La Concorde, section

Immanence within Transcendence: the Paris within Simonida Perica Uth’s Eyes

Essay written by PHD. Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University

I Prologues

Born in Serbia and having made Washington, DC her home for many decades, Simonida Perica Uth—like so many of those impassioned with culture, cafes, and streets that dance with distinctive syncopations—fell in love long ago with Paris. The consummate center of interwoven artistic tradition and innovation, the French capital assumed a position of primacy in the late 17th century—when the designs for the expanding Louvre palace proposed by the Italian Gian Lorenzo Bernini that would have led Paris architecturally toward becoming a second Rome—were ignored in favor of designs by a trio of French architects, as Louis XIV turned more of his attention to his suburban refuge, Versailles. Parisian architectural primacy became hegemony by the 19th century. Before and after World War I—and even after the painful recovery from World War II—nearly every aspiring painter, sculptor, architect, poet, composer, and performer worth his or her salt, from West and East, migrated to Paris. Some stayed briefly, others remained throughout their lives, drawing inspiration from the City of Light that resonated from their canvases and pages, in the sounds and shapes and hues that they produced.

Simonida has brought to Paris and her love of its powerful and delicate ambience an evolving series of inspirations that, informing her mind and her eye, have helped to yield the vision of the city transmuted within her enthralling imagery. One readily enough recognizes the influence of the Icon tradition—appropriate to an array of structures for which the term “iconic” could have been invented—in particular the use of gold leaf to create spaceless space backgrounds beyond our everyday profane sense of space. In and against such a transcendent reality, ghostly yet substantive structures take the place of the figures in traditional icons with a connection to divinity and thus a connection beyond our reality. They sit or stand, or barely so, their spiritual emphasis recognizable in the barely fleshed bodies beneath their stylized garments with their gold striations and distinctly symbolic pigments. Such icons that can be associated with Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and other Orthodox visual contexts that have as their beginning point the Byzantine world all resonate from Simonida’s work.

The artist has asserted, in conversation, that, her understanding of the importance of gold-leaf ground was particularly influenced by the Russian Orthodox priest, mathematician, inventor, and art historian, Pavel Alexandrovich Florenski (1882-1937), whose writings “inspired me so deeply to understand symbols and the meaning of gold… and silver in animating a special sort of life energy within religious relics.”[1] Indeed, Simonida has expanded the instrumentation of that spiritual energy, including copper and silvery aluminum in order to broaden the nuances and the vibrating energy of her images.

Not surprisingly, the influences from the East interweave those of the West: on one of her many visits to Paris, the artist encountered the emotionally destabilizing paintings of Gustave Moreau (1826-98)—she visited the museum dedicated to and packed with his work, drawn to his lines and his shimmering surfaces. She noted in particular his darkly erotic “Salome” (he devoted four works to versions of this subject, two of them in the Moreau Museum) bursting with Byzantine lushness expressed in a style at once fantastical and naturalistic, rife with transcendent shades of gold and yet filled with earthbound fleshiness. “I fell in love, he took one of my veils, I was able to see my path as an artist right there,” she has commented.

The connection to Moreau is deeper and more personal than merely compelling aesthetics. If the City of Light and the lushly-conceived paintings encompassed in her current Paris-focused series maybe seen as one light within her life as a painter, her son, Nikola, is another, yet brighter light within her life. As she has expressed it, it was “interesting and strange that his [Moreau’s] art became so much part of me that something perplexing happened on one of my later trips to France: my son Nikola, who was then born on the same day—April 6—as Moreau [the one in 1826 and the other in 1991] and looking so remarkably like him” in a Moreau self-portrait whose doppelganger is a photo taken of Nikola. By coincidence—or perhaps not by coincidence [painting].

The visual roads from ancient Byzantium and Moreau’s nineteenth-century Paris, so stylistically different from each other, converge in a vocabulary of symbols, and follow a common path toward creating—slowly extracting—light from darkness as a spiritual as much as aesthetic exercise. It is no surprise that Simonida is also drawn to the language of William Blake’s (1757-1827) unique visions of everyday and myth-born creatures ensconced in light-and-dark-filled spaces extracted from human and transhuman reality. So, too, she has been drawn to the mystical side of Gustave Dore’s (1832-83) illustrations—in particular those found among the 500 illustrations for his 1854 Pictorial History of Sacred Russia—as she has studied mysticism itself, in particular Kabbalah with its highly esoteric symbolic language; its assertions regarding coincidences that are not coincidental but part of an esoteric system of grasping the universe beyond the grasp of most of us; its obsessive fascination with numbers and letters—and its notion of an endless light (‘eyn sof or, in Hebrew) that exists beyond the progression of ideas connecting humanity with divinity.

Simonida’s universalist sense of a self that connects diverse conceptual and visual worlds draws from China as much as it does from nearer literary and artistic sources. She has commented on a story from the Tang Period: about a painter who was put into prison because the emperor did not want anyone to acquire a painted screen more beautiful than the one he had just commissioned from that painter. The painter was not merely imprisoned, but hanged by his hands, to break them, and blinded—but he managed to begin painting with inner vision and his toes, producing exquisite pictures of inconceivably life-like naturalism: the image of a little mouse, and then another, and then another. So effectively and realistically were they depicted that—as often happens in Chinese folklore where a painter is a character in the narrative—the mice came to life, climbed up the ropes, chewed at them, and freed the blind but far from incapable artist. The artist himself, in fact, is never named, yet his anonymity is undercut but his identifiable avatars in diverse cultures and their folkloric traditions.

II Paris Through the Artist’s Eyes

All of these elements suffuse the paintings of Paris architecture that constitute Simonida’s extensive project. The edifices that define the unique skyline of Paris have been transmuted from secular architecture to iconic beings as they are set within and against spaceless space skies of gold, silver, and copper leaf. While the buildings and groups of structures are delineated in intricate, somewhat stylized detail in black and white, they are often overrun with color—specifically: the blue, white, and red (representing the ancient regime’s three estates: nobility (blue), clergy (white), and bourgeoisie (red)) that comprise the colors of the French national flag.[2]

France itself and its political and cultural capital might be called co-icons with the specific edifices that she depicts. One image summarizes the entire visual program: the artist has crowded all of the individual structures together in an elegant jumble, contained within a parabola that is at one and the same time a stylized basket, a boat, and a simplified swag, hovering against, within, and above a ground that it is brown and gold—and a bright blue, feckless sky, (the only time in these works when the sky is not metallic, in fact) with just a hint of the blue Seine River flowing beneath the Pont Neuf. The tricolor unfurls beneath the Arc de Triomphe d’Etoile: a visual magnet toward which the viewer’s eye is instantly drawn [painting].

And so one enters Paris thought the gateway of the artist’s eyes. Every tour of a city studded with eye-catching monuments raises the question: where to begin? With structures that connect to religion, to politics, to culture—to what combination of these forces in the history of the city? Why not Notre Dame de Paris? This is, after all, not only arguably the spiritual and cultural heart of this Catholic city where Gothic architecture began, but located in the historic center of Paris: on the Ile de la Cite that dominates the River Seine separating the city into its left and right banks, where the aboriginal, pre-Roman Parisii first established the village called Lutetia, between 250 and 225 BCE.[3] Notre Dame—dedicated to Our (notre) Lady (dame), the Virgin Mary—pioneered the use of rib vaults, flying buttresses, and enormous, color-rich rose windows. Characteristic of vast medieval churches, it raised its sculptured body slowly above the horizon: begun in 1163 (under Bishop Maurice de Sully) and mostly completed nearly a century later, in 1260, it was subject to continuing accretions over the centuries.

Simonida leads us to the south side, simplifying the details and submerging the entire structure and the entire ground area around it in an eye-popping red pigment (the color in traditional Christian art conveying Christ’s suffering). The church seems almost to hover within its grand plaza, (or perhaps it floats within it, a visual echo of Claude Debussy’s transcendent 1910 piano piece, La cathedrale engloutie: “The Sunken Cathedral”). The church is its own horizon line—a rectilinear hillock rising just over the level of the ground around it towards a gold-leaf sky that seems to vibrate with simultaneously inner and outer light. What is present vies with what is absent to the observant inner eye: the steeple is missing. For the catastrophic fire of mid-April 2019 completely eliminated the delicate fleche—the timber spire soaring over the crossing of nave and apse with transepts—but where the spire would be we can discern ghosted forms rising within the gold [painting].

On the right bank (rive droite) of the city whose central island is dominated by Notre Dame, up and away from the quay, toward Pigalle, an unexpected stillness pours out and up to the front façade of the Moulin Rouge. One might think of this structure as the conceptual opposite of Notre Dame. She defies that unnuanced presumption, however, as she envelops both edifices in a similar coloristic garb. A renowned cabaret founded in 1889 in which the can-can dance was born—originally as a seductive dance by courtesans, eventually evolving into a more straightforward entertainment that spread (on a course actually parallel to, if much later than, gothic architectural style) out from Paris to cabarets across Europe. If Notre Dame’s 2019 fire eliminated its spire but didn’t destroy its towers, the modest tower of the red (rouge) windmill (moulin) has never ceased to dominate the two-story building’s roof—albeit other structures have risen behind it in recent years to shrink the sense of a devouring sky. While Simonida has also drenched this edifice in crimson, the hue of her image and its model may be understood to precisely mirror each other: the actual building and its windmill are in fact dominated by red. She adds a tricolor blue across the structures flanking the mill with two of its arms pushing up into the gold-leaf spaceless sky [painting].

One might come back to the Isle de la Cite to re-center ourselves, and turn slightly northwest from the cathedral toward the edge of the Island where, in Simonida’s image, a light silvery sky meets the rich dark blue into which an extended architectural landscape forms the backdrop for—and the relentless Seine the foreground, flowing through the arches of—the Pont Neuf. Paradoxically named (Pont Neuf means “new bridge”) this is the oldest standing bridge across the Seine in Paris—at the time of slow construction, between 1578 and 1607, there were other, older bridges, hence its designation as “new.” The bridge extends from the right to the left bank (rive gauche) with five arches between the Ile de la Cite and the left bank and seven between the Ileand the right bank—it is a section of the latter, with its added early 18th-century pump house, toward which Simonida leads our eye, capturing the thick, supporting struts and the delicate street lamps that were added around the time when this bridge achieved official iconic status by being designated a historic monument by the French Ministry of Culture in 1889. Her isolation of the white and grey-colored bridge within a sea of blue offers the delightful illusion that the River that is the arterial lifeline of Paris has enveloped the entire city [painting].

A similar, even more overwhelming flooding effect follows us if we follow the bridge over again to the rive droite and up, away from the river, toward the sumptuous 19th-century Palais Garnier, built in 1861-75 for the Paris Opera at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III—and since 1989 uniquely associated with the Paris Opera Ballet. Often refered to as the most famous opera house in the world, it shares iconic status with Notre Dame, the Louvre, and perhaps the Basilica of Sacre Coeur as one of the symbols of Paris par excellence. Perhaps this is, at least in part, due to the setting of the novel, The Phantom of the Opera, in Charles Garnier’s enormous, opulently and eclectically appointed Second Empire-style building. Simonida has chosen—differently from in her other images—to offer a lighter blue for the building itself, submerged nonetheless within a sea of surrounding darker blue, and the copper-green low-copula roof as—well, light copper-green—flanked at the corners by its gilded acroterial statuary. The five sculptural groups, all told, rise against a silver sky, however, as she embeds what is both an iconic jewel and a work with the feel of delicate Wedgewood pottery in its stunning setting [painting].

The Louvre, on the other hand, running virtually along the same bank of the Seine, is in and of itself the size of a small town (royal hunts on horseback were once conducted through its extensive halls). What became one of two or three overwhelming art museums in the world began as a fortress in 1190—a mere generation after the new project of Notre Dame had begun—and was reconstructed in the 16th century as a royal palace. The easternmost façade, added during the reign of Louis XIV, (mainly between 1667 and 1674), is recognized as the outstanding masterpiece of French architectural classicism. Interestingly, it was a group effort: Charles Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault—with some additional assistance by Francois, brother of Charles Le Vau—and offers a kind of restrained baroque style. The design is noted for its elegant combination of French and Italian elements: the elevated row of double Corinthian-capped columns was inspired, perhaps, by Bramante’s 1510-12 Palazzo Caprini in Rome (better known as the House of Raphael). The idea of one central and two terminal pavilions, extending slightly from the overall façade, is French, but the central, slightly extended main entrance area, the upper part of which is on-line with the colonnade, suggests a modified ancient Roman temple (even including the rounded Syrian gable often used by the Romans, albeit not in temple architecture). Above all, its flat roof, unprecedented in France, but common in Italy, would influential subsequent French architectural efforts.

Simonida has, as it were, zoomed in toward that central outcropping, thereby emphasizing the temple-like structure of that entrance—this is, after all, an extraordinary temple of culture, (in which we acolytes bow as we lean in to read the titles of its endless works of art). She has enabled more intense focus for her viewer on the relief-carved scene that fills in the triangular fronton, while overwhelming the entire façade with her familiar deep blue. This time the sky scintillates with the visual heat of copper leaf, her choice of this rather than gold or silver offering both a more fiery quality to the sky and a dynamic contrast to the pigment of the building itself. And this time she has added puffy, light greenish clouds to allow her sky to be simultaneously naturalistic and completely beyond nature [painting].

The Louvre was transformed into a museum after the Revolution—between 1789 and 1799. The endless accumulation of art that extends from the statuary of Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquity to contemporary painting overflows its labyrinthine corridors and open spaces. Perhaps no structure is more emblematic of the ongoing interweave for Paris between its adherence to and love of tradition and its constant search for and embrace of innovation than the creation—outside those hallways, within the courtyard of the rectilinear horseshoe whose extended arms point out toward the gardens of the Tuileries that comprises the main entrance to the museum—of a large Metal and Glass Pyramid. It was created in 1983 by the renowned modern architect, I.M. Pei as the primary entrance: one proceeds into its interior in order to gain access to the museum interior. Thus a restrained baroque façade, with all of its solid stone neo-classical elements—its succession of large ground-level rounded arches surmounted, along the second story, by a progression of windows surmounted by small triangular frontons, with each of the three facades punctuated at their centers by complex, towering entryways that culminate in a bulbous roof—provides a frame for the skeletal, space-frame pyramid (its metal struts echoing the pigment of the rooves of the surrounding buildings) and the echoing triangular forms that spread out from it along the courtyard pavement.

Simonida’s rendition pushes the pyramid off-center and up almost against one of the three wings, helping to make Pei’s idea that the pyramidal form echoes the triangular frontons more apparent. The entire structure is overrun with the familiar deep, rich red that she has used in other works in this series as gold leaf and that red vie with each other for hegemony at the roof line—yielding to complete domination by gold as one’s eye moves up the smooth surface of the image [painting].

Following on a line from the pyramid out across the Tuileries, to the Place de la Concorde and then along the wide and elegant road called the Elysian Fields—the Champs-Elysees—one arrives at another iconic monument. As with her re-vision of I.M. Pei’s pyramid within its Louvre context, Simonida’s version of the Arc de Triomphe d’Etoile offers a golden sky meeting the red roof line. Jean Chalgrin’s stout work of sculpted architecture is Paris’ noteworthy contribution to the idea invented by the ancient Romans, of a free-standing arch, festooned with relief carvings and inscriptions, marking the meeting of major roads within or the main entry into a town—but that mainly mark the conquering presence of the Romans, from along the sacra via (sacred way) on the edge of Rome’s oldest forum itself (the Arch of Titus), out and across Europe and North Africa.

Begun in 1806, when Napoleon was at the peak of his career as a self-proclaimed Caesar, but not finished until 1836, the Arch both illuminates triumph—celebrating victory by celebrating all of those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (and also includes the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I at its base)—and stands at the center of a star-(etoile)-like array of arteries (twelve avenues, including, of course, the Champs-Elysees) that emanate from its circular plaza and encompass the city. The blood red that engorges Simonida’s vision of the monument and its surroundings, from the horizon down to the bottom edges, seems particularly appropriate in this image: unnaturally regular rectilinear shape is embellished by the irregular shapes of the sculptural groups at its corners, but the pigment suggests the natural, beating heart of the bustling metropolis—its rhythms subsumed by the artist, against expectation, within an empty silence, devoid of the pedestrians and automobiles that actually swirl in and around the arch at virtually all hours of day or night [painting].

From the Place de l’Etoile (now called Place Charles De Gaulle), we might amble along one of the avenues that lead circuitously toward the northeast, heading up to Montmartre, one of Paris’ hills and dominated by the pure white, uniquely formed dome—and four echoing mini-domes (together comprising a Christ symbol: together, the five domes signify the five wounds of his martyrdom)—that are instantly identifiable as presenting a different sort of heart within this ever-fibrillating city: the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur (“Sacred Heart”—of Jesus). The church rises on the site where, according to tradition, Saint Denis, patron saint of Paris, was martyred (by being beheaded) by the pagan Roman imperium—as were other Christian martyrs (hence: Mont des Martres: “mount of martyrs”). Its construction was proposed by Bishop Fournier of Nantes in 1870 after the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian War: he asserted that post-revolution “moral decline” of France led to the French defeat as a divine punishment. That idea was taken up by the philanthropist, Alexandre Legentil, adding his voice to the idea of building a church of forgiveness. Entirely funded by private contributions, but with French parliamentary support needed to acquire the site, the basilica’s construction began, finally, in 1875—and was only finished in 1914, on the eve of the Great War.

Designed by Paul Abadie, the soaring and peaceful edifice—after the Eiffel Tour the most visited tourist site in Paris—belies its position as a once hotly discussed source of controversy and conflict between the Church and the political left.[4] Simonida—looking not up at but on a level with the structure’s southern face, from which it overlooks Paris—has chosen to emphasize its pure whiteness: an important component of the tricolor, after all, with a range of symbolic purposes. The grey of the lower and or less prominent elements push the eye toward the upward-thrusting whites that she has placed, with no further pigments, against the blinding gold leaf of an endless, spaceless sky. She emphasizes the array of micro-domes that multiply the visual reverberation of dome and mini-domes; she transforms and expands the double rose windows below those mini-domes—and turns the equestrian statues of Saint Joan of Arc and Saint Louis (King Louis IX) toward the side, so that we grasp more effectively both their power and their visual role, flanking the stairway up to the threefold entryway, as anchors for a conceptual triangle the top of which is the figure of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the aedicula above the doorway [painting].

The Basilica of Sacre-Coeur is particularly dear to the artist’s heart: in a second work, she depicts its famous dome and one of the smaller domes rising in white against another, still vaster golden sky from an agglomeration of structures climbing up Montmartre shadowed in blush grey (including the basilica’s often-ignored bell tower with its distinctively pinched top)—their predominantly rectilinear diagonal and vertical lines in dialogue with the curves of occasional arches and of those distinctive domes [painting].

Tradition has it that the head and other relics of the martyred St Denis were carried across to the left bank of the Seine in the year 636, where his tomb was eventually located in the basilica named for him. That basilica became the resting place for the Kings of France until the early nineteenth century. As we follow Simonida’s visual path across the river to the rive gauche, it turns out that, through her eyes we encounter a number of interesting structures that eventuated as final resting places for groups of important French figures. None is more significant than the Pantheon—located in the renowned Latin Quarter and not far from St Denis—and resonating in name from the early second-century pagan temple, in Rome, to all (pan) of the gods (theon). Its structure recalls the Roman edifice’s most salient features, albeit in slightly altered style: its dome and its protruding front façade with a porch whose Corinthian-capped columns support an entablature and triangular fronton.

Jacques-German Soufflot’s final design for what originated as a church dedicated to St Genevieve, (another patron saint of Paris, along with St Denis) was gradually constructed between 1758 (at the behest of King Louis XV) and 1790. Its neo-classicism is most obviously distinguished from its Roman model by Soufflot’s reduction of the front columns from eight to six; his introduction of an entire sweep of columns around the lower part—the drum—of his dome; and the attenuation of the dome itself to something narrower and higher, part of a treble-interior-layered copula that hovers over the point, in the interior, where nave, transepts and apse converge. Of course, by the time the church was finished, the Revolution was in process, and the National Constituent Assembly voted to transform it into a mausoleum for the remains (or in some cases, empty memorial) of distinguished French citizens, ranging, over time, from Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Victor Hugo to Marie Curie and Josephine Baker—a temple, indeed, to the gods of French cultural, scientific, and political accomplishment.

Simonida takes her own interesting turn with this structure. She emphasizes its unobtrusive embedment among the buildings that crowd around it in the Latin Quarter—so much so that she fools the viewer’s eye by angling her perspective in order to reduce the fronton-bearing columns to five—which embedment underscores the degree to which the living and the dead reside side-by-side, as it were. This juxtaposed co-existence is subtly reinforced by emulating the key coloristic choices that she made in depicting Sacre-Coeur back across the river. Like the Montmartre basilica, the Pantheon stands out with an emphasis on radiant white, its dome reaching up into the gold-leafed skies, but the surrounding buildings are all represented in a greyish tone. The subtle color nuances are apart from and connected to the formal emphasis on the contrast between the surrounding rectilinear horizontality-verticality and the prominence of diagonals and curves that define the iconic centerpiece to her composition [painting].

There is a touch irony in Simonida’s similar coloristic decision with here carefully detailed rendition of Les Invalides—another domed structure further west on the left bank of the river, with its extensive lawns leading down virtually to the river’s edge—commissioned by Louis XV’s predecessor, the long-ruling Louis XIV. The king initiated the project in 1670: the creation of a hospital and home for disabled (invalides) soldiers, (for which complex the domed edifice is actually the chapel). The project was undertaken the following year under the direction of Liberal Bruant, but its ultimate design was accomplished by Jules Hardouin-Mansart—with a dome more than 75 feet higher than that of the Pantheon, and surrounded by fifteen courtyards; the entirety was not completed until 1706. While it continued to serve as a war-veteran’s respite until the early twentieth century, it, too, like its sibling, the Pantheon, has also served as a burial site for military heroes. Arguably the most renowned of these is Napoleon Bonaparte, whose remains, eventually returned to France form the Island of St Helena, were ultimately laid to rest in 1861 in a red quartzite tomb resting on a green granite base.

The aforementioned irony for Simonida’s image is that she has again chosen to depict this complex building—that rises on five levels from ground to top of the dome, with a double-layered entrance fronton marked by an escalating double array of columns and a double-level drum rising from the rectangular body—using, again, simple black and white. This includes the dome, which in actuality scintillates with lavishly applied gold leaf. So, as so often, she confounds expectations: this time by reserving her gold leaf for the skies and desisting from using it for her re-vision of the dome, while also placing that primary structure as an outcropping embedded within the outer walls of the vast complex [painting].

The long garden that leads from Les Invalides down to the Seine yields at the quay to the Alexander III Bridge (Pont Alexandre III)—the Russian Tsar who concluded the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892. The richly appointed beaux-arts confection was begun in 1896 and finished just in time for the Universal Exposition of 1900. Simonida has turned her eye just beyond the bridge, back on the rive droite, to a corner of Charles Girault’s Petit Palais, the construction of which, like that of the nearby Grand Palais, began in 1897 in order for it also to be ready, with its dramatic, in-pulling arched entrance, for the Universal Exposition. Her emphasis is on a section—a corner pavilion with its embedded triangular fronton—of that neo-classical entrance façade, and on large commemorative columns with heroes poised on top of them, offering a restrained black-and-white image with none of the myriad building details contending in pigment with her familiar gold-leaf sky—except for the unfurled three-colored French flag that rises above the roofline into that scintillating space [painting].

But the Pont Alexandre IIL itself is also one of several bridges—among the 37 vehicular and pedestrian connections between the two banks of the Seine, 23 of which are identified by UNESCO as of particular historic and/or aesthetic note—that have also captured Simonida’s eye and been captured by her pencil, charcoal, paintbrush, and palette knife. She emphasizes the carved-stone floral swags, highlighted by gilded punctuation points, that adorn its flanks, the beautiful sconces that provide tiny islands of light as dusk comes on, and above all the dark bronze and brightly gilded sculptural group of nymphs that marks the center point of the long-low single-span masterpiece designed in 1896 by Joseph Cassien-Bernard and Gaston Cousin. She has transformed this visual point into a ghostly white horse and rider galloping in mid-air at that mid-mark along the bridge: all else in the scene that she offers is submerged in a light blue-grey, between the deep dark blue of the river below and the gold-leaf above the horizon lines of the city architecture (that includes the dome of Les Invalides) [painting].

She schematically captures the Pont au Change (Exchange Bridge)—so-called because, back in the 12th century, an earlier iteration housed the shops of myriad goldsmiths and money-changers—that connects the right bank at the Place du Chatelet to the Ile de la Cite at the point where the island is dominated by the massive forms for the Palace of Justice and the adjoining Conciergerie—used as a prison during the Revolution. The artist squeezes the bridge’s spans and embeds the massive Palace of Justice towers with their witch-hat-like rooves against the edifice walls as if those walls have become sleek and modern—and sandwiches the entire black-and-grey array of manmade structures between the seamless gold of her skyless sky and pulsing rhythms of the blue-and-grey river [painting].

The iconic bridge of bridges, of course—the Grande Dame of bridges connecting the two sides of the Grande Dame of cultural cities, by way of the Isle de la Cite—is the Pont Neuf near where we began this encounter. This oldest that was once the newest is thus a particularly enduring symbol of the city as a center of tradition and innovation, at its geographic and spiritual center. So Simonida portrays the Pont Neuf again (who can get enough of it?), this time zooming her focus in on a mere three arches of its twelve, bringing the viewer closer to the buttresses that double, above the arch struts, as outcroppings that allow individuals to stand away from the main flow of bridge-crossing traffic to watch the river’s flow, and rising, each, to a slender pair of eloquent street lights. She places a mountainous agglomeration of buildings—in which she has embedded the transposed classical form of the Roman temple-style Pantheon façade, as if it were there, just beyond the bridge—rising directly from the bridge’s recumbent spine. The entire expanse of solid man-made structures marks the swollen middle course of the canvas, below which the light and dark and greyish blue water of the Seine flows away from the viewer, and above which the now-familiar glowing gold of a supernatural sky extends [painting].

The consummate Parisian icon is the Eiffel Tower. It was originally designed as part of the 1889 Universal Exposition, and like a number of innovative monuments, albeit inconceivably to us today, the Tour d’Eiffel was originally criticized by French artists and intellectuals (think I.M. Pei’s Pyramide, far more recently, and one might recall that Impressionist painting was despised at first; ironically, appreciated first by American art aficionados—so it goes!), before everyone across the planet came to adore it. The 1889 exposition marking the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution yielded both the tower that was, at that time, the tallest in the world, and served as the expo symbol (in spite of the disgruntled Parisians). It remains the most recognizable symbol of the City of Light. While Gustave Eiffel was the engineer-contractor whose firm built the graceful colossus, the designers, Maurice Koechlin, Emile Nougier, and Stephen Sauvestre—who added the gently curving arches of the base (resonating from those of the Pont Neuf and other bridges along the Seine), as well as the glass observation platform and the small cupola on top, (the contours of which bear a resemblance to the domes of the Church of Sacre Coeur)—remain virtually unknown.

Simonida’s all white-and black colossus, its proportions deliberately squatter and sturdier than its model—a four-legged beast as if about to step forward—rises against a far-flung cityscape that is marked by the hints of domes and towers that we have seen through her eyes in other canvases. A sliver of the blue river is visible along the left lower side, an intriguing violet slithers along the buildings toward their horizon, as if the setting sun has started to shift their hues from pink to red to purple—and the horizon, like a 17th-century Dutch landscape, is deliberately low, in order to emphasize the soaring, overwhelming quality of the artist’s gilded sky, into which the self-assertive genius child of the gilded, Belle Epoque, thrusts itself [painting].

Epilogue

There is an epilogue to all of this, by way of a related project—of course: the painting of three enormous canvases to cover the front façade of the French Ambassador’s residence while the exterior of the mansion is being restored. The building is itself (by coincidence or not) iconic and French. It was designed in 1910 by the Paris-born French-American architect, Jules Henri de Sibour—who claims descent, on his father’s side, from the Bourbon royal dynasty. Sibour (whose mother was an American from Belfast, Maine) ended up doing much of his work in Washington, DC—typically beaux-arts in style, with an acknowledged French influence. Thus the residence offers a bit of Paris in Washington—and a fitting setting for Simonida’s threefold artistic identity roots (Serbia-Washington-Paris), which she has turned toward a traditional three-fold form—but in an untraditional way.

Her enormous triptych sets the façade of the residence against the symbolic light that is intended to suggest three moods associated with three times of the day: morning, midday, and evening. Thus the bright light of midday is expressed in the gold leaf that defines the sky above the central portion of the building, and resonates within its windows. The intricate ogive double door, framed by elaborate carvings in a rectangular lozenge that support the fourfold windows away from which the tricolor extends, lead the eye up to the pointed center of the monumental entryway that ultimately rises above the roofline. That roof is flat and embellished with a balustrade, to the left and right—as if the entryway peak were the River Seine or the Isle de la Cite within the river, rising up to separate the two banks of the city.

To the viewer’s left, dawn is expressed by the copper-pink sky that rises expectantly from the two left-hand sections of the mansion, and subtly colors the stone and stucco walls and the myriad windows that, like their counterparts in the central sections of the building, assume arched forms, framed—alone, in pairs, trios, and quartets—in lighter-hued, relief-carved stone. Evening falls gently over the righthand double wing of the building, a silver sky resting on the structure, its restful light echoed in the windows. The painting of the building that hides the scaffolding that hides the actual building underscores the dynamic balances between the human hand and that of nature: its sharp-edges and straight lines contrast with the curves and irregular lines of bushes and trees [painting]. The asymmetrical details of the foliage within the symmetries of their placement and against the precise symmetries of the mansion offer a delightful visual reminder of the varied ways in which our vision of the world is enhanced when we are privileged to look through lenses provided by a talented artist’s eye.

Ori Z Soltes

Georgetown University

[1] This and other comments ascribed to Simonida in this essay were made either in conversation in November, 2021 or in several emails in June, 2022.

[2] There is in fact a number of interpretations for these colors; two other important ones are that the three represent liberty (liberte), equality (egalite), and brotherhood (fraternite)—values championed in the French Revolution—or that the blue symbolizes St Martin of Tours, Red symbolizes St Denis, and white symbolizes St Joan of Arc; or that the white represents the House of Bourbon and thus the French monarchy, whereas blue and red, colors worn by the French revolutionaries in Paris, represent the city of Paris pushing against monarchy in and beyond 1789.

[3] For the sticklers among us: much earlier, Neolithic remains have been found here as well.

[4] This was also the site where the Commune first convened and where, on March 18,1871, Communard soldiers killed two French army generals—and where, on the last day of the Commune, one of its leaders, the socialist sand anarchist Eugene Varlin, was executed. The left-right political conflict over the site helped prevent the declaration by the French parliament of Sacre-Coeur as a national historic monument until 2022.