PHOTOGRAPHER: JACQUES OLIVAR

I lived for some years at the 31 rue Campagne Première in Paris. The beautiful building of “Ateliers d’Artistes’ had seen many great artists of the 30th staying between his walls. I was sharing Man Ray’s Atelier, breathing his air and washing my hands in the same tap at the first floor of the duplex. Stealing a piece of his mind and watching the same view through the wide Atelier’s windowpane. Facing the entrance of the building, in the street, Jean Paul Belmondo had found death in Godard’s movie “A bout de souffle.’ I remember Japanese tourists making pictures of one of them lying on the ground like Godard’s last scene. At the 5 of the same street, the little restaurant Rosalie used to receive people like Gertrud Stein, Ezra Pound, Mondrian, Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, Hemingway, Soutine and many others. As Duchamp used to say, the first international colony of Artists. Kiki was the queen of the quarter and she used to bring with her people like Apollinaire, Joyce, Cocteau. Well, my mind was rambling around this huge cultural legacy,and I was kind of dreaming I was one of them. So, I was looking for an expressionist expression inspired by dancers like Nijinski to stay alive in this fabulous artistic dreamy state of mind.

39”x30” inches, Edition of 10