann, la grande patronne des arts, qui offre à la ville la magnifique Luma Arles.

Luma Arles: La Tour de Frank Gehry

Une plaque en l’honneur de Jim Harrison 

En octobre 2016, le maire Hervé Schiavetti a remis la Médaille de la Ville à Jim Fergus, qui a découvert Arles grâce à Jim Harrison, et comme Jim, a adopté Arles comme son point de chute en France. Au Nord-Pinus, Fergus est resté dans la chambre où Jim logeait.

L’heure a bien sonné pour honorer Jim Harrison avec une plaque dédiée à lui sur la place du Forum près du Grand Hôtel Nord-Pinus.

Le nouveau maire Patrick de Carolis a bien reconnu une occasion de rehausser le profil culturel d’Arles en commémorant Jim Harrison, un écrivain de la race des géants.

De ce fait, le maire de Carolis a confié un dossier aux conseillers municipaux pour rend hommage à Jim qui avait un grand attachement à la Petite Rome des Gaules.

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Ludwig Bemelmans, Count de La Rochefoucauld, and an American Beauty, Unmasked

August 4, 2019 By Bradbury in Culture, Société

“Thru These Portals Pass the Most Beautiful Girls in the World.” Earl Carroll Theater, Hollywood. Credit: Shirley Claire @ earlcarrollgirls.com

The waves of beautiful faces, of bright mouths and of perfect limbs washed over the riveting gazes of admirers at the Earl Carroll Theatre in Hollywood, the flashy theater-restaurant that, in the 1940’s, prefigured the glamour of Vegas.

Undamaged and innocent, the beautiful women on stage evoked an overwhelming desire that their moment would come, soon, before they would have to scatter and discover random fates when the spotlight was no longer.

A beauty among beauties at Earl Carroll, Beverly was uncommonly radiant: silken legs, golden blonde locks, and blue oceanic eyes. Elegant, eloquent and breathing self-esteem, her destiny had a focus, a place: Paris.

In the 1950’s, Paris, reawakened and abounding with Americans of talent and ambition, was a city that she had been bred for. There, she came into the orbit of the celebrated illustrator and storyteller Ludwig Bemelmans.

Her beauty, her irresistible charm, and her love affair with Armand, a French count, inspired Bemelmans’ dazzling imagination when he was living on the banks of Seine.

Bemelmans published, in October, 1957, a novel, The Woman of My Life. Beverly is the woman. Her identity – revealed to me at by surprise – I am now obliged to share.

There is another story, a tranche of her life, that I place, carefully, alongside his. Like some ravishing women, she would trust her life to men, alas, foreboding trouble.

Beverly becomes a conduit for the stories of others who touched her life in Paris in the 1950’s: Le beau monde, art, and the implacable power of love.

Voilà, the stage is empty. The curtain rises. The actors take their places.

Ludwig Bemelmans

We all have access to the donnée of the life of Ludwig Bemelmans, the gifted illustrator and author of more than forty books. Millions know him through the creation of Madeline, a French gamine, and her adventures in a series of children books.

New Yorkers, with a hint of society, relish his delightful murals of Central Park that grace Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel.

Bemelmans was un homme déraciné. A tumultuous childhood: born in the Austrian Tyrol, raised by a French governess who became pregnant by his father and commited suicide, abandoned by his father, shuffled off with his pregnant mother to her family in Germany, kicked back to his uncle, and then sent off to New York in 1914, at the age of 16, for a brief failed reunion with his father. Stupefying.

His youth endued him with the will and energy that Hemingway had written about to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless.” Going on was Bemelmans’ distinction.

Hotels would harbour him. He spent 15 years at the Ritz Carlton. In 1947, the murals at the Carlyle paid for 18 months of his family’s room and board. He would own no property in New York.

He was an autodidact. Bemelmans dedicated himself to the craft of writing and drawing. He incarnated Nora Ephron’s credo that “everything was copy.” Moreover, everything was scenes to illustrate.

The forces that shaped Bemelmans, and the trajectory of his artistry, are chronicled in Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator, written by his grandson John Bemelmans Marciano. A pleasurable read, the countless illustrations affirm a joyous talent.

As Forbes reported, the curators of Bemelmans’ brand – John Bemelmans Marciano and his mother Barbara Bemelmans – have leveraged Bemelmans’ creative gifts into a family business now worth millions.

If there is a great deal of the personality of Bemelmans, as revealed in his writings and in his sublime illustrations, there is very little in the book that is personal.

I want to contextualize the arc of Bemelmans’ days in France. In the case of Paris, the danger of it was financial and emotional dissolution.

Paris: La rue Gît-le-Cœur

Yearning for his own nest in Paris, Bemelmans, in the early 1950’s, found a penthouse on the Left Bank of the Seine on the Quai des Grands-Augustins at Rue 1 Git-le-Coeur.

In his illustrated memoir My Life in Art, Bemelmans wrote: “It was the color of cold salmon….It had a two-person elevator, a statue of Rodin in the entrance hall. and the top floors were furnished like a country home in Westchester.” He sketched the “sweeping panorama of the city” from the penthouse’s terrace.

The penthouse belonged to a friend, Alice Antoinette DeLamar (1895-1983), who inherited, at the age of 23, a massive fortune. Was ascribing the decor to a Westchester home a gesture of privacy? Actually, Alice DeLamar had a residence in Weston CT.

The luxury of the setting, and the glorious views, are revealed in photographs in The Manuscript Hunter, a website dedicated to documenting the life of Alice DeLamar.

The rue Git-le-Coeur is part of Beat Generation lore, as at No. 9 is the Beat Hotel that took in Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin, among others.

On the Quai, a few paces down from 1 Git-le-Coeur, is La petite Ecluse des Grands-Augustins, a Bordelais wine bar that was, during my days on rue Dauphine, the mise en scène for intimate hours etched fiercely in memory.

La Colombe: A Bistro and a Home

La Colombe, on the L’Ile de la Cité, Paris, drawn by Ludwig Bemelmans. Source: My Life in Art, 1958.

There is a feeling Bemelmans had — I have had it myself— that living in Paris is inspiring, though it is not sufficient. You desire to possess something to achieve a sense of belonging there.

In 1953, something in Bemelmans responded to this need. He purchased a building on the north edge of L’Ile de la Cite on rue Colombe, the entrance facing onto the Quai des Fleurs.

“It was precisely what I had been looking for—a lovely house, half palace, half ruin, an old house covered partly with vine,” Bemelmans wrote in My Life in Art. “It had a bistro on the ground floor frequented by clochards and a small garden in front in which people sat.”

His dream, vivid to the point of ecstasy, was to revel in an artistic, social and culinary existence amidst the glamour of Paris, all under one roof.

It was a building dilapidated by neglect, a financial sinkhole. Costs skyrocketed due to delays in acquiring construction permits, and to extensive renovations.

The most frustrating obstacle was the lack of sewer lines. There were no bathrooms. Bemelmans rigged up a taxi with doors designated “Mesdames” and “Messieurs” for transporting guests to relief nearby.

Bemelmans’ dream of entertaining Le Tout Paris, and its posh English-speaking counterpart, was destined to vanish. La Colombe closed after a few months. The building passed into the hands of Michel Valette (1928 – 2016) and his wife Beleine.

The Paris Murals: Rescued

Bemelmans decorated the walls of La Colombe with lively images of la bonne table. In contrast to fanciful images of animals posing as humans in Central Park on the walls at Bemelmans Bar in New York, the walls of La Colombe evoked the gaiety of les dîners en ville.

A variation on the Paris frescoes appeared on the cover of The New Yorker – the magazine featured many covers by Bemelmans over the years – in June, 1954.

New Yorker Cover of June 24, 1954, Artwork by Ludwig Bemelmans

In October, 1954, Michel Valette and his wife Beleine opened La Colombe as a cabaret bistro. In 1962, there was a change in labor laws whereby artists were classified as employees. The social charges and taxes were onerous, forcing La Colombe, in 1964, to close down as a cabaret.

From 1964 to 1985, La Colombe was a 3-star restaurant with Beleine Valette as chef. When the space was sold in 1985, Michel and Beleine preserved the frescoes of Bemelmans, placing them in storage. Michel Valette describes this rescue operation in his book, yet to be published.

The frescos would have passed from sight if not for the vigilance of Jane Bayard Curley, the curator of a 2014 exhibition at New York Historical Society: “Madeline in New York: The Art of Ludwig Bemelmans.”

The year: 2012. How Jane must have trembled with pure excitement, like finding a precious jewel in an old drawer, when, at a public auction, she discovered five frescoes of Bemelmans from La Colombe.

Jane’s heightened sensitivity to Bemelmans’ artistry was shared by the fervid art collectors Charles and Deborah Royce. The frescoes underwent a six-month restoration at the Center Art Studio in New York where conservators restored the original vibrant brushwork.

It was to the Ocean House Hotel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, that Charles and Deborah Royce joined the La Colombe murals with 21 illustrations of Bemelmans, as well as two panels, from a total of fifteen, that were originally commissioned by Aristotle Onassis in 1953 for the playroom of Onassis’s yacht Christina O.

At the Ocean House Hotel, you have the satisfaction of knowing that, despite any misfortunes, these delightful artistic creations were fated to reside in a common space.

Ludwig Bemelmans Enraptured

In My Life in Art, Bemelmans’ elaboration on how he found La Colombe is incompatible with a someone of his station in high society. After several interchanges with Bemelmans, a clochard (a vagrant) leads him to the decrepit property.

Michel Valette provided me with some nuance. Bemelman’s decision to sell La Colombe, at what Valette referred to as a bargain basement price, was precipitated by a désespoir d’amour – the lose of a love object that shattered all hope and all joy.

In retrospect, it was this younger woman who had led Bemelmans to La Colombe. The entire project was a grand romantic adventure. It was out of that excitement, finding love where he thought there had been none, that Bemelmans envisioned a rhapsodic passage to a new life.

He must have had the sensation that Hemingway felt it in the Sun Also Rises: “of things coming that you could not prevent happening.” That Bemelmans would never arouse her love in return was a discovery that made the sale of La Colombe unavoidably poignant.

Her name was Régine, according to Jane Bayard Curley. Worse still, Jane messaged me, was the suitor that Régine eloped with: Henry Freund, the younger brother of Bemelmans’ wife. Shattering.

In escaping emotional and financial ruin, Bemelmans was emboldened by the company of Count Amand. By 1957, when they passed time together at the artist’s studio outside of Paris, Bemelmans was preparing for a one-man show of his oil paintings at the Galerie Durand-Ruel that fall. A new dawn, as a painter. 

Armand II de La Rochefoucauld

Among the French nobility, La Rochefoucauld is among the most illustrious families, their origins dating to the 10th and 11th centuries.

The Count Armand de La Rochefoucauld (1902-1995) befriended Ludwig Bemelmans in Paris in the late 1940’s. In The World of Bemelmans, published in 1955, Armand is identified as a habituée of the chic bistro Le Montana on the left bank, and an investor in a seedy bistro, Le Petit Balcon.

Although single at the time, Armand had a son, Armand III, born in Lisbon in 1944, out of wedlock to Renée Brandt, whom he never married and whom never took a noble title.

Armand was, as his son attested, un fétard, a man who was fond of drink, bars and clubs, and women, preferably vivacious.

Michel Valette informed me that Armand was a bit louche, having made several appearances at La Colombe, in 1954, after Michel had reopened it as a cabaret.

Armand had been engaged to Beverly, an American identified as Evelyn in The Woman of My Life. A strong current of emotion passed through them, a profound attraction. She marked him with an indissoluble appreciation for high tone women whose langue maternelle was English.

A cocktail of beauty, ambition and wealth, Esther Millicent Clarke intoxicated Armand at first sight. Born to a British father and Japanese mother in Tokyo, interned by the Japanese in the Philippines at the outbreak of World War II after which time she emigrated to the United States. Divorced, Esther had been married to a rich Californian.

The youthful Esther, 35, came to Paris in 1956. Her daughter, Cheryl Nesbitt, attended a posh private school in Switzerland. At last, a beautiful woman who had seen more of the world than Armand, 54, had.

Shunning disfavor by Armand’s kin, they snuck off to Saanen, Switzerland where they wed on Feb. 5, 1957. A daughter Lise was born in 1958.

The year is 1957. In photographs with his close friend Ludwig Bemelmans at Ville D’Avray, Armand, now married, appears relaxed in a sport coat and tie. A catered lunch. A stroll along a pond.

Their turmoils were behind them. They appear at ease with life and drawn close to its essence.

Armand had finally turned to a life in the tranquil broad wake of French nobility that he had envisioned. The seas had calmed. His course was fixed.

Chateau de La Rochefoucauld, La Charente, where Armand III married in 2007

Armand III – L’Enfant Terrible of French Nobility

Turbulence of la première classe: Count Armand III de La Rochefoucauld lived on the lam, as a wanted man, in the 1990’s.

A swindler extraordinaire, listed by Interpol in about 90 countries, he was convicted four times in several countries for passing fake travelers cheques and false identities.

In the states, Armand III’s notoriety would have spawned his own version of  “Celebrity Aristocrat,” have had him on late night chat shows, and giving motivational speeches at addiction clinics.

The French harbour no such sentiments for royals. In 2015, police raided his property and discovered passports with a photo of Armand III in numerous false identities, 3,000 euros in his pocket, and more than 1 million in fake travelers cheques.

Despite his protest that all this was vestiges of a former life, he was jailed.  I imagine he was mouthing words of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.”

After 14 months, he was freed without charges being filed. Upon his return, he learned that the court was confiscating his cherished classic cars: a 1952 Cadillac Eldorado, and a 1955 Buick that had been owned by Cary Grant.

It was a deep dormant wound, waiting to be evoked by opportunity, that led to his impossible behavior.

The resentment, he opined, of being declared a “bastard” at the age of twelve when his father, who never wed Armand III’s mother, Renée Brandt, married Esther Millicent Clarke.

He was barely 12. His family refused to acknowledge him in public. His grandfather deemed in his will for Armand III to remain childless so that his illegitimate birth would result in no heirs. His uncle became his paternal figure.

A conjugal life arrived in 2007 when he married Anne Caroline Landal des Essars, 25 years his junior. They decamped to a manor house in Normandy.

Armand III settled a score with his grandfather. He became a progéniteur: three daughters, the youngest was only ten days old when he was hauled off to la tôle (jail).

In interviews, he has a condescending casualness towards his persecutors, as if his transgressions were mere adolescent pranks.

Armand III’s fashion style is “monogrammed slippers”: dated opulence, with a dash of decadence. Fragrance? My hunch: Guerlain’s Habit Rouge.

He is sustained indomitably by his wife Anne Caroline. I place his story here with the belief that he may have viewed, during his childhood, the gracious silhouette of Beverly. On March 23, I received an email from Armand III, who wrote:

I very well remember Beverly. Beautiful woman, living rue de l’Université, ground floor, on the right. I even remember the furniture, very 1930/1940. I often pass by, asking myself what became of her. My father wasn’t “engaged” to her, but very much in love.

The Woman of My Life

Published in October, 1957, The Woman of My Life recounts the adventures of Armand, a French Duke, in his search for the love of his life.

The opening passage is a reverie to Evelyn, which fills an entire page in John Bemelmans Marciano’s book. However, this tribute could represent Bemelmans’ channeling his devotion for Régine.

Along the way, the Duke has to overcome a fear of women, and perhaps an inborn indifference to females. Towards the end of the book, he loses a woman, who was “the woman of his life,” to a younger suitor, a situation that mirrors his rejection by Régine.

Evelyn, the American beauty, is the ever-present force who perseveres in her devotion. The narrative closes with Armand and Evelyn boarding a boat at Le Havre for America, a marriage to follow on board.

John Bemelmans Marciano asserts that the book is “loosely based on the life of Armand de la Rouchefoucauld (sic). This strikes me as dubious. It’s more of an imaginative tribute to Armand, and to Beverly, inspired by common experiences.

The New York Times accorded The Woman of My Life cheerful praise.

Beverly 

Among the ephemera that my mother left in boxes, I discovered the book The Woman of My Life. Instantly, I recognized the author from evenings of merriment at Bemelmans Bar in my days, those endless days, in New York.

I opened the book. Letters and cards fell to my feet. I felt a tinge of excitement. Fragments of an inner life revealed to me. Et voila, Beverly writes:

“The Woman of My Life is about my Paris adventures (I am Evelyn) and Armand is my ex-fiancé.”

Beverly was a dear friend of my mother at the time when they both performed at the Earl Carroll Theater.

Radiant with ambition, savage with youth, and armed with beauty, they came to Hollywood full of brave illusions.  They ran together, and ran away from men who were no good. The mobster Mickey Cohen, for one.

Beverly was seductive, and at the same time untrusting, as life had already taught her some hard lessons. She had two young daughters to support, and, as a consequence, she devoted herself to men of a certain standing.

How she arrived in Paris in the early 1950’s is a mystery. She must have known that the move marked a turning point in her life, out of line with everything that had preceded it. According to Armand III, Beverly knew Esther Millicent Clarke prior to Esther’s marriage to Armand II.

In Paris, she reveled in hosting cocktails and dinners for American expats. She kept up with the gossip on celebrities in from New York and the coast. 

Beverly wasn’t into boozing coupled with venery of the Paris Review crowd, rituals that co-founder George Plimpton imported back to his native city. She did not hang out in cafés. Hers was a more serious world where her daughters, and love, were all consuming.

Armand is a “gentleman.” She knows that there is real passion there, yet she realizes that whatever splendor she evokes in his heart is inadequate for him to become a father for her girls.

In 1957, there was trouble:

“Well, I have had no luck. I married an Arabian prince in the Mosquée, but before we could have a civil marriage, he was sent off to prison for I don’t know how long. (Being one of the leaders of the rebellion.) And I’m told the marriage isn’t legal – I don’t know what to do.”

The truth is in the stars. They had lost their shimmer. I am confidant that Beverly regained their light again, incandescent as ever.

The Girls

It is Christmas, 1957. Her girls at the doorway to adulthood, eager to launch themselves into the world, and she, dangling, suspended in time. In Beverly’s own tender hand:

“Delylle is 15 now and very pretty. She thinks she is Brigit Bardot for the moment. She is very French in her ways – but an Elvis Presley fan and did you know that the James Dean cult and Elvis Presley mania has crept into the continent.

“Sharon is very lovely and serious. She has decided to study medicine and will enroll later La faculté de Médecine. She is now 17.”

Holiday Greetings from Beverly in Paris, Christmas, 1957

Note: Since publication of this article, Beverly revealed as Beverly McKie (née O’Brien), AKA O’Brien-Samana. Her daughters: Sharon Diane McKie and Delylle Ann McKie.

Paris: Le Dôme

An early evening in January last year, when an eerie calm draped over terror-weary Paris, I dined with an esteemed American attorney, of the art world, in the front room of Le Dôme in Montparnasse.

Sitting on a banquette, while the attentive waiter explained the wine list, a young woman walked in, and slipping out of an elegant black coat, looked back toward us, exposing an open face, warm, unhurried, her watery blonde hair brushing her soft features. I saw her smile.

I flinched, and recognized her instantly: Beverly, at twenty-six, at the Earl Carroll Theater, fresh, vital, and totally unaware of what one day she would come to experience in Paris.

I was plunged into panic trying to imagine what Beverly did become, and how her girls, Sharon and Delyelle, got on with their lives in Paris, or elsewhere.

I thought of the city that lay all around me in dawn and darkness, the lights dancing off of the Seine. Down through the years, among the thousands of passive faces in the Metro, the expressions of wonder at vernissages and of joy at restaurants, did I gaze, uninformed, for a fleeting moment, at Beverly, Sharon or Delyelle?

A sentimental notion. I yield to the remorseless truth: I came too late to the party. Paris holds secrets that it never unveils.

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A Meditation: Gloria Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Jo Davidson

June 20, 2019 By Bradbury in Culture

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, bronze cast, 1916, by Jo Davidson. Credit: Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery

She was at peace with life, free to illuminate all its careening emotions, the weightless days and the troubled ones, and the rebounding reinventions of self.

In the spring of 2016, Gloria Vanderbilt (1924-2019), came forward with Anderson Cooper, her son with her late fourth husband Wyatt Cooper, to tell the story of her life in two medium: an e-epistolary memoir, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son Talk About Life, Love, and Loss, and the HBO documentary, Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper.

When her world was young, it was taken from her. There was a riveting custody trial in 1934 that removed her from a derelict, inattentive mother to the care of her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney – heiress, art patron, sculptor, and founder of, in 1930, the Whitney Museum.

Much is revealed of how she, a sublime beauty of uncommon wealth, attached herself, by passion, love or marriage, to men. In her pulling away from her aunt in 1941, when she fled to Los Angeles, and from ostracizing her impoverished mother from 1945 to 1960, there came calling the imminence of deep regret.

I found appealing her frankness, and all denuding of self-pity. She handled her dimming past as if caressing worn stones in her hands. Her strength is in her understanding that she can not explain everything, life has things to tend to.

From my point of view, she bore within her an “imago” – the idealized image of her mother – developed in her lonely childhood. She carried forward this ‘imago’ into adulthood, engendering within her psyche a dédoublement, a splitting of the world of fictive parental love from the harsh cold reality of a chronic painful fracture.

The feeling of being orphaned by legal proxy from her mother was heightened by the loss of her father Reginald Vanderbilt, who passed away from alcohol abuse when Gloria was fifteen months into the world. In the alcove of Gertrude’s bedroom, there was a sculpted bust of her father, which reawakened Gloria’s curiosity about a man she never experienced. The sculptor: Jo Davidson.

Gertrude and Jo: A twenty-five year friendship

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney first encountered Jo Davidson in 1908 at the Paris restaurant La Venue. Whereas Gertrude pursued many artists she supported as lovers, her nearly twenty-five year friendship with Jo Davidson possessed an essential trait: no venery.

In the 1920’s, Gertrude patronized the Paris dress shop of Yvonne, a fashion designer and Jo’s wife. When Yvonne passed away suddenly in New York, Jo and his son Jacques spent three days in May, 1934 (five months before the custody trial) at Gertrude’s estate in Old Westbury on Long Island. Jo wrote to her soon after his departure for France that, paralyzed with grief, he was unable to work.

The passing of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in April, 1942, brought Gloria Vanderbilt back to New York for the funeral. In her book, Gloria wrote, “I now understand that I was far more related to spirit to Aunt Ger and I never became close enough to be aware of this. Another regret.”

The service was held on April 20, 1942, at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue in New York City where Gloria’s grandfather had donated the portal, and her great grandfather had sold the site to the church.

Gloria took her seat with family members on the pews on the front left side.  Certainly, she glanced to the pews on the front right side to see, among the artists her aunt encouraged and supported, the bearded visage of Jo Davidson.

At the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, there is a permanent exhibit “Biographer in Bronze”: fourteen portraits in bronze and terra-cotta fashioned by Jo Davidson between 1908 and 1946.

Among these works is the resplendent bronze of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, which she commissioned in 1916. “This was her way of helping me carry on. . . . Her enthusiasm did much to help sustain my courage in this period,” acknowledged Jo Davidson.

The glory.

Jo Davidson

Jo Davidson (1883-1952), born to parents of Russian heritage on the lower east side, articulated an ardent longing for his works to find a home in the parks of his native New York City.

The consoling affirmation would arrive, although years after his passing. Where there were none, there are now three: Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia in Little Flower Park (1957) on the Lower East Side; Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park (1992), and his cherished friend Franklin D. Roosevelt at FDR Four Freedoms Park (2012) on Roosevelt Island.

##

For the Writer Jim Harrison, a Bandol Red of the Domaine Tempier Was His Reverie, His Lyric.

February 3, 2019 By Bradbury in Culture, Vin et Cuisine

Jim Harrison, in 2007, quaffing a bottle of Bandol from Domaine Tempier. Credit: Jeff Topping/The New York Times/Redux

Ndlr: Lulu Peyraud died Oct 7, 2020. At Lulu’s table, her devotees, among them Richard Olney and Alice Waters, found a true connection to the upper world of Provencal cuisine. Her lessons, many unspoken, few forgotten. Jim Harrison cherished her friendship.

Proem

So they drifted, the paragons of heightened culinary sensibility, first one by one, then by pairs, to the large proud biscuit-coloured Bastide, with faded blue shutters and orange tile roof, of the Domaine Tempier, and to the wines of Lucien Peyraud and the Provençal cuisine of Lulu Peyraud: Richard Olney, Alice Waters, Kermit Lynch, and, in the 1990’s, Jim Harrison.

Now, consider this: For sixteen years straight, 1994 until 2010, Jim Harrison made an annual pilgrimage to the Domaine Tempier to sit at Lulu’s table, and take his ease with friends and great wines. His ferocious devotion to Lulu would be the envy of Queens.

Here was civilization at its most comforting. In the distance, the sea sat quietly.  The open sky blanketed everything. Food and wine sustained lively conversations and bursts of laughter. The glory must have seemed, at times, endless. They were the curators of a richly textured happiness.

In the annals of the wine world was there ever a phenomena so brilliant, I ask? These leading men and leading ladies gave the feel of a movie set in a time-honoured way. Jim Harrison’s casting call in this memorable mise-en-scene came by way of a lusty palate.

At crepuscule, La Tourtine, a vineyard of Le Domaine Tempier, AOC Bandol, a balcony to the dazzling sea

…we can’t become inconsolable just because life is incomprehensible.

                                                                                     Dalva, Jim Harrison

The writer and poet Jim Harrison, who Hollywood took in with the filming of his Legends of the Fall (1994), did not let life’s incomprehensibilities mess with any iota of pleasure.  Confronted with something bewildering and impenetrable, he sought consolation in food and wine, consuming nearly unspeakable quantities with unending pleasure.

This is a man to whom wine matters like few others you will ever read. I found that Harrison brings to wine the boundless enthusiasm of a very bright child, self-absorbed in pleasure: wine “draws in the world that surrounds us…increases the best aspects of camaraderie and sweetens the tongue for conversation,” swinging your mood from”gentle to gentler.”

His was an imagination colonized, fantastically, by wine. For Harrison, wine makes a seductive sort of promise that you will not only experience great pleasure, but that it will cleanse your adult consciousness of dissatisfaction, regret and despair, while gifting you with metaphor, rapture, and lust:

“On a possibly morose day this single glass (of wine) was capable of producing literary ecstasy……Wine crawls in the window of your life and never leaves.”

“Drinking wine is beyond the vagaries of language and numbers and finds its essence, like sex, totally within the realm of the senses.”

First Love: French Reds, With Sorrow

Harrison was adamant in his preferences: “My first love, French reds.”  Bordeaux? No, he told France Culture radio; he disdained Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.

His passion was for red wines that possessed a particular quality: sorrow. Ones that wore proudly a latent sadness.

How does wine acquire these personifying qualities? In brief, when vines suffer. These are wines from vines planted in soil impoverished by hot arid climates. Required is a root system to penetrate deep into the cracked earth to search out moisture. These are wines with a specific goût de terroir: those of Southern France.

What Harrison found extraordinarily gratifying were animalistic blends showing dark fruits, tautness, the hint of wild herbs (garrigue), spice and minerals, at times licorice and leather. One can add to this list high alcohol approaching 15%.

The red wines that spoke to his soul were those from Bandol.

Bandol: The Bestial Mourvèdre

Cradled in the windswept hills about the seaside town of Bandol, the AOC Bandol spans 3500 acres. For limiting soil erosion and retaining moisture, winemakers employ low dry-stone walls to form terraces, called “restanques.”

The Mourvèdre grape is the soul of Bandol, a late-ripening rustic grape that yields bestial, gamey red wines of dark fruits and supple tannins. The thick skins of Mourvèdre allow the vintages to age well. In Bandol, the blends contain 50%, or more, of Mourvèdre, along with Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah.

I submit that there is something deeply epiphanic in the congruity between adjectives employed for Jim Harrison’s writing style and those that describe the Bandol wines he cherished, to wit: masculine, rustic, earthy, gamey and lusty.

Sexy, Sultry, and Moody like Brando

A keen aperçu from the wine writer Elizabeth Gabay: Bandol is “sexy, sultry, and moody like Brando.”

When Elizabeth made that remark, she was unaware of Lanie Goodman’s  reportage that in October, 1954, Marlon Brando, 30, visited his fiancée Josanne Mariani, 19, and her family in Bandol. He had fallen for the local girl at a New York party thrown by the acting teacher Stella Adler.

During a four-day stay, the capricious Brando bristled at media hounds. Within a year, the romance had faded. Today, pictures of Brando in Bandol hang at some local wineries.

Domaine Tempier: His Reverie, His Lyric

Among the 59 producers in Bandol, Jim Harrison had a rhapsodic thirst for the Domaine Tempier. He consumed more Tempier than any other wine. Un amour fou.

“I’ve been through at least fifty cases of their (Tempier) Bandol, so you must trust me.”

When Harrison wrote that the “Domaine Tempier Bandol, for reasons of temperament (is) my favorite wine,” he was evoking the wine’s rustic, intense flavors that resonate with his consciousness of living in harmony with the feral outdoors.

The exultant, unabashedly richly textured mouthfeel of Mourvèdre in the red wines of Domaine Tempier was Harrison’s reverie, his lyric:

“Wine can offer oxygen to the spirit, I thought…..and not incidentally opening a bottle Domaine Tempier Bandol because I had read a secret bible in France that said to drink red after dark to fight off the night in our souls.”

Red Wine of the Domaine Tempier – the Exultant Intense Mourvèdre

Domaine Tempier: History

A family enterprise since 1834, the Domaine Tempier covers about 85 acres that are a mosaic of terroirs – parcels scattered about the windswept hills of Bandol, facing south in the burning sun.

Whereas most producers in Bandol bottle more rosé than red, the Domaine Tempier is one of the few wineries that produces more red than rosé .

In 1936, Lucie “Lulu” Tempier married Lucien Peyraud, an engineer. Her father handed them the Domaine Tempier.  In 1941, Bandol was accorded status as an A.O.C. (appellation d’origine contrôlée) with just 10 wineries.

As leader of the local wine growers, Lucien spearheaded the large-scale replanting of Mourvèdre. Initially, Mourvèdre represented at least twenty percent of the blend. Today, it is a minimum of fifty percent, making Bandol unique among appellations in France.

Lucien passed along management of the Domaine to his sons Francois and Jean-Marie, who promoted the cuvées de terroir (single vineyard vintages) of La Tourtine, La Migoua and, later, Cabassaou. The current manager of the Domaine is Daniel Ravier.

Domaine Tempier – La Tourtine

When Harrison states that Domaine Tempier is his favorite wine for “reasons of temperament,” he is evoking the wine’s rustic, intense flavors that resonate with his consciousness of living in harmony with the feral outdoors.

“How can I write wildly without the help of these creatures? Right now I’m drinking an ’87 Bandol Tourtine to give me courage to sign my name.”

Among the single vineyard vintages of Domaine Tempier, I perceive La Tourtine is the blend that gets deeply inside of his head, inciting his pertinacious “id” – the reptilian urge for sensual pleasures, venery too.

There is a feeling Harrison had — I have had it myself with the cuvée La Pierre Noir at this vineyard — that the first sip of La Tourtine crystallizes a special relationship between him and the terroir, a sort of unspoken intimacy. You come to appreciate the essence of wine.

It is for Harrison a mystical bonding with a speck of land – only 11 acres. Perched on top of a hillside in Le Castellet, La Tourtine is buffeted by frequent winds and exposed to the constant rays of a brilliant sun.

It turns out that the wines of La Tourtine are incredibly exposed to harsh conditions. Under a brutal summer sun, the soft clay and limestone soil hardens, opening large cracks that resemble crevices on a cliff. Voilà, deep roots, a harbinger of latent sorrow.

Here is wine merchant Kermit Lynch’s notes on La Tourtine, a cuvée of 80% Mourvèdre, 10% Grenache, and 10% Cinsault:

“A wonderful synthesis of the terroir’s tremendous complexity, where aromas of squid ink, graphite, and crushed stone are framed by firm tannins. Decant to enjoy now, but it’s marvelous with age.”

La Tourtine vineyard, Domaine Tempier, AOC Bandol

Backstory: A Most Uncommon Script

When Jim Harrison wandered onto the grounds of the Domaine Tempier in 1994 to meet Lulu Peyraud, it was a path well traveled.

His presence at the Domaine was anteceded by a thirty-year saga of gastronomic indulgences shared by extraordinary personalities, whose memories, once heaped there, had them, like Harrison, constantly returning.

Richard Olney: Avant-garde

Those who make cuisine and wine their profession revere the brilliance of Richard Olney. His influence emanated from an unlikely perch: a spartanly-furnished house on a hilltop in the French village of Sollies-Toucas near the port city of Toulon. (From nearby Pignans, I made a furtive inachieved approach in 1995.)

Sans phone nor television, his was a hermetic existence completely focused on the perfection of the culinary arts. A brilliant fanatic, Olney shared his lucid precisions in 35 books he wrote on food and wine.

Moving to France from Brooklyn in 1951 with artistic aspirations, and a yen for bohemian ways, Olney met Lucie “Lulu” Peynaud at a dinner party in the 60’s in Paris.

He soon found himself being tutored on winemaking by Lulu’s husband Lucien at their estate. An imperishable bond formed between them.

Alice Waters: Chez Panisse

In 1974, Onley was on a book tour in San Francisco where Alice Waters popped into his cooking demo at Williams Sonoma. She invited him to dine at Chez Panisse, the ineffaceably mythic restaurant in Berkeley she founded with friends in 1971.

Olney’s credo of fresh local market ingredients was like some kind of eternal oath for Alice. She visited Sollies-Toucas in August, 1975, telling the Guardian in 2010, “…what I got from Richard, was this total conviction that what he was doing was the right thing.”

Onley brought Alice Waters to the Domaine Tempier –  the wines of Lucien and the Provençal cuisine of Lulu. For Alice, an inspiration — so natural, unimagined, longed for.  Alice ordered Domaine Tempier for her restaurant.

An aggressively worn copy of Olney’s ”Simple French Food” dwells in Chez Panisse like a pense–bête to do things the right way.

Kermit Lynch: Wine Merchant

After opening a wine shop in Albany CA. north of Berkeley in 1972, Kermit Lynch was keen on launching an import business. Alice Waters inspired him, and he journeyed to Olney’s table in 1976.

The lithe Lynch impressed Olney as an old-fashioned bohemian. When Olney served him his first glass of Bandol, a 1969 red, Lynch trembled with discovery.

For Lynch, Olney stood at the entrance of a new life that he had always envisioned.  Olney’s sharp opinions and good taste were like a brief exciting apprenticeship.

Off they went for a week visiting vineyards in Burgundy and the Côtes-du-Rhône to taste wines to import. For Lynch, his adventures in the vineyards had the excitement of a youthful love affair. He would memorialize these cherished years of discovery in a book.

Olney brought Lynch into the constellation of the Domaine Tempier.  “In the years ahead,” Lynch wrote, “we (Alice and I) visited so often and were received so well, we felt like part of the family.”  Lucien Peynaud said Lynch was mon fils.

As a Berkeley grad student in 1978, I drifted into Lynch’s shop with my French fiancée, but I was soon on my way to another sort of life in Paris to sip wines at Steven Spurrier’s shop.

Lynch never had time for scoring wine on a 100-pt scale so dear to wine trade bores the world over. Neither did Jim Harrison, who thought that numerical scores were all about marketing.

The France that the Peynauds revealed to Waters and Lynch was the cultured world of food and wine, a veritable symphony of flavors, and ways in which food and wine exist in perfect harmony. That, and what the French call l’art de recevoir – the art of hospitality at home.

In the early 1990’s, Alice encouraged Olney to write a book lionizing Lulu Peyraud’s culinary gifts. Lulu’s Provençal Table, which includes a history of the Domaine, remains in print.

Lulu’s Provencal Table: The Exuberant Food and Wine from the Domaine Tempier Vineyard, by Richard Olney

Lynch bought a home in Le Beausset, a few miles from the Domaine Tempier. Over the years, the ascendency of Bandol’s reputation can be attributed, in part, to the passion of Kermit Lynch, a fierce champion of the appellation’s wines.

Jim Harrison: Visits to Lulu’s Table

In France, Harrison was heralded as ‘un grand.’ He visited France often where he was feted on cultural shows, at lectures and book signings, usually with a glass of red in hand. French journalists went to Montana and Arizona to interview him.

The French cherished Harrison’s absolute unselfconsciousness, a natural ease like an animal that had wandered in from the prairie.  He drew people’s admiration because you never knew what he was going to say. He spoke in a gliding halting cadence, with humour and naked candor, yielding unexpected pleasure and envy.

Take one such moment on the French show “Le Circle de Minuit” where Harrison extolled on the virtue of cooking at home:

“I started cooking to give up adultery. You see what I mean? If you are chasing women, it is very destructive to your writing, but cuisine keeps you home, and that pacifies you. You save millions of dollars for a possible divorce. Then you can spend that money on truffles and wine.”

In an interview in the newspaper Nice-Matin, Lulu Peyraud recounts the time she was in the states when Kermit Lynch slipped her a book by Jim Harrison, and said, “This one likes your wine and buys it often from me.”

Lulu read all of Harrison in French. Her favorite: Dalva, the story of a eponymous part-Sioux woman in search of her displaced child.

Jim Harrison captures the ambiance of the Domaine he first visited in 1994:

“I’m rather haunted by this vineyard. The house and gardens still seem turn-of-the-century, the Provencal light is diffused by the granitic mountains, and the estate is so close to the Mediterranean that there is a salty tinge to the violet-blushed air.”

Mischief would arrive:

“At one endless lunch with Olney and the wine importer Kermit Lynch and his wife Gail, a photographer, I tasted a fifteen-year succession of Bandols, after which I was taken to Marseilles to chat before a thousand of so folks. This didn’t exactly pan out so they say.”

When in the south, there were side trips to Collioure near the Spanish border to search for manuscripts of the poet Antonio Machado. Several times Harrison would stop in Arles to stay at the Hotel Nord-Pinus, his “favorite hotel in the world.”

La Tourtine vineyard, Domaine Tempier, Bandol, France

Mozart of the Terroir

After 2010, Harrison’s poor health prevented annual visits to the Domaine Tempier. There was diabetes. Issues with his tonnage. “My valves were blown according to the body mechanics, the doctors, my threads stripped bare from purported overuse.” His writing was shadowed by mortality.

In an interview with Nice-Matin, Lulu Peyraud recounted that Harrison had made two visits after 2010 to the Domaine.  Both trips involved literary homages: one to the tomb of the poet René Char in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgues in the Vaucluse, and the other to the burial grounds of the poet Garcia Lorca in Spain.

Blows followed, principal among them the death of his wife Linda in October, 2015. Jim carried on with his writing.

“Death is like a sniper,” wrote Nora Ephron. When his body was ambushed on March 26, 2016, Jim was writing, with a pen in hand, a new poem at his desk, as the author Philip Caputo wrote in a Facebook post. A heart attack.

By all accounts, his friends expressed a sorrow for him that one reserved for kings. France mourned him as one of their own. His kingdom was the meadow, the forest, the river, and the high desert. Like a lord, he had, always, a disposition for a feast, washed down with rivers of French reds.

In an earlier time, Harrison felt he had escaped the sniper’s aim on a stormy flight back home:

I was still trembling from having kissed death’s ass in the face and fetched two wines from the cellar, a Migoua and a Tourtine Bandol from Lulu Peyraud’s Domaine Tempier. I slowly drank both of these superb bottles while meditating…After a short while, this blessed Bandol began to take over and I again realized that we are only flowers for the void.

Jim Harrison died at his Arizona ranch, alone, surrounded by the harmony of nature, bottles of Domaine Tempier, his spiritual source, nearby, and close to his final companion, his dog.

Epilogue 

Le Domaine Tempier

The years have their closure. Many of the people have passed from sight. What remains: the tradition.

From the perch of vine-packed terraces of Bandol, you grasp that this is Europe where you stand in the shadow of tradition.  You come to appreciate the lessons and pleasures of tradition passed down through the years. Among these pleasures is the incomparable taste and texture of Mourvèdre and the wines of Bandol.

Never part of any fashion or fad, Bandol does not play games, try to seduce you, or attempt to be modern. You take Bandol for the tradition it embodies like I do, or if not, you can dismiss it as a matter of taste, so you say. Otherwise, what better reason to have Bandol, red and rosé, in your cellar: it is a wine like nothing else.

Postscript: The Literary Bandol

In At Last, the British novelist Edward St. Aubyn winds down in acrid ironic prose the lacerating saga of Patrick Melrose, born into the high tone world of the upper crust, and finally liberated from the ravages of addiction.

St. Aubyn makes numerous references to the family’s house in Provence, where he was sexually assaulted on a staircase by his demented father, a raging pedophile. In articles and interviews, the location of this house is identified, generically, as in Provence.

The authentic location: Le Plan du Castellet – a hameau situated in the commune of Le Castellet, north of Bandol and a few miles from the bastide of Domaine Tempier.

##

Note on sources: The writing of Jim Harrison on wine and Bandol cited in this article can be found in two collections, “The Raw and the Cooked,” 2001, and “A Really Big Lunch,” 2017, and from recorded interviews with France Culture radio and appearances on French television.

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