Paris has more art museums than I ever dreamed of. Some I have been to on previous visits, but this year, I'm seeing art in many more. I'm now a card carrying Friend of the Louvre, and a member of the Musee D'Orsay and the Musee du Orangerie, which means I can go to these museums whenever I want with very little standing in line!
The Louvre right now (November) has a special exhibit entitled Le Printemps de la Renaissance--the spring of the Renaissance, which I visited recently. No photographing allowed (unlike the regular Louvre), so I only have a bookmark for one of the paintings that I really liked. The exhibit mostly presented sculpture. The Renaissance was a time of change in art due to the knowledge artists gained about Greek and Roman art, writing and architecture. Much of the themes reflect stories and thinking of the ancients. Some of the sculpture directly copies and expands upon ancient art.
I have taken other pictures at the Louvre. The fresco of Botticelli's the Three Graces and a Young Girl is one of my all time favorites.
you can find some of the Islamic pottery I have photographed.
The Musee D'Orsay also does not allow you to take pictures (I think they are protecting their copyright to all the forms in paintings and sculpture) so I haven't collected any images from there. But it's a wonderful place and the Impressionist collection is one I go to see over and over. A recent exhibit called Masculin/Masculin did not speak to me. I have enjoyed other special exhibits including one about Impressionism and Fashion from 2012 (which I had not expected to like and found fabulous). Here are Monet's "Women in the Garden" and Berard's "A Ball."
One museum I discovered with my friend Laura was the Musee of Paul Marmottan, who was a collector of Impressionist art and also a supporter of Impressionist artists. The museum is his home, which is elaborately decorated, but for me the paintings were the thing. An rich and varied collection of Impressionist works are housed there, including the two depicted here in postcards. Berthe Morisot was one of the two women who counted in Impressionism (the other was Mary Cassett), and her paintings can be found in small quantities in the world. However, at the Marmottan, there were many, and all wonderful. Below is a copy of her "Eugene Manet and sa fille dans le Jardin de Bougival (Eugene Manet and his daughter in the Bougival Parc)." Also below is the "Impression Soleil Levant" (Impression of a Setting Sun) by Monet, from which the term Impressionism was coined by a very unfriendly critic of this painting. Also below is Gauguin's Bouquet of Flowers, which I liked as well.
Laura and I also visited the home and museum of August Rodin, perhaps the most widely known of France's sculptors. Below is his famous Balzac sculpture from the garden of the museum (though another casting of it is in the esplanade on Blvd St Michelle). A casting of the "The Kiss" is set outside of the Musee de L'Orangerie.
I went with my friends Barry and Sandy to the Musee de L'Orangerie. It houses the twelve WaterLily panels of Monet which he painted late in his life. I can't do justice to them in photos because they are all large, some roughly 20 feet long and about 6 ft high. You can take a virtual tour, that is pretty good, at:
The special exhibit we saw there was Diego Rivera's work, which is much known in the US for the murals he painted during the 1930s, particularly in Detroit. I have always loved his paintings, especially the one here (taken from the web)..jpg)
The exhibit also included works by his on-again, off-again wife Frida Kahlo, who was a talented painter in her own right. The painting here is one I find compelling, but I confess that many of her works I find strange.
Friends visiting from the US said they found the exhibit at the Fondation Cartier of Ron Muek's work (an English sculpturer) interesting. When I went, I was totally astonished by this work. The photos below (taken from the web) give a sample of his creativity and master, but you have to see it live to really experience it. My favorite is the Youth sculpture. What you may not be able to see is that this young man is looking at a wound in his side, just visible under his shirt. It is in a way chilling, yet sad and so amazing. It harkens back to sculpture of Jesus examining his wounds in Middle Ages' sculpture. The other pieces depicted here also captured my attention.
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| Couple under Umbrella by Ron Muek |
Making Couple Under Umbrella
Saint Chapelle is not a museum although it offers visits as one (it is not used as a religious space though it is a Catholic chapel). It is famous for its stained glass windows of mid-13th century origin
(the photo below is from the web and better than any I've taken), and wonderful woodwork and architecture, but even the flooring is lovely.
Early in our stay in Paris, Chuck and I went to the Art Nouveau exhibition at the Pinacotheque Museum. It was an extensive collection of pottery, some jewelry, furniture, sculpture and posters. I was not supposed to take pictures, which I did not know at first. So I happened to get some photos of pottery:
Just this week I visited the Luxembourg Museum, which only holds special exhibits. The current exhibit, La Renaissance and Le Reve (the Renaissance and Dreams) looked at how dreams and dreamers are depicted during the Renaissance when ancient Greek and Roman art and writing changed how artists thought about their work. The postcards below represent B. Dossi's Morning: Aurora and the Horses of Apollo, P. Bordone's Sleeping Venus and Cupid, which holds much in common with some Impressionist nudes, and L. Lotto's The Dream of a Young Girl (which is a mysterious piece with a cherub dropping flower petals on the girl in white while satyrs cavort nearby).
Last on this list is the Pompidou Center, part of which is closed for renovations. Nonetheless the most modern part of the museum was open. Here I am in a room created to represent something (dreams, maybe?).
And here is a photo I took from one of the windows--a view towards Montmartre.
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