Paris -- in a grand fashion

Boasting 1,654 pages, 1,500 illustrations and essays by 11 scholars in two boxed volumes that tip the scales at 26 1/2 pounds, “The Art and Spirit of Paris” is a publishing event. A sumptuous art book that threatens to throw your back out of whack if you lift it -- and promises to set you back anywhere from $297.50 to $425, depending on when and where you buy it -- this new arrival from Abbeville Press is undeniably big, beautiful and expensive.

Beyond that, it isn’t easy to describe. But publisher Robert Abrams knows what he was after.

“The objective was to pull together two millennia of great artistic productivity, to find themes that run throughout the period and to show the thing as a whole rather than in fractured glimpses,” he says. “And in pulling the whole thing together, the goal was to experience the city that contains it. Paris itself is a great work of art and beauty. The people of Paris coined the term l’art de vivre, and I think that’s what their emphasis on culture is all about, the art of living.”

Neither a history of French art nor a “straight” Parisian art history, the book “is very much about the city,” Abrams says. But the premise is that the artistic legacy of Paris is essential to the look and feel of the place. “People experience Paris itself as a whole,” he says. “As much as one can do that in a book, that’s what I tried to do.”

Every season brings new books on Paris. Another entry this year is “Paris: City of Art,” an 11-pound, $85 tome by Jean-Marie Perouse de Montclos, published by Vendome. But that book concentrates on architecture. In the Abbeville publication, readers proceed from the Gallo-Roman settlement described by Julius Caesar to 1999-2000 celebrations of the new millennium, as they watch a parade of Parisian painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, photography, fashion, design and theater. They also see the city in photographs, from Joseph Martin’s panoramic frontispiece, “View of the Seine,” picturing Paris at night as a dazzling jewel, to the closing black-and-white shots of ordinary folks at cafes and brasseries.

Project editor Christopher Lyon likens the approach to “an aerial view from a balloon or a satellite.” Looking at Paris from a high vantage point, he says, the book “synthesizes a vast amount of scholarship and imagery and presents the essence of a city that has played a crucial role in the history of Western art.”

A dozen years in the making, “The Art and Spirit of Paris” was a daunting project, but Abrams knew what he was getting into. The book was inspired by “The Art of Florence,” a nine-year labor of love published by Abbeville in 1988.

“That book grew out of my own experience,” he says. “I majored in art history at Harvard and did my thesis on architecture and painting in Renaissance Italy. There wasn’t one comprehensive book that dealt with the Renaissance in Italy, both in terms of text and illustrations, so I decided to try to provide a benchmark for what we knew then about the art and history of Florence.”

His first mega art book, “it was a mammoth project and big risk,” he says. “But it was done out of intellectual and emotional passion, and it worked. It found an audience and it is recognized as the definitive general book on the art of Florence, a city I love and love to visit.”

It took about three years for Abrams to recover from that venture, but then he began thinking about other cities that might warrant the same kind of attention.

“Paris was the one that insistently came to my mind,” he says, “but I knew it would be a much more ambitious project because its life began more than 2,000 years ago and it continues to be very vital today. Florence had its peak of creativity in a span of about 350 years; Paris has just gone on and on.”

Another obstacle was that Abrams had relatively little formal education in the art of Paris. “But I decided to give it a shot,” he says. “This was intellectually very challenging, maybe even presumptuous, but I guess I get a kick out of a challenge.”

One of his first decisions was whether one author could handle the project or if it required several specialists. Abrams didn’t come up with a writer who was sufficiently well versed in all the subjects he planned to cover, so he recruited an international array of scholars to write about their areas of expertise.

“It was difficult finding the authors because they knew how hard it would be to condense their time periods to the specifications,” he says. “Also, they are first-rate scholars who are concerned about their scholarly reputations, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with popular acceptance. I had to explain that this book is for a general audience of people who are interested in the city, who feel a connection and want to have more knowledge than they can have in a guidebook or a straight history of art text. We wanted the book to be as readable and accessible as possible.”

OUTLINING THEMES

Once the writers were lined up, the challenge was to create a cohesive text from all their contributions. That’s where Michel Laclotte, the book’s editorial director, came in. A former director of the Louvre, he outlined themes that would run throughout the book: Paris as an urban environment, a center of the decorative arts, a battleground for artistic debate and a hub of entertainment, or spectacle.

“These were his four parameters,” Lyon says. “Once we had that embedded in our heads, we had a roadmap to find our way through this extraordinary jungle of material.”

The text proceeds chronologically, but it isn’t entirely predictable. Venceslas Kruta, a director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, notes that images on ancient Gallic coins inspired Picasso some 2,000 years after they were cast. Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, director of the Musee National de la Renaissance in Ecouen, France, describes the 13th century chapel of Sainte-Chapelle as a “radically modern” structure. “Artists were especially taken with it,” he writes, “for to them it represented a uniquely organic whole capable of satisfying their longing for earthly embodiment of the absolute.”

The decorative arts get considerable space, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Parisians of means lived in gilded splendor. A section on “Libertinism and Luxury” features elaborately decorated salons and bathhouses designed as Roman temples and Chinese fantasies.

“Worldly Women” also get their due. Andrew Carrington Shelton, an art history professor at Ohio State University, points out that an obsession with prostitution during the Third Republic (1870-99) shows up in the work of avant-garde artists, including Impressionists Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Many of their subjects scratched out a living as sales clerks, laundresses or barmaids, but they were probably willing to trade sexual favors for a more comfortable lifestyle or a higher status.

As the story moves into the Industrial Revolution, when iron was the building material of choice and Paris’ great railroad stations were created, there’s a chapter on “engineer’s architecture.” Here, as elsewhere in the book, art is not treated in isolation. In a section on “Science and Style,” Jeffrey Weiss, chief curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery in Washington, interprets the Eiffel Tower as a metaphorical viewpoint as well as a physical one.

“Both celebrated and reviled in its day, the Eiffel Tower was addressed at once as a technological advance and an aesthetic abomination that violated the city’s great beauty,” he writes. “Ultimately, modernism in Paris was accompanied by a profound sense of cultural ambivalence and loss, sentiments that were often evoked to lament the changing aesthetic identity of the city itself.”

But change it did, as pictures of dozens of modern structures show. Indeed, most of the second volume deals with the 20th century. Frequent travelers to Paris will find familiar examples of relatively recent architectural additions to the urban landscape, such as I.M. Pei’s Pyramid at the Louvre, Dominique Perrault’s National Library and Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation and Institute of the Arab World.

Nine photographic “portfolios” between the chapters offer additional sights and scenes. In keeping with the book’s concept, the first portfolio is called “The View From Above.” Other groups of pictures focus on the Seine, stone and metalwork, gardens and Paris at night.

“I didn’t think the book should be just about the art,” Abrams says. “There is an intangible thing that some of us sense when we are there. If I left out some of these great photographic evocations of the spirit of the city and what it looks like, it would be too heavy and kind of disproportionate to what I feel about the city.”

The market’s response to all this remains to be seen, but Abrams is optimistic.

“My ambition was to do it absolutely the best way I could, and I knew I was going to have one shot at it,” he says. “ ‘The Art of Florence’ is still in print and still sells very nicely. I hope that will be the case for ‘The Art and Spirit of Paris.’ There aren’t that many books nowadays that continue to find their audience after 20 years or so.”