ABSTRACT

In this chapter the author recollects the memories of his life. It was the author's very first post-war foray out of Britain, and the first stop was Paris, of course, breathtakingly different, bewildering. The author was stayed with his first cousins. The author explored Paris on his own on that first outing from Britain, which were some years before 'New York stole Modern Art'. Paris was its capital still, still the city of art galleries, of little theatres and the even smaller magazines – of culture in general. Like most of the 'culture-workers' outside any immediate architectural circles, Pichette found author's passion for architecture puzzling. Anyone who had the good luck to be involved with words would surely not invest his energy in such prosy business as building. Jean Helion paintings of that time, which he wanted to be 'moral and didactic', had a limited iconography: threatening, outsize, sectioned pumpkins.