A Favorite Building in Paris

Humor me.

Try this experiment:

Close your eyes and think of a building in Paris.

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C,mon, give it a go.

I’ll wait.

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What did your building look like?.

 

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Here’s my favorite building:

I can hear you thinking: “Sure, it’s okay, but…”

Wait. You have to look up and then you’ll see:

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Don’t these gals make you smile? I just love them. Unlike most cariatids on Paris buildings, these ladies look like real women.

It’s at 39 rue Réaumur in the 3rd if you want to visit it. I finally researched the building. And guess what: they are real women. Or one woman, to be exact.

The building was constructed in 1900 during the Belle Époque by architect Germain Salard. But it was sculptor Pierre Roche who created the cariatids, inspired by his muse, Loie Fuller. She inspired many artists during her time, including Toulouse-Lautrec who painted her. The Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies filmed her.

She was an American who started out in vaudeville and burlesque and even performed with Buffalo Bill Cody’s troupe. During the era of tight corsets, she created her own style of dancing that involved huge swaths of flowing silk that she swirled and twirled about, creating a flower-like, dynamic Art Nouveau production. She was an early lighting engineer and experimented with a revolving disk of colored gels that projected multi-color lights onto her while dancing. She came before Isadora Duncan and is considered one of the founders of modern dance. She performed at the Folies Bergère and was enourmously influential in her time. All of this despite the fact that she was plain and chubby. Could that happen today? I doubt it.