It’s a long time since Paris was regarded as a seedbed for contemporary style in the visual arts. French prestige began to erode after World War II, and by the time Pop art arrived in the Sixties, even the French could see how high New York had risen. By the Seventies, as developments in Germany and Italy caught up with and passed America, France found itself, for the first time in maybe four hundred years, a second-rate artistic power. In the Eighties, France has only fallen farther behind: along with playing a supporting role to Italy and Germany, France is now overshadowed by Spain, England, Russia, and Eastern Europe as well. Most of the new European art we see in New York is as instantly forgettable as the occasional French imports that do come our way. But the conventional wisdom has it that the French can’t innovate and other Europeans can; and American art professionals nowadays visit Paris for the food, the shopping, the cafés—for everything except the contemporary art.

Maybe there isn’t any worthwhile art being created in Paris today; but considering the extent to which the curators at French museums are now fixated on international developments, I doubt they could recognize something homegrown and authentic if it did come their way. Parisians are painfully aware that foreigners, American and otherwise, expect no further chapters in the history of French painting. And if the events scheduled in Paris for the bicentennial summer just passed are any