Sous le Ciel de Paris

We’ve just passed the halfway point for the 2024 Olympics in Paris, France, and it looks as if Great Britain could be on for a record medal haul, while the French have taken full advantage of their home crowd support to surge past the total they achieved in Tokyo three years ago.

We were lucky enough to be in Paris for most of the first week, and even luckier to have tickets to see two women’s handball matches in one of the halls at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles convention centre, converted for the occasion into a sports arena that you would be forgiven for thinking had always been there.

(The last time I was in Paris, I visited the same hall. Then it was not full of handball players and their roaring, cheering, foot-stamping supporters but rather a multitude of horse breeds for the Salon International de l’Agriculture. Having a passing acquaintance with the team at Paris Expo, I can say wholeheartedly that they can be proud of what they achieved for the Olympics.)

The two matches we saw—Spain vs Hungary and France vs Angola—were fun, even if handball is hardly a favourite sport of mine, and the refashioned hall was impressive, in addition to which there was plenty to keep the crowd gee’d up throughout the afternoon session.

But what I wanted to sample most of the all was the mood in the city, especially as we were only watching live sport for a few hours out of our five-day stay.

This Olympics has been billed as the first to be based fully within the host city, using pre-existing venues rather than a series of potential white elephant arenas constructed on redeveloped or reclaimed land. And it has to be admitted that the idea of watching fencing in the Grand Palais or archery in the Esplanade des Invalides is compelling, to say the least.

It makes me wish that London had thought or/been able to do the same in 2012, although the promise of ensuring that the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford did not fall into disuse and ruin has happily been fulfilled.

Some pre-existing spaces were used for the London Olympics, including Greenwich Park, which was home to the equestrian events. I happened to live very close by at the time, near Maze Hill station, and the atmosphere was wonderful and utterly intoxicating.

It wasn’t just the army of sunny, welcoming volunteers that lent a festive air to the occasion, but the optimism and cheerfulness of the way in which the games were implemented that made them seem that much more special.

The Olympics themselves bring their own magic of course, and that has been visible in the way in which French have taken not only their homegrown athletes to heart but also those from any country who have embodied what are defined as the values and spirit of the games: excellence, respect and friendship.

“This is the idea of setting your rivalries aside,” the IOC says on its official Olympic website, adding: “There is more that unites us than divides us.”

All that was in evidence on the streets of London in 2012, but would that outlook be shared by the notoriously grumpy and unfriendly Parisiens, who had complained long and hard about the Olympics coming to their city, from the moment it had been chosen to host the games?

The first thing to be said is that Paris has done a pretty good job with the fan zones dotted around the city, despite a general lack of shade in the soaring temperatures, and various cultural centres have entered into the spirit of the occasion by putting on Olympic-themed exhibitions and attractions (see below).

Moreover, having the Olympic flame as a hot air balloon cauldron in the middle of the Jardin des Tuileries is, to my mind, a stroke of inspired genius (even if the French didn’t actually invent hot air balloons, which was rather the work of Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Jesuit priest from Colonial Brazil, in the early part of the 18th century).

However, once you stray outside of the area of a venue or dedicated space, the sense of occasion drops off vertiginously. Even one street away from the Hôtel de Ville, which has one of the largest fan zones in central Paris, you would have no clue that you were in the middle of the Olympics, and the sense of participation by local bars and restaurants is practically nil.

It is almost as if they want to show visitors that they, at best, don’t care about the games and, at worst, actively don’t want them. Hardly a warm welcome, and certainly not in the Olympic spirit of friendship.

There are a few volunteers dotted about at key places, but they are by and large sullen and unsmiling, as are the police (although the French authorities are not known to have a sense of engaging with their community, as opposed merely to protecting it).

I was also a little sad to see that, while the interiors of the fan zones were pretty well appointed and had activities for all ages, almost no attention was paid to the exteriors, with poor signage and no sense of caring what visitors from across the globe would experience as they went in search of Olympics-related activities in between visits to sports venues.

This even included the area around La Villette, which hosted the Parc des Nations. The national stands themselves were wonderful, but the way from the metro station up to them was not, and it was hard have a sense of where each of them were located once you got there.

But I am nitpicking. The Olympics are a large and unwieldy beast, and the plans developed for Paris 2024, much like those for the opening ceremony, were extremely ambitious and sprawling, almost impossible to execute without everything going precisely to plan, and guaranteed to divide opinions.

However, just as with the opening ceremony, the games have overall turned out very well, with moments of sublime inspiration and beauty that will live long in the memory.

While we were in Paris, I decided that the time was to take the plunge and make my first visit to an art institution that is so famous that it hardly needs any introduction: The Louvre.

Before I go any further, I should give you a couple of facts: it is by far the largest museum in the world in terms of floorspace, although its collection of approximately 500,000 pieces is dwarfed by the over 3.1 million artworks held by the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, and the more than 8 million objects in the British Museum’s collection.

The Louvre is also said to be the most visited museum in the world, with a staggering 8.9 million in 2023, versus 6.8 million for the Vatican and 5.8 million visitors to the British Museum in the same year.

Moreover, I should underline that, for a variety of reasons, I wasn’t able to give the museum the time it deserved; unlike, say, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, in which I spent almost an entire, blissful day a few years ago, or the National Gallery in London, where I immersed myself in its collection every weekend, room by room, for well over a year.

My impressions of the Louvre are therefore necessarily fleeting, but there were many aspects of my visit that stood out for me after more than half a lifetime of fantasising about viewing a gallery that my father had first explored in the 1960s.

I began with the Olympism exhibition, which runs until 16 September and looks at the birth of the modern Olympic movement in France by connecting ancient artefacts depicting sport and physical activity with their more recent reinterpretation during the late 19th century through sculpture, dance and art.

From that enjoyable, if rather thin, show, I took a circuitous route towards the Mona Lisa, the main stop-off point for the vast majority of visitors to the Louvre. The aim was not only to see some of the gallery’s impressive collection but also to experience being in the space.

I realise that we were in the middle of the Olympics and so the Louvre was possibly more crowded than normal but, similarly to the Vatican, I was utterly overwhelmed by the sheer number of people milling about, which ruined any ability to actually appreciate the objects, not least because of the echoing din of their constant, unchecked chatter.

There was also the distraction of people constantly taking photos of art like video game characters trying to collect points. Mostly, they seemed to photograph something only when they saw someone else taking a picture of it. One man traipsing around the gallery with his partner turned a corner, saw a crowd gathered around a fairly unremarkable statue, raised his phone, took a picture and then walked on.

He didn’t find out what the piece was called, or even look at it. I would wager that, even if he ever looks at his photograph again, he will never take the time to find out what he had taken (and he was hardly the only person I saw do something similar during my visit).

But what about the artworks themselves? There are some blockbuster masterpieces, of course, that are rightly venerated (see above) but not everything is good. This is inevitable with such a large collection, but was somehow disappointing after all the buildup.

And this is art with a capital A; Grand Art, no less, that one is supposed to admire, even if one doesn’t actually like it. By and large, the paintings and sculptures depict heroic scenes with heroic characters doing heroic things. That this is Good Art is a piece of unquestionable received wisdom and anyone who disagrees must be an uncultured idiot, or so the argument goes.

But to me, the galleries were rather stuffy and old-fashioned, and the collection seemed to my mind a little jumbled up. I also found the architecture of the building, especially in the older parts, served to distance the viewer from the artwork, and so make their appreciation in the congested din of the galleries all the more difficult.

This sense is taken to the extreme with the Mona Lisa. Even without the crowds, the security measures mean it would not be possible to get close enough to the painting to able to view it and understand it (how different that is from the Uffizi gallery in Florence, where you can place yourself square in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and appreciate his brushwork.)

Throw in several hundred people crowding in front of it, with hands clasping their iPhones and held aloft like adherents to a new religion, and the experience takes on a comical note that one would see reflected in the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa herself if only one was near enough to see it.

And was it really necessary to install a Starbucks, of all things, in the main entrance hall? Could the directors of a world famous art institution in Paris really not come up with something better?

Despite all of this, I did enjoy the Louvre, especially when I strayed off the beaten track. The Islamic art galleries, for example, were comparatively empty, and I had the space and time to reflect on what I was seeing and, dare I say it, enjoy the pieces on show.