Swell - or swollen? ... Gloria Friedmann's
Le Locataire (The Tenant) on display
at the Grand Palais's exhibition, La Force de l'Art.
Photograph: Remy de la Mauviniere/AP
Can exhibition spaces actually be too big? Paris does trample over London in this respect, with acres and acres of space for really enormous art shows.
The Grand Palais is now thoroughly back in business - the final phase of its €101.4m renovation is due for completion next year - and going to shows there makes you want to weep over the inadequacies of the National Gallery's cramped basement exhibition space and the very strange assortment of rooms at the Victoria and Albert into which the Modernism show is crammed.
Even the Royal Academy looks decidedly pokey after the Grand Palais, where you can have several vast exhibitions going on at one time and never get any sense of crowding.
Yesterday I went to see two shows: Italia Nova, a survey of Italian art from the first days of futurism to the early spatial experiments of Lucio Fontana; and the controversial Force de l'Art, a survey of contemporary artists working in France.
Italia Nova was set in generous halls and echoing enfilades of galleries; the work was luxuriously hung. La Force de l'Art was almost ridiculous: it was set in the "nave" of the Grand Palais, the enormous glass-domed central section of the building. This space makes the British Museum's Great Court look like suburban conservatory. It's so big and airy it practically counts as being outside.
La Force de l'Art is a strange and confusing show, with 16 curators each having presented a little bit of it. It's not quite clear how the whole thing adds up or where it leads. Too much of it seems provisional, and you are inevitably taking pot luck as far as the curating is concerned.
Of all the 16 sections I only really liked two. It was big and exhausting and sometimes felt like an art fair, but with more pretensions. Quite soon, I began to feel words like "grands folies" edging into my brain. The Parisians have this enormous space in the Grand Palais, and presumably they feel they have to fill it.
And yet, if they didn't have it and hadn't filled it, my life would probably now be just a little bit happier (saving the grace of Hou Hanrou and Eric Troncy, whose sections I enjoyed). I started to long, agoraphobically, for the poky little exhibition rooms at the bottom of the Sainsbury Wing. How cosy, how comfortingly womblike, how little risk of seeing more than a couple of dozen paintings at any one time...
