Manet in Tunisia

December 14, 2011

Rue Mosnier Decorated with Flags, Edouard Manet (1878)

Revolutionary art changes how one can see. So does revolution.

By James Polchin

In January, I waited outside the Grand Palais in Paris for two hours in near-freezing temperatures to see a Claude Monet show, the first in nearly two decades in France.

As it was for everyone I knew who went to the show, waiting for Monet was part of the experience of seeing Monet. Three lines fed into the lobby entrance, elevated above the crowd by a marble staircase. I was in the line for people without reserved tickets, and every so often, the guards would let a dozen or so of us in. It moved at a hand- and foot-numbing pace. After 30 or 40 minutes, the couple in front of me gave up. I started wondering why I was standing in the cold, waiting for art.

After a while, a group of patrons near the front started shouting, “À nous! À nous!” (Now us! Now us!). It was a defiant attempt to get the guards to open the line again. And often, it worked. At one point, a middle-aged woman in a purple jacket who had just made it up the marble stairs stood on the balcony, arms outstretched, and started to chant, “À nous! À nous!” encouraging us all to join in. “Bon courage!” she shouted, making a fist and shaking it in the air. It felt like a political rally, as sometimes happens in Paris, when a casual incident takes on an energy akin to a revolution in the making. But all I wanted was to get out of the cold and gray and see Impressionist paintings.

Inside, there were no chants but instead a shoving match. My feet numb and tingling, I pushed through pockets of German tourists, old Parisians anchored to cushioned benches, and American college students, looking for a comfortable place to see the canvases. But the crowds were too strong; people were pushing this way and that, handbags jabbing my arm or my back, sometimes rudely. I was too exhausted from the two-hour wait to try to see Monet. If the wait felt like a political rally, the exhibition felt like the revolution’s aftermath, and we all wandered around thinking that there must be more to this, that the wait in the cold should have led to something less chaotic.

Outside the museum, the newspapers and magazines at the kiosk were filled with news of protests and revolution in Tunisia. The protests began in December when in the small city of Sidi Bouzid an unemployed university-educated man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after police confiscated his fruit stand, which was his only source of income. Days of protests followed, and then another man from the same city climbed an electrical pole and reportedly shouted, “No for misery, no for unemployment,” and grabbed the wires, electrocuting himself. By January, protests against the Tunisian president had spread across the country. Looking at the headlines, my mind echoed with the chants of à nous! à nous!

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