THE PARISIEENNE by Agnes Goodsir (1924) The model is her lover Cherry Dunne.
The other day, someone said “I was down in your native country recently.”
“Charente?” I said.
“No,” he said, puzzled. “Australia.”
My confusion was genuine. French culture is so overwhelming that it soon erases the one you arrived with. Hence the fact that Australians haven’t left much of a mark on France – unless, that is, one counts Harry Seidler’s neoBrutalist Australian Embassy in Paris, a building with the charm of a brick outhouse but none of its utility.
Imagine our surprise, then, when, a few years ago, art historian Karen Quinlan turned up from Bendigo in Victoria to explain that our apartment was once the home of Australian painter Agnes Goodsir.
Over the centuries, our building, c. 1760, has seen some changes. Some time in the 19th century, six tiny chambres de bonnes or maids’ rooms just under the roof, with no running water or heating and a single toilet on the landing, became three studios, then two, and finally a single apartment with a terrace, a proper bathroom and kitchen, but with the toilet still, to the bemusement of visitors, beside what is now our front door.
Goodsir lived here in the nineteen-twenties and ‘thirties with her American companion Rachel Dunne aka Cherry. They’d met in London when Dunne was married, and eloped to Paris, where they shared an apartment until Agnes died in 1939. Oddly, given that Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier lived two floors below and Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas ten minutes’ walk away in one direction , while Nathalie Clifford Barney maintained her gay salon in the other, they didn’t appear to have socialised with any of them.
They did hobnob with another Aussie expat, the painter Rupert Bunny, whose work enlivened my adolescent visits to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At a time when no movie could expose a navel or show a married couple sharing a bed, it unapologetically displayed his voluptuous pre-Raphaelite ladies lounging half-naked, reading magazines and sipping lemonade. (Do they still hang his paintings, I wonder? More likely, in this era of a new puritanism, his work has been retired as insufficiently “woke”.)
SUMMER TIME by Rupert Bunny (1907)
Bunny, another elegant married gay, school of Oscar Wilde, enjoyed all the advantages denied woman artists of the day. With his own studio, he didn’t need to rub shoulders in the so-called académies of Montparnasse which offered cheap tuition, if you didn’t mind squalor.
"All the rooms were packed," complained one female student at a school where Goodsir studied, the Académie Colarossi. “In the one where we were drawing from the nude, the air was stifling because of an overheated stove. We were positively melting in an inferno permeated by the strong smell of perspiring bodies mixed with scent, fresh paint, damp waterproofs and dirty feet; all this was intensified by the thick smoke from cigarettes and the strong tobacco of pipe smokers.”
Men grabbed the best spots in class, banishing women to the back of the room. No concessions were made to modesty. One girl arrived from England just as the teacher was selecting the day’s model. After watching a succession of nude men bound up onto the dais and strike a pose, she fled to the toilet and threw up.
Male artists regularly propositioned fellow students, on the theory that they were free to do the same; “equality” didn’t mean favouritism, just parity. The Colarossi and other schools were prowled by the likes of Amadeo Modigliani, who met his lover and muse Jeanne Hébuterne there, and by such systematic eroticists as Henri-Pierre Roché, the “Jim” of Jules et Jim, who documented his busy sex life with the scholarship of a Kinsey. Most women, like American Dadaist Beatrice Wood, decided there was no chance for, as she put it, a “monogamous woman in a polygamous world,” and entered a ménage à trois with Roché and Marcel Duchamp.
A few Australian soldiers got to Paris during World War I, my own grandfather among them, but most preferred London, where they understood the language. In Paris, they could only look, and while some liked what they saw – of the women on the boulevards, one wrote “they are just bubbling over with the very joy of life, chockful of spirits and enjoying love and passion to their utmost capacity” – another, visiting the Folies Bergère, complained that “throngs of girls – some very beautiful – infest the place and persistently keep pestering you, clinging on to belt and having to be beaten off almost.”
Grandfather Archie Baxter may have been more appreciative than most, and acted on it – “If you happen to see someone on the street who looks like you,” my father told me when I moved here, “don’t be surprised” – but aside from a few French phrases, he kept mum about his visit. One such phrase did pass into the language, however. Diggers mishearing “vin blanc”, took to ordering “plonk”, which became an Australianism for wine.
Living in France was never my idea, but Paris, as they say, waits for you. Arriving, we check our other selves at the door. We take a seat in a café and watch people passing. Perhaps they aren’t “just bubbling over with the very joy of life, chockful of spirits and enjoying love and passion to their utmost capacity” but one feels they might do so, if we wait long enough. And where one would not, in other circumstances, necessarily be drawn to paint or sing or write about the lack of an experience or the anticipation of it, here one senses that as not only a possible reaction but the only correct one. Comme ça.