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The Torn Posters in the Paris Metro (August 2024)
Take a guided tour of the French capital’s most prominent underground art gallery
Welcome to the Paris Underground Museum Tour. My name is William and today I’ll be guiding you through the most contemporary art gallery in all of France.
Now, before we get going, let’s just do a quick headcount.
We’re all here? Cool. Let’s dive right in.
So in case you didn’t know, we’re at Montparnasse-Bienvenüe. It’s a metro station below the Gare Montparnasse, one of the major train stations in Paris.
It’s also below the Tour Montparnasse, one of the only skyscrapers in the city. People hated the building so much that the council promised to ban the erection of other such monstrosities within Paris intramuros. So ironically, whilst the Tour Montaparnasse is hated for marring the Paris skyline, it arguably also saved it.
Now if we make our way here, we can find an artwork titled Guillotine Blues by a certain Monsieur Unknown. What I like about this work is that it’s tricolore, containing the red, white and blue of the French flag. You could almost imagine it as being some kind of physical representation of the country, as if someone had fed the flag into an AI program and had asked it to spit out something broadly human in form.
Funnily enough, the physical erasure of the person’s face arguably enhances the image by keeping her universal; as no one knows what she looks like, everyone is free to see themselves in her. You could say she’s a modern symbol of the French republic, a Marianne in denim, and she’s there for everyone because she’s everyone.
Now we’re going to make our way to Les Agnettes in the Northwestern suburbs of Paris. It’s quite a journey, I know, but it is what it is.
So here we have Go For Gold by yet another anonymous artist. To be brutally honest…
