An Introduction to Paris by Escort Girl Paris, Jula

The writer needs a sense of place, a place to put down roots even if those roots must be tom out as he starts on his journey to independence. This place of origin nourishes his soul: he knows its people, their proverbs and dialects; he knows their aspirations and their failures. Through his sense of place the writer comes to know himself. The voyage, therefore, begins at home, for that home is the writer's reality, no matter how far he may wander in forging his art.

Most artists leave the place of their origin - the place that formed their youth and their sense of reality. They leave as a result of maturation, family moves, education, or career. Those artists whose place is provincial may feel their alienation from that culture. Some of these artists from the provinces flee in anger the cultural insularity or the ugliness of home. Others seek what they do not have in their place of origin. They may seek acceptance for their art and a community with other artists. In the first three decades of this century, an unprecedented number of artists from various countries of the world sought this community of artists in Paris.
The artists of the early twentieth century did not invent deracination, but they did make it a vogue. They discovered that Paris helped them to solve their problem of inner exile, it fostered their maturity. Like artists before and since, they discovered that distance from home fuels interest in homeland and a keen and objective perspective on place. Hemingway wrote his story of Nick fishing in the Big Two-Hearted River in a cafe in Montparnasse. James Joyce wrote about Dublin in Zurich, Trieste, and Paris. Picasso painted Guemica just a block from the Seine. And Chagall painted the folklore and farm animals of his native Russia in a cramped hovel in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. They lived in a foreign country yet recreated the culture of their own land.

That Paris has been the second home for artists for centuries is no accident. The City of Light has represented the best in Western culture. 'It was a place where the very air was impregnated with the energies of art', wrote Thomas Wolfe. One sees this in the beauty of the architecture of the grand boulevards and monuments as well as in the names of its streets, for Paris honours its artists and philosophers. Paris has always accepted and nourished genius. Thus, it promises a haven to the fleeing or seeking artist. It is the ancient city of the exiled and the centre of Western art.

But there are other reasons why an indigent artist or intellectual can endure poverty in Paris better than elsewhere. In addition to its beauty there is its freedom; in Paris the artist is not enlisted in the army of the proletariat, and consequently there is less interference with private life here. There is interference, of course, for the French themselves, but for a foreigner there is a fanciful freedom and grace of life that is not obtainable elsewhere. This respect for privacy appears to some to be a rather amoral attitude.

Because the city has been the home of the masters for centuries, it beckons 'each new artist. And every poet and painter who has lived here has wanted to leave his calling card. Paul Valery claims that Paris has always been the 'desired object of so many conquerors, some armed with their talent, others with their weapons'. Those of talent left their stamp on the reality as well as on the myth of Paris, even while they were creating art that captured the sense of another place. In Paris their paintings hang on great walls, their statues stand in squares and gardens, and their memoirs keep alive the legends of their social escapades and artistic struggles.

'Paris was where the twentieth century was', exclaimed Gertrude Stein - as if to explain the unprecedented gathering of artists in the early decades of this century. Twentieth-century art was being created by the avant-garde: Picasso, Apollinaire, Cubism and the School of Paris, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Les Six, Nadia Boulanger, Proust, Pound, Ioyce, Stein, Surrealism.

Here were the teachers, the little magazines and presses, the salons. In short, here was an audience, and acceptance. 'Every man works better when he has companions . . . yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, consultation', said Henry James.