Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

What I really wanted to do was crawl up out of the abandoned railroad tracks after 12 hours in the catas, hail the nearest cab, and say “To the Louvre!” Unfortunately, I was so dirty that no cab would stop for me, so I had to take the subway instead.

This was probably the best idea I had in Paris. There were two juxtapositions that made this an almost surreal experience. The first is that during the entire time in the catas, the foremost thing on my mind was “don’t get lost.” We were always stopping to check the map and make sure that we knew where we were. When I got to the Louvre, I didn’t even glance at a map. After 12 hours of pinpoint navigation, I wanted to just get lost and see what I ran into.

The second was the fact that in one day (and in the same clothes - although I did take off the helmet and galoshes), I could see the absolute best of what two vastly different cultural worlds had to offer. In order to truly get to know a city, you have to try and obtain the broadest experience possible. We had a great opportunity to see a side of Paris few got to see, and I was determined to make the most of it. But I also wanted to spend some time seeing the highbrow side of Paris - the side everybody gets to see. Both kinds of excursions had equal importance in my mind - to me they were flip sides of the same coin. The big difference was just that one was easier than the other.

I spent a couple hours wandering the Louvre. The building is itself is so amazing it’s almost worth the price of admission alone. But the art wasn’t bad also. My personal favorite was a mural on one of the ceilings showing the fall of Icarus. I also ran into the Mona Lisa. I had seen the Mona Lisa before on a previous short trip to Paris. All I can say is, I understand the hype. It’s probably one of my personal five favorite paintings in the world.

Another museum, the Musee D’Orsay, has another of my favorites - Summary Judgment Under the Moorish Kings of Granada, by Henri Regnault. This painting you really have to see in person. An image, or even a print, really doesn’t do it justice. When you view the original, it’s absolutely haunting how you can see the silent communication taking place between the eyes of the executioner and the eyes of the just-decapitated. The Musee D’Orsay is a great visit in its own right. It’s smaller than the Louvre, and you can see everything in one visit without getting tired of it. It’s also in a great venue - an old train station on the left bank of the Seine.

I also made time to visit the Picasso Museum (not as good as the one in Barcelona), and the Rodin Museum (not as good as the one in Philadelphia). If you’re a penny pincher, the best thing to do is to skip the actual Rodin museum and just pay the one Euro to visit the garden. The garden has pretty much all the famous stuff: the Thinker, the Burghers of Calais, Balzac, and the Gates of Hell, foremost among them. If you don’t want to shlep all the way to France, the MoMA has a cast of Balzac, the Met has a cast of the Burghers of Calais, and the aforementioned Rodin Museum in Philadelphia has casts of both the Thinker and the Gates of Hell - although the Paris cast of the Gates of Hell is in much better repair than the Philadelphia cast. The plaster original, restored in 1917 and used for the three original casts (Paris, Philadelphia, and Toyko) is the Musee D’Orsay. I really wanted to visit the Musee National d’Arte Moderne also, but when you’ve only got two weeks and you’re spending days at a time underground, there’s only so many museums you end up having time for.

Later on when we spent the weekend in Amsterdam, I also visited their two famous art museums: the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum (which has perhaps the most annoyingly designed website ever). The Rijksmuseum was undergoing restoration, so only a small selection was on exhibit - including this painting.

There’s only a handful of works of art - be they paintings, sculptures, songs, movies, stories, or anything else you could conceivably call “art” - that will provoke a genuine emotional reaction from me. For some reason, a reason I can’t really figure out, that painting made me cry. And as admirable and impressive as the art in both the catacombs and the Louvre were, this was the only thing I saw that really made me feel something. And isn’t that what art - no matter what kind and where you might find it - is supposed to do?

Tags: Around, art, France, Louvre, Paris

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Around. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.