Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
       Susie Asado.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
       Susie Asado.
–    Susie Asado by Gertrude Stein

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s latest film offering, reminds us that the adage that “the grass is always greener on the other side (or during an earlier ‘golden age’)” is rarely true.  Our own lives in the times in which we are born are as rich and amazing as we choose to make them.  However, there is little doubt that Paris in the 1920s was, according to Gertrude Stein, the heart and soul of art and literature at that time.  During the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, American artists and writers, as well as European artists and writers living in England and other European countries, flocked to Paris, which was fast becoming the hub for artistic and literary innovation and experimentation.  Names synonymous with literary and artistic genius – Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse – came to Paris to live, work, and feed off of the synergy created by their close proximity to kindred spirits.

Women, such as Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney, who were at the heart of the American expatriate community, established some of Paris’ most renowned salons – meeting places for luminaries in art and literature.  It was at the homes of these women that artists and writers mingled, exchanged ideas, and supported one another.  Paris in the 1920s provided a relatively level playing field that enabled men and women from varied backgrounds and ethnicities to come together and be judged on their talents and ideas rather than on that which they could not change.  The richness of the resulting encounters shaped the art and literature of the Modernist age as well as many intellectual and aesthetic movements throughout the Twentieth Century.

Clearly, alcohol played its part in lubricating the conversations within the salons of Paris, but there is evidence that tea, too, was a beverage of choice.  While tea consumption in France has never rivaled that of Great Britain, it has long been popular among the French upper middle class.  When not actually being consumed in the salons of the day, tea was represented in other ways.  The pajamas that Matisse made fashionable as leisurewear in the early Twentieth Century were patterned after those worn by tea planters.  In addition, many artists of the period captured tea in their paintings, particularly women drinking tea in garden settings.  Matisse’s painting above shows two women enjoying a sunny day in the yard and a samovar of tea.

Today, Paris is dotted with salons de the, but while most likely don’t attract a literal who’s who of the contemporary art and literature scenes, they likely do serve up a far superior leaf and a far greater variety of teas than what were available back in the 1920s.  Now, over 100 years since Gertrude Stein turned her home at 27 rue de Fleurus into the meeting place of novelists, poets, and artists, isn’t it time to bring back the salons that launched the Twentieth Century and combine them with the salons de the of today?  With the prevalence of sound bites, tweets, and status updates, the arts of conversation, debate, and face-to-face interaction are in desperate need of a revival.  And what better way to start a conversation than with a pot of good tea.