Morgane Ely / Hostess and guests

 

Morgane Ely, Dinner à la japonaise (detail), 2025. Courtesy of Prima Gallery

Hostess and guests

10 Oct — 15 Nov 2025 at the Prima Gallery in Paris, France

17 SEPTEMBER 2025

With Morgane Ely, woodcut is not a means to reproduce images, it is a way to embody them. The carved plates, shaped over long hours of meticulous work, are not tools but artworks in their own right. No prints here. What’s shown are the matrices themselves: inked, scored, sometimes sprayed in acid-bright colors. Each piece seems to earn its own presence, raw, dense, and precise — a critique made material.

Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris, France

Shakespeare and Company

Experience books and timelessness in one of the oldest English bookstores of Paris 

9 JULY 2024, 

NIMI SANJITH

The quaint, old bookstore nestled alongside a riverbank, adjacent to a historical monument, in a city that exudes love, art, lights, and fashion, is enough to entice anyone to pay a visit to "Shakespeare and Company." However, the story doesn't merely conclude there. It's a journey that transports you to a realm of books and timelessness. I could endlessly elaborate on the reasons and ways this is so.

An enthusiastic reader often regards reading as an expedition into a realm of limitless imagination. They approach a book with a blank canvas, ready to paint their own interpretation of the world the author has woven. Such a reader also holds a deep fondness for spaces that invigorate and brim with countless tales. Being someone who is captivated by storytelling and hungers for narratives from all corners, a pilgrimage to this English bookstore in Paris was an essential agenda during my trip to the city.

"Shakespeare and Company" is the embodiment of every bibliophile's fantasy. Much like unraveling the pages of a work of fiction, a visit to this store unveils numerous narratives in every nook and cranny. Situated along the Seine's left bank, a stone's throw from the Notre Dame Cathedral, this establishment is one of Paris's oldest English bookstores. Legend has it that it provided refuge to several literary titans of bygone eras. Originally founded by George Whitman in 1951 under the name "Le Mistral," the building's architecture initially faced criticism. However, Whitman repurposed the store as a haven for aspiring writers and artists, offering them shelter during their trying times in Paris. In exchange for assistance around the bookstore, these individuals found a place to stay. In 1964, Whitman bestowed the name "Shakespeare and Company" upon the bookstore, borrowing it from Sylvia Beach's establishment of the same name, which was established in 1919 and shuttered in 1941. Since then, it has persisted as a haven for secondhand books, an assortment of antique volumes, and a public library that patrons are free to peruse.

On the day I decided to visit "Shakespeare and Company," heavy rain was falling. I assumed there would be fewer crowds everywhere. Yet, as Paris is renowned for, no inclement weather can hinder the city's celebration of art, literature, and architecture. Turning into the lane adjacent to Notre Dame, the street leading to the bookstore already displayed a queue of people waiting to enter. I then learned the rule that allowed only twenty people inside the store at any given time. However, there was no time limit for how long one could stay within. As patrons exited, others entered. Everyone waited patiently, and I had my 5-year-old daughter with me, eager to witness one of the world's oldest stores. The café next to the store provided a convenient spot for those seeking relaxation while waiting, and I must note that it offered some of the finest coffee in Paris. Sipping hot, steaming coffee on a rainy day amidst the presence of books spanning three generations was sheer bliss for an enthusiast's soul.

Stepping into the store, I felt as though I had entered the libraries of our great-grandparents, with books piled up to the ceiling. The ground floor housed new releases, neatly organized by various genres as in a typical bookstore. However, there were quite a few unique selections within the poetry and literature sections. Each shelf featured in-store recommendations for content and aesthetic front covers. Moving to the first floor, I encountered an antique collection and cozy reading corners. One could recline on a windowsill and delve into grand, ancient tales. Numerous beds were nestled between bookshelves, said to have accommodated 30,000 individuals who assisted around the store. Countless stories adorned the walls in the form of pictures, and hours could be spent reading and uncovering them all. I noticed many regular visitors engaging in casual and friendly conversations with the storekeepers. I couldn't resist making a purchase, and I'm pleased I did, for it came with a timeless stamp and a cherished bookmark.

Visitors should be aware that photography is not permitted inside the store. They encourage you to stow away your phones and explore. While it might seem like a missed opportunity for your social media feed, some stories are best experienced through your own eyes rather than the lens of a camera. Though I lack physical photographs of the space I discovered, I experienced a sense of timelessness. That mental image can convey a story that exceeds a thousand words. "Shakespeare and Company" is a haven not only for those who adore immersing themselves in Paris and books but also for a timeless romance that can be kindled with literature, coffee, a touch of Parisian ambiance, and endless tales from a bygone era.

MEER

The resurrection of Simone Biles

Simone Biles, during one of her exercises in the team final.FRANCISCO SECO

PARIS 2024

The resurrection of Simone Biles

The gymnast is once again the star of the U.S. team and of the Olympic Games. She is back and will end her journey in the world of sports only when she decides to

Paloma del Río
31 July 2024

By now, everything has already been said about Simone Biles. That she was born into a broken home, that it was her grandfather who, with his second wife, adopted Simone and her sister Adria, and that she grew up happy and athletic doing gymnastics from the age of six. She joined the national team very early on due to her talent and began to stand out in “minor” competitions until she was old enough to be part of the U.S. senior team. The coach at the time, Martha Karoly (wife of Bela Karoly, coach and discoverer of Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton) included her in the national team for the 2014 World Championships in Antwerp, and at the age of 16 she was proclaimed world champion, a title she has won six times. She has won 30 medals at World Championships, of which 23 are gold, far surpassing the second gymnast with the most medals, Vitaly Sherbo, an Olympic champion in Barcelona 92. She was champion of the United States on nine occasions. And she arrived in Paris with seven Olympic medals, tied with Shannon Miller. 

 

Samuel Beckett

An Exercise in Redemption: On Deirdre Bair’s “Parisian Lives”

November 14, 2019   •   By Sophie Madeline Dess

AWARD-WINNING WRITER Deirdre Bair likes to call herself an “accidental biographer.” Apparently, she “had never read a biography before she decided that Samuel Beckett needed one and she was the person to write it.” One is inclined to call this a “happy” accident since the Beckett bio won the National Book Award in 1981 and started Bair on a prolific career. However, given the mortifying and fury-eliciting anecdotes laced throughout her new memoir, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me, happy is not the word that comes most readily to mind.

Paris street named in honour of artists who lived in Jersey

 

Claude Cahun

Paris street named in honour of artists who lived in Jersey

27 November 2018

Claude Cahun, who was born Lucy Schwob, is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, and there has been a resurgence in her work since the mid-1990s when Jersey Heritage acquired her collection.

Emmanuel Peterson / Paris

Emmanuel Peterson, 1h30. Square du Vert Galant

Emmanuel Peterson 

Paris

8 avr. — 28 mai 2016 à la Galerie du Forez à Paris

 

Emmanuel Peterson, 2h30. Boulevard de Clichy

Emmanuel Peterson, 2h00. Quai de Seine près du Pont de Bercy

Ilustrated by Charlie Louis

Slavery and prostitution: from Benin City to Paris

Paris Match | Publié le 16/06/2016 à 12h21 |Mis à jour le 16/06/2016 à 20h10

Par Pauline Delassus

The bois de Vincennes near Paris, France, in May 2016. Nobody told this girl where she would end up when she crossed the Mediterranean Sea. But is was all set up from the beginning.

‘A unique and bizarre place of his own in the story of modern art’... Blooming, 2001-2008, by Cy Twombly. 

Cy Twombly review – blood-soaked coronation for a misunderstood master

Centre Pompidou, Paris
The first retrospective since the US artist’s death in 2011 celebrates a man pushing sex and death into a gory new space for art

My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

Jonathan Jones
Wednesday 30 November 2016

C

y Twombly, an artist who was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928 and moved to Italy in the 1950s, is in many ways very French. In the Salle des Bronzes Antiques at the Louvre museum in Paris, where ancient Greek armour waits silently for wars that will never come again, the room’s vast ceiling is painted by Twombly with a bright expanse of blue, its intensity illuminated by silver and gold suns and moons as if the light of the Mediterranean were infusing the museum with desire and danger.

Ellery Washingon / James Balwin´s Paris

James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s Paris

By ELLERY WASHINGTONJAN. 17, 2014

Launch media viewer

Café de Flore, where Baldwin worked on his novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

One bright afternoon in Paris, on the terrace of the cafe Deux Magots, in St.-Germain-des-Prés, I found myself engaged in an increasingly animated conversation about the writer James Baldwin and the notorious feud that broke out between him and his fellow African-American expatriate Richard Wright.

Becoming a Member of the Shakespeare and Company Lending Library

Joshua Kotin

January 20, 2020

It’s 1920. You’ve just moved to Paris—to work, to study, to escape. You want to read English-language books. What are your options? You could buy books at Brentano’s, a bookshop at 27 avenue de l’Opéra on the Right Bank. But English-language books are expensive—five to twenty times the price of French books. You could join the American Library in Paris, another Right Bank institution, at 10 rue de l’Elysée. But the holdings are limited—based on a collection donated by American libraries during the War. Luckily, you’ve received a flyer for Shakespeare and Company, a new bookshop and lending library at 8 rue Dupuytren on the Left Bank. The flyer even includes a map. You decide to visit.¹

Last Tango in Paris / Review by Norman Mailer

• 
  

LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1973): A TRANSIT TO NARCISSUS – Review by Norman Mailer

To pay one’s five dollars and join the full house at the Translux for the evening show of Last Tango in Paris is to be reminded once again that the planet is in a state of pullulation. The seasons accelerate. The snow which was falling in November had left by the first of March. Would our summer arrive at Easter and end with July? It is all that nuclear radiation, says every aficionado of the occult. And we pullulate. Like an anthill beginning to feel the heat.

Notre Dame and the culture it inspired – from Matisse to the Muppets

It mesmerised Proust, terrified Homer Simpson and gave us the Hunchback – Guardian critics celebrate Paris’s gothic masterpiece at the heart of the modern imagination

Oliver Wainwright, Stuart Jeffries, Peter Bradshaw, Jonathan Jones, Fiona Maddocks, Michael Coveney and Keza MacDonald

Tue 16 Apr 2019 16.13 BST

Architecture: ‘Pugin fainted when he saw its beauty’

As Notre Dame Cathedral’s majestic spire tumbled into the inferno on Monday night, live newsreaders around the world decried the tragic loss of this 12th-century marvel. The great timber roof – nicknamed “the forest” for the thousands of trees used in its beams – was gone, the rose windows feared melted, the heart of Paris destroyed forever. What few realised in the heat of the shocking footage was that much of what was ablaze was a 19th-century fantasy. Like most buildings of this age, Notre Dame is the sum of centuries of restorations and reinventions, a muddled patchwork of myth and speculation.

Victor Hugo's Notre Dame novel tops bestseller list after fire

Different editions of author’s 19th-century classic in five of top 10 slots on Amazon France

John Henley

Wed 17 Ap 2019

 

Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as Esmeralda in the 1923 film. Photograph: John Springer Collection/Corbis via Getty Images

Victor Hugo’s 19th-century literary classic Notre-Dame de Paris has soared to the top of France’s online bestseller list after the fire that ravaged the 850-year-old Paris cathedral on Monday night.

By Wednesday morning, different editions of the 1831 novel occupied the first, third, fifth, seventh and eighth slots in Amazon France’s bestseller list, with a history of the gothic architectural masterpiece taking sixth place.The book is better known in the Anglosphere as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the title given to its 1833 English translation.

The runaway success confirms a French tendency to seek solace in literature at times of national anguish: A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his time in the bars and cafés of 1920s Paris, became France’s fastest-selling book after the terror attacks of November 2015.

Hugo’s epic 11-volume novel is set in 1482 and tells the story of the beautiful Gypsy girl Esmeralda, who captures the hearts of many men – but especially the hunchback Quasimodo, the half-blind and deaf bellringer of Notre-Dame.

Many critics have argued that the cathedral itself is the real hero of the work, which the writer and campaigner began in 1829 partly to draw attention to the importance of the French capital’s gothic architecture, which at the time was being widely neglected, defaced or pulled down to make way for new buildings.

The novel went on to become a classic and is largely credited with helping to initiate a vast renovation of the crumbling cathedral – Hugo’s “majestic and sublime edifice” – in the mid-19th century, completed by the architects Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.

In one often-cited passage from the novel, Hugo rages at the state of the building: “As much beauty as it may retain in its old age, it is not easy to repress a sigh, to restrain our anger, when we mark the countless defacements and mutilations to which men and time have subjected that venerable monument.”

A second, equally prophetic passage has circulated widely on social media in France since the fire that destroyed large parts of the cathedral’s roof and sent its spire toppling into the nave.

“All eyes were turned to the top of the church,” Hugo wrote. “What they saw was most strange. Upon the top of the topmost gallery, higher than the central rose-window, a vast flame ascended between the two belfries with whirling sparks.

“A vast flame, fierce and strong, fragments of which were borne away by the wind with the smoke. Below this flame … two spouts, terminating in gargoyles, vomited sheets of fiery rain, whose silvery streams shone out distinctly against the gloom of the lower part of the cathedral front.”

THE GUARDIAN

Pictures of the Day / 18 June 2017 / My bike is one life

Pictures of the Day: 18 June 2017

Cyclists lay on the ground during a gathering called by the "mon velo est une vie" committee (my bike is one life) to prevent bike accidents in Paris.

FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

TELEGRAPH

Fashion / Autumn in Paris

Mode

Autumn in Paris

2015

Ian McEwan on Charlie Hebdo -facing down hatred with laughter

The slaughter in Paris was a tragedy for the open society – the free speech debate must revive

Saturdady 10 January 2015 

M

urderous and self-sanctifying, radical Islam has become a global attractor for psychopaths. It has never been embarrassed to proclaim its list of hatreds: education, tolerance, plurality, pleasure and, above all, freedom of expression – the freedom that underpins all others. Even more important than the abstractions are the people that jihadists hate and have killed: children, schoolgirls, gays, women, atheists, non-Muslims, and many, many Muslims. To that list we must now add the brave and lively staff of Charlie Hebdo, who hoped to face down hatred with laughter. The slaughter in Paris is a tragedy for the open society. On a dark night for mental freedom, a few fragile points of light: the calm, determined crowds gathered in cities across France; the hope that the general revulsion at these murders might have a unifying effect; the fact that a cult rooted in hate is a frail thing and cannot last; the fact that the psychopaths are vastly outnumbered.

With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime, Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal

The Picasso Museum in Paris has reopened 

after a renovation that more than doubled its size.

With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime, 

Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal

The Picasso Museum Reopens in Paris

By Holland Cotter

The New York Times, October 27, 2014

Photos by Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Pablo Picasso

PARIS — “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it,”Pablo Picasso reportedly said. Whether he did say it or not, it sounds like him, serial overproducer. And in a gray, leaf-drifting October here he’s as good as his word. The Picasso Museum, which closed for expansion in 2009, has finally reopened at more than twice its former size, but years overschedule and wrapped in a swirl of intrigue.

For the news media, the renovation project has been a gift. Work on the Baroque mansion that houses the museum, the world’s largest Picasso collection, dragged scandalously on and on. Budgets ballooned. There were shocked firings (Anne Baldassari, the museum’s director was dismissed), high-level hissy fits and ad hominem attacks galore. Who could ask for more?

The renovated Picasso Museum, closed since 2009 for renovation, finally reopened on Saturday in the Hôtel Salé, a Baroque 17th-century mansion. CreditEd Alcock for The New York Times

The art-loving public could. The museum, which debuted in 1985, is a popular draw. No matter how many great individual Picasso works there are in London, Madrid or New York, in its museum Paris has the artist himself, early and late, in major and minor mode. No wonder anxious crowds lined the sidewalks and swarmed the front door here for the public opening on Saturday.

Once inside, what do they get? Fabulousness — and frustration. On the unqualified positive side, there are more than 400 Picasso works encompassing his career, along with a gemlike selection of pieces he owned by artists he loved: Chardin, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Henri Rousseau. And in a sense, even his own work here represents a personal choice.

In breadth, texture and spirit, the exhibition is like no other. It is utterly different from, say, the large selection of Picassos in “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met show is a classic lineup of trophy masterpieces. What’s at the Picasso Museum is closer to a sublime teaching collection, with scraps and masterworks mixed together. The goal here is less to monumentalize an artist or a style than to tell a complex story of how art is made by one person of protean energy over a specific stretch of time.

Picasso was a lifelong self-collector who kept examples of his art that he couldn’t or didn’t want to relinquish: juvenilia, pictorial notes to self, finished favorites, and souvenirs of loves and traumas gone by. He left this archive, or accumulation, to family members when he died in 1973. They sifted it and gave a vast amount to the French government in lieu of paying inheritance tax. It is this collection, essentially shaped by the artist himself, that the museum is built on.

A visitor viewing some of the museum’s 437 works on display, which include not only ones by Picasso but works by artists he admired. CreditEd Alcock for The New York Times

Given such richly personal material, it’s too bad the new presentation at the Picasso Museum — officially the Musée Picasso Paris — isn’t telling that story more persuasively. Architecture is part of the problem. The museum’s 17th-century home, the Hôtel Salé, in the historic Marais district, with its garden, courtyard and two-story, sculpture-encrusted entrance hall, has never been ideal for showing art.

The interior is choppy, with smallish spaces, dead ends, and illogical connections. The original 1980s renovation laid a white-walled Corbusian gloss over this without achieving a sense of unity. The new design, by the architect Jean-François Bodin, is basically a magnified version of the old plan. There’s more space — four floors of galleries, including a vaulted basement and loftlike attic with exposed beams and views of surrounding rooftops — but their order is still hard to navigate.

An impression of discontinuity is compounded by the idiosyncratic arrangement of art devised by Ms. Baldassari, who stayed on the job just long enough to organize the inaugural show. The main installation, on the first and second floors, begins with a few paintings by the adolescent Picasso in Spain, where he was born in 1881, and others from his first stay in Paris when he was barely out of his teens. The shift is dramatic: Murillo-style realism one year, the equivalent of psychedelia the next.

But the time frame quickly grows confusing. The collection’s earliest painting, “The Barefoot Girl,” from 1895, turns up two galleries away with some near-abstract 1930s sculpture. Elsewhere, a pairing of the “blue” self-portrait from 1901 with a sketchy moon-face one from 1972 makes sense in a compare-and-contrast way. But putting them with the 1914 Cubist “Man With a Mustache” and a bronze head from 1958 doesn’t, unless you’re saying that all Picasso male heads are self-portraits, which they aren’t.

A detail from Picasso’s sculpture “A Man With a Sheep” (1943). CreditEd Alcock for The New York Times

The trouble is, Ms. Baldassari doesn’t say anything at all about the choices she’s making. Labels with information are absent. The unstated idea, in curatorial vogue at the moment, is that art speaks for itself, end of story. But this isn’t so, and hasn’t been since the 18th century, when most art was still about politics and religion and pitched to a privileged insider audience. Art has changed; audiences have changed, widened. Today, no single body of shared knowledge can be assumed. Viewers need help, and deserve the choice to avail themselves of it.

By way of compromise, Ms. Baldassari shapes the show around a few loose themes. Under the label “Primitive” she has brought together an astonishing array of small paintings and drawings that demonstrate, step by audacious step, how “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” came into being in 1907. Under “War Paintings,” we see the 1937 “Guernica” simultaneously coalescing and sending sparks out in future directions.

Much of the museum’s collection, though, is from an in-between period, the late 1920s to the early 1930s, when Picasso was coming off his post-World War I “classical” phase, getting his radical mojo back, and beginning to think of himself as a surrealist. It was tough going. The new work didn’t sell too well — possibly that’s the reason he kept so much of it — and you can see why: It’s strong, aggressive stuff. Everything is teeth and genitals, penetrations and impalings. Bodies, mostly female, are crudités of detached limbs. Picasso appears repeatedly in the alter-ego of the Minotaur, an Ovidian sex machine.

Work from his sex-and-violence phase feels right at home in Paris this fall. An exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “Sade: Attacking the Sun,” is a tribute to the Divine Marquis and an orgy of erotically tortured figures. (The Picasso Museum lent paintings to the show.) At the Pompidou Center, Marcel Duchamp makes all sorts of slice-and-dice moves on the human form in a fine-tuned show of his paintings. And the Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy has brought his elaborately offensive “Chocolate Factory” to Monnaie de Paris, a former mint, where blonde-wigged workers of various genders turn out edible versions of sex toys and Santa Clauses.

When Mr. McCarthy installed a big blowup sculpture of one of the sex toys — he coyly titled it “Tree” — in the Place Vendôme, he was slapped by an offended local, opening a window on a reactionary side of French politics usually hidden from short-term visitors. But it’s there, always has been, and Picasso, the insider who was always an outsider, knew this.

All together, you can learn a tremendous amount about him in the Picasso Museum show, not least that he could be a truly terrible artist. Maybe the biggest revelation, though, comes on the top floor, when you catch your first glimpse of a Cézanne landscape Picasso once owned, and instantly sense what’s been missing from the two floors below: focus, concentration, a point of repose, warmth like a light in a tunnel, a fire in a hearth, a vigil lamp in a church.

The comparison of Cézanne to Picasso we see here is of painter to cartoonist, of steady walker to competition dancer. It’s hard even to imagine Picasso painting landscapes — though he did; there’s one nearby — because, judging by this jumpy show, he doesn’t know how to be quiet, to sit there, stop spewing, do nothing, look long. Yet I can imagine him entering the gallery, as we do, nerves keyed up, and seeing Cézanne with a jolt of relief. It’s fitting that after Picasso died at 91, he was laid to rest in the garden of his summer home, a chateau not so different from the Hôtel Salé, but in the South of France, in view of Cézanne’s beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. Not that he was particularly sentimental about the connection. He was territorial to the end. “Cézanne painted these mountains and now they are mine,” he is said to have boasted. And Paris owns Picasso, or a comprehensive chunk of him, and whatever the failings of the Picasso Museum, that’s just a fact.

The Picasso Museum is in the Hôtel Salé, 5 Rue de Thorigny, Paris; museepicassoparis.fr/en/.

A version of this review appears in print on October 28, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime, Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal. 

THE NEW YORK TIMES