Paris, 4 June 2022

Pentecost in the church across the street, which is blocked by men in red safety vests. I believe there was vigil last night, and some kind of a procession this morning but too far away to observe. We live across from the side entrance, which is boarded up, because someone set fire to it two or three years ago - Before Covid - and it is at last being repaired—the door and the rose window.

I walked over to the Centre Pompidou late yesterday to see the Shirley Jaffe show; it is magnificent, a small retrospective consisting, if I read correctly, of works that were left to the French state in lieu of taxes, when Jaffe died, in Paris, in 2016 (all facts subject to correction). Very big, very brightly-coloured canvases, the early work abstract, gestural (think Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell), later work more static, but still kinetic, the eye coming and going between motifs, hard-edged, playful, shapes enigmatic but in the way of riddles. My favourite might have been the wall-sized ‘Boulevard Montparnasse’ of 1968. But I had a lot of favourites.