An Artful Day

Wednesday was our first full day in Paris, and we decided to get ourselves a little cultured and spend the day hobnobbing with some of the greatest works of art on the planet.  We parked under the Louvre, but decided to get our feet wet first at the Musee d' Orsay just on the other side of the River.  Above is a view of Pont Neuf (New Bridge - the oldest Bridge in Paris) and the Ile de la Cite, the island in the middle of the Seine, and the very heart of Paris

Looking back on the Louvre.

The Orsay Museum is renowned for it's fantastic collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art.  I was really looking forward to it.

But before I ever saw a single piece of artwork, I was enthralled with the architecture!  The museum is an old railway station, so it is huge, bright, and airy!

So much natural light!  Perfect for a museum.

I lust LOVE the huge station clock!

It was pretty from every angle.

What on earth are those people doing?

The first art you see when you come to the Orsay, is the incredible sculpture.  This lady is knitting.
This is the young Aristotle studying a scroll.  Reminded me of my kids doing homework.  He seems less that enthusiastic.

This sculpture was intriguing.  It is an older man  who seems quite disturbed while his own  babyhood, childhood, and youth, all cling desperately to him.

And this marble bust of a young African man was simply magnificent!

In another section there was a 3D model of the inner workings of the old Paris opera house, the very same that was made famous in The Phantom of the Opera.  I thought it was very interesting!

Ah, and then we get to the meat of the Orsay, the French Impressionists and Monet!  As you know I love Monet, and even more so now that I had been to Giverny.  These are some of my favorites.  I love the Women in the Garden with their dresses and parasols, and the field with the red posies.  I saw haystacks similar to these at Giverny.  The painting of the picnic was very large, and in pieces.

This was Dad's favorite.  Monet does cold as well as he does warm.  Dad should hang that in his house to cool him down on those hot August days.

One of my favorites!  The woman is still, and yet the brushstrokes show so much movement.  You can almost feel the breeze.

More of Monet's masterpieces.  I think I sat on that bench!

Upstairs you can look out from behind giant clock faces on the train station.  SO COOL!

So much of the impressionists work celebrated domesticity and family.  Maybe that is why I like it so much.  On the left I can just imagine the baby kissing her big sister goodnight as she sits in her mamma's lap.  And on the right the young mother is enthralled with watching her baby sleep.  I've been there.

Degas and his ballerinas were all wonderful!

Whistler's Mother was dark and drab in contrast to all the color of the of the French Impressionists.  He was about the only American I saw at the Museum.

Renior is another one that makes me happy.  On the left is his portrait of his good friend, Claude Monet.

I absolutely LOVED the color and energy of this piece by Renoir.  Can't you just hear the music playing and the mix of voices (French, of course) and laughing?

VanGogh's works were interesting.  You could tell which painting were done when he was in a good place, and which he painted when he was in his dark place.  My favorite was the bright painting of the farmers taking a well deserved nap.

It is so exciting every time I catch a glimpse of that tower, even through a museum window!

This was Dennis' favorite painting - high energy, colorful, and fun!  The pointillism was so interesting.  It was fun to get up really close and see how it was all done with tiny dots.  This picture uses only 4 colors of paint - red, yellow, blue, and white.

The Orsay was really amazing.  I was fascinated by the different artists and could get a good sense of each of them due to the large collections of their works.  You could really tell which artists had happy lives, and which had not-so happy lives.  Some artists I love, and others I just hated.  I could also see the progression for traditional to pre-impressionism to impressionism, to post impressionism, and beyond to the beginnings of modern art.

Back across the Seine.

What do I have to do to get that man to smile for my pictures anyway?

The river was really beautiful!

Looking back at the Orsay.

To get to our next stop we had to walk through the Tuileries gardens.

The Egyption obelisque is the Place de la Concorde, and beyond that, way down on the other side of Champs-Elysees is the Arch de Triomphe

Further down in the Tularies gardens.

And at the other end another arch and the Louvre.
The Tuileries with the Orsay and the Eiffel tower peeking above the green.

All that art had really gotten us famished, and we knew that there was no way we could take on the Louvre without a little nourishment.  Luckily there was a bread stand there in the park.

As we were enjoying our sandwiches, Dennis felt inclined to feed a crumb to one of the cute little French birdies there in the park.  It ate the crumb right out of his hand.

Within seconds birds had congregated at out feet.  Apparently 'tweet tweet' means 'free food' in birdie French.

They got braver and braver.  This one hopped on my knee for a crumb.

Then all birds started getting their sights on Dad for some reason.  It made him very nervous.  Check out Mom just laughing at him!
then suddenly several birds went straight for Dad's lunch and snatched it right out of his hand.  It kind of freaked dad out a bit.  Poor Dad.  If you ever come to Paris, be sure to watch out for the ferocious French birdies!

This French lady didn't seem to mind the birds a bit.  So what was Dad's problem?

After the brunch with birdies we were ready to take on the Louvre.  The Louvre was the Royal Palace before Versailles was built, but I'm thinking the pyramid came some time after that.

Dennis is ready.  Bring on the Art!  (Actually, Dennis isn't an art museum enthusiast, but he was being very supportive of his art-loving wife, just like I would be willing to sit through a baseball game for him - well, as long that baseball game was in France.)

We saw a lot of this type of thing in France - the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the antique with the modern.  In some cases it works and in some cases it doesn't (It was BAD in the gardens of Versailles where the new fountains look liked they were made out of a bunch of rubber hoses.  Bad!)  In this case, though,  I really like it, which surprises me a lot.

Mom is on her way to hang out with the Mona Lisa.

We could see into a corridor where some of the ancient artifacts and stuff were held - kind of cool to see a bit behind the scenes.

The Hellenistic Greek statue, the Winged Victory of Samothrace was prominently displayed on a stairwell.  I thought it was beautiful, even without a head.  She is apparently perched on the prow of a stone ship.  No one is sure what her arms were doing, but her hand is an a display case nearby.

We got a little lost (easy to do in the Louvre) and saw a ton of Egyptian artifacts on the detour, like this Sphinx. 

We also got to see some of the very oldest parts of the Louvre when it was ancient fortress.  This part is all underground.

The Louvre has a great collection of Ancient Greek and Roman statues

including this fine lady, the Greek goddess Aphrodite, but her closest friends call her the Venus de Milo.  

A rare Greek statue for around 100 B.C., the Venus de Milo was discovered on the island of Melos, and demonstrates a classic Greek contraposto (counter pose) stance with one shoulder, hip and leg up, and the others down.  She is a study in opposites, and interesting to view from every angle.  (I like her because she is a tall, strong woman with some meat on her bones!  And if her arms were still there, we'd clearly see that she is doing taekwando.)

The Grand Gallery is the log corridor that holds painting of some of the greatest Italian Renaissance artists (and is in the opening chapters of The DaVinci Code of course.)

So of course, Leonardo DaVinci has a few paintings there,

including this dame... The Mona Lisa.

People warned me that I might be disappointed with seeing her in person, but nobody warned me that she would be so small...

Look.  She is only 6 inches tall!

Wait, oops!  Wrong lens.

Here, is this better?

We had a Mona Lisa smile contest.  Looks like dad won, hands down.

Actually, I wasn't a bit disappointed by the Mona Lisa.  I liked her, and I think her mystique is her mysterious smile.  You just wonder what she is thinking.  I think she looks happy and contented.  (Pregnant maybe? but only in that good second trimester stage.) But she also looks like she is clever with a quick wit.  Mona is my type of gal.  I'd love to do lunch with her sometime.  

The Louvre from the window.

Another Gallery held paintings from French Romanticism.

France's favorite girl-next-door, Joan of Arc.

I really love this one!

We had seen about as much art as we could possibly see at this point, and our eyes were beginning to glaze over real good (especially Dennis,) and we were ready to call it quits, but not until we first had a peek of these two guys...

Michelangelo's Slaves.  I am a HUGE Michelangelo fan (The Agony and the Ecstasy is one of my all time favorite books!)  He was a genius, and a true artist, so far ahead of his time.  These sculptures show figures trying to tear themselves away from the marble block that they are still part of.  They are themselves the masterpieces within the stone, that Michelangelo alone can set free with his chisel.  Fascinating!  Nobody can do the male body like Michelangelo.  Every muscle, tendon, and joint.  Just how can he get cold hard crystalline stone to look like soft, firm flesh?  You get the sense that if you stood there long enough, you'd eventually see the Slaves work their way out of their stone bindings.

Finally, I just love this picture.  Look at the view this girl has right in front to her - the palace, the pyramid, the fountain, and all the people coming and going, day and night.  And yet she never looks out the window because she is forever preoccupied with the little scorpion that has just stung her foot.  How unfortunate.  I don't know if I feel more sorry for her that she got stung by a scorpion, or that she is missing the view that is right there.  Poor thing.

Oh, and what visit to the Louvre would be complete without taking a peek at resting place of the holy grail (according to Dan Brown.  What an imagination that guy has!)  It's actually a shopping mall.   But it makes for a cool picture, anyway. 

After dragging ourselves back to the car, Dennis decided to take his very first lap around the Arch de Triomphe.  I tell you, you take your life in your hands when you enter that roundabout.

Then we cruised down the Champs-Elysees and enjoyed the nightlife from the comfort of the car before heading back home feeling culturally enriched after our artful day.