Paris revisited. Again.

We were big fans of the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris. There was something magical about traveling back in time to his version of the emigre scene in 1920s Paris. Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Picasso... All of the stories are legendary, and most of the works still dazzle. The reason the hero of the film is transported back to this time is precisely because of all this magic.

It was a real time though, and probably really magical. We have the books and the art from the time to tease us about it. Warren Perry writes about it all in the National Portrait Gallery Face to Face blog:

The other preoccupation of this period was, of course, art—in all its forms. Painting, writing, theater, and dance were all appreciated facets of the cultural scene. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were alternately feathering and grinding words onto paper, [Gerald] Murphy and Picasso were splashing paints onto canvases, and Zelda Fitzgerald somehow convinced herself that she should become a ballerina, though her habits and age were somewhat ballet-prohibitive. All of these individuals met with creative success, even Zelda, who danced in staged works and gave herself over manically to ballet.

The glimpses of the art are well worth a visit: A Moveable Force: The Resonance of the Expatriate Experience