Sartre, c’est aussi la France (Sartre is also France) were the words spoken by former French president De Gaulle, who had previously stated that he was France. His remarks on Sartre followed talks of legal action against the writer for encouraging conscripts to refuse service in Algeria. The president was in fact confirming that France was a haven for dissident voices and differing ideologies.

This led to Paris becoming the preferred choice of residence for a larger number of intellectuals, writers and artists from around the world. A sense of camaraderie and freedom brought these creative individuals from other parts of France, Europe and the rest of the world. German occupation of several sovereign states in Europe had forced their citizens to flee and find refuge in Paris. Therefore, the city emerged as a symbol of life amid the deadly theatre of World Wars.

It was home to artists who spoke Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Norwegian and Italian, but actually communicated through art. National identities, past experiences, cultural features, individual accounts led to the formulation of artistic ideologies, broadly known as cubism, fauvism, surrealism, expressionism and abstraction.

Rendezvous in Paris, the exhibition of “foreign-born artists of diverse backgrounds and training” being held at Louvre-Abu Dhabi — from September 18-December 7, 2019 — represents some of these notions. Curated by Christian Briend, chief curator and Head of modern collections, MNAM-CCI; and assisted by Anna Hiddleston-Galloni, it “presents more than 80 works including paintings, sculptures, and photographs from 40 of the most significant artists of this period referred to as the school of Paris”. A term that “first appeared in 1925, is widely used to refer to the extraordinary artistic flowering which resulted from the painters and sculptors who came from all over Europe, Asia and America to the French capital”.

The exhibition starts with Pablo Picasso’s Gustave Coquiot, 1901, a portrait bearing the unmistakable trace of Toulouse Lautrec, suggests how a person like Picasso could not have evolved without his predecessor. In fact, the entire exhibition dismantles the myth of a sole genius, as it draws connecting lines and denotes common points of seeing reality simultaneously by contemporaries, housed in a single city — Paris.

In their art, luckily, Paris plays the backdrop and not the main motif, as each of them was residing in his own home/hell. For Picasso, during his Cubist phase, the outside reality was a combination of cubes, cones and circles. This brings him closer to Juan Gris, another Spaniard, venturing into cubism. One is surprised by an unexpected interpretation of cubism in The Baroness Helene d’Oettingen, 1917, of Leopold Survage, in which the artist creates a backstage for theatre, seen from all angles. It transmutes the original concept of cubism — of conflicting views on a flat surface — into a diorama painting.

In the cubist works on display, there is a difference between Picasso and lesser known painters like Serge Ferat, Henri Hayden and Maria Blanchard. In contrast to Picasso, these artists had spent more time in constructing a cubist painting. Whereas Picasso was painting without the yoke or responsibility for a style or movement. He confessed “we had no intention whatever of inventing cubism”, which made it possible for him to treat his surroundings as a source of inquiry.

Apart from these stylistic exercises, the exhibition deals with one’s identity as an outsider. The idea of being an outsider is linked to mammoth expeditions in which millions died fighting for European powers on three continents.

Hence the surge of surrealism, which almost divorced and distanced from reality at hand to excavate the debris of unconscious. The painting, Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, Spring 1914 by Giorgio De Chirico, evokes a no man’s land between perception and premonition. In the painting, putting dark glasses on the plaster bust of the poet, he draws a line between two realms — known and unfathomable.

Jewish history and myth are addressed by two artists Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. Chagall blends the Jewish origin with his Russian background to create a world that lies on the shore of — what later was coined as — magical realism. Soutine (obliquely) portrays the state of being a Jew, explained by Arthur C Danto: “looking at his paintings, with their twisted forms and the unmistakable presence in some of them of death, they might connote suffering — and suffering has been deeply associated with Jewish history.”

Walking from one room to next, brushing past the School of Paris, one is inclined to give it another name — school of outsiders. It wasn’t just leaving their homelands for France, but the spirit of being differently intrigued which attracted several creative individuals.

The idea of outsider primarily evolved on the canvases of artists who changed the standards of art, challenging the construct of the ‘standard’ in itself. Cubists, surrealists and fauvists were a few to uproot the traditional standards of art. In their surge to be outsiders’ they referred to cultures that lie away from the European hemisphere of taste. Amedeo Modigliani’s Woman’s Head (1911-13) in its formation reminds us of African stone carvings, not delinked from Picasso’s appropriating of African masks in his art, particularly in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.

The School of Paris brought to Paris and to the world art, awareness of world and art, beyond the limited understanding of a school or a style. These artists, shown at the Louvre-Abu Dhabi, were moderns to the core, because being modern means to leave the burden of past and shackles of one’s region. It seems these artists from the Rendezvous in Paris wholeheartedly accepted Arthur Rimbaud’s declaration “You must be absolutely modern”.