Monday 22 April 2019

Paris sera toujours Paris

by Màxim Huerta and Maria Herreros

I took this book from the library just to look at the illustrations and ended up reading it from back to back. There’s no particular order you have to follow though.

No matter how much you love Paris, to call anything after the song by Maurice Chevalier, a bit of a cliché itself, is a cliché squared. Moreover, the title is deceiving: the book is more about some of the more fascinating people who happened to live in Paris than the city itself, and not toujours either but mostly in the first half of the 20th century. And what people! Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, Brassaï, Foujita, Kiki de Montparnasse, Tamara de Lempicka, Mistinguett, Modigliani, Picasso, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein... Even Pascin and Lucy Vidil Krohg, of whose existence I was ignorant until just a month ago, make their appearance.

To get a taste of the book, have a look here.

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