When a French President gets a whim, interesting things can happen. Former President Francois Mitterand was a fan of public sculpture, and was responsible for adding more than 200 pieces to Paris streets and squares in the 1980s and 90s.
He made the choices himself, and they were not always as obvious as statues of poets and actors such as Arthur Rimbaud, Albert Camus and Jean Vilar. Some have a more whimsical feel, such as the two shown here, standing outside the huge Gare Saint-Lazare, one of Paris’s oldest and largest stations since 1985.
Both are the work of a one-named sculptor Arman, a Frenchman who lived and worked in New York. Arman called the pile of bronze suitcases “an accumulation,” and it’s reasonable to think the same word could be applied to the tower of clocks on the station’s other plaza.
The ‘accumulations’ drummed up their share of controversy, although they’ve long since found acceptance. One of Mitterand’s other projects is still waiting for a permanent home. It’s a statue of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of treason in the 1890s in a case that tore French politics apart and revealed deep anti-semitism. That statue was proposed for the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, where Dreyfus was first humiliated and years later restored to duty. The statue stands now in a square along the Boulevard Raspail, a location that is officially temporary, due to the controversy over the original plan.
