There was also a bit of snow.
I started the day at the Musee D'Orsay, one of my favorite museums. I'm not alone in this; many people told me that it's their favorite museum as well. A former train station, it houses a vast collection of Impressionist paintings.
As I wrote on my post on the Louvre, I like periods of transition, where there is usually an explosion of invention and variation. Periods of refinement, while producing many great works, do not have as deep an attraction for me.
Like the Renaissance Italian painters, the Impressionists were trying out new ways of seeing the world. Here "seeing" takes on two meanings. The first is more obvious and superficial: how do we process light and images, and how can the eye be fooled? One of the greatest of the many great Impressionists is Monet, and of his paintings D'Orsay houses several of his famed Cathedral Rouen series, where the artist painted the same view of the cathedral, over and over, under different lighting conditions.
Impressionism was one of the first salvos in Modernism and Post-modernism. When you start to learn how the eye can be fooled, you realize, it's really how the brain is fooled. And the brain can be fooled by images, how else is it fooled?
Artists have traditionally been skeptical and questioning. But with Modernism, this trend became full blown.
To help us understand this transition, a starting point is a definition of post-Modernism: incredulity towards all "master narratives" (except, of course, towards the master narrative of post-Modernism itself). Modernism was a precursor in that it was skeptical of many traditional narratives.
A great example of this is to compare Ingres' "Odalisque," a classic example of the "male gaze," wherein the woman seems to accept and even shyly smile at the viewer. Not so in Manet's "Olympia," which is a direct response to all the odalisques that preceded it:
Here the woman is not pleased with being viewed; her emotion is not shame at being naked, but challenging the viewer's voyerism.
Even more challenging is Courbet's "Origin of the World" (google it yourself, this is a family blog), which goes even further in questioning the motives and hidden agendas of artists and art-lovers alike.
By the way, the Musee D'Orsay was also undergoing renovation, and so many of its prize pieces had been moved to the first floor. If any important ones were missing, I didn't notice.
After lunch at the museum (another excellent meal, a tasty risotto aux champignons--pricey but no more so than outside restaurants) I walked to the Musee Rodin. You can see the snow on the ground here:
My favorite Rodin pieces are those where the figures are emerging out of stone. (He didn't originate this--it goes back at least to Michelangelo--but he utilized it heavily.) They don't photograph well, however, so I'll restrict myself to more traditional, and famous sculptures, such as "Le Baiser," which in English means "The Snog" and in American "The Kiss."
Of course the most famous Rodin sculpture is "The Thinker."
Donna says an awful lot of pictures of me seem to have objects coming out of my head and so, now, we try deliberately for pictures of objects coming out of my head. It took a few tries to do this self-portrait:
After Musee Rodin I walked near the Eiffel Tower, then caught the metro to the Musee Marmatten Monet, which unsurprisingly houses more Monets. They discourage photographs, which I respected. Then I walked to the Eiffel Tower, and managed to get yet another in the series "Things Coming Out of Calvin's Head."
In case you prefer your tour eiffel sans
hominid, here you go:
I also caught this picture of the Seine as dusk approached.
I finished the day with a plate of fruit de mer. It's amazing how many things that look like, well, snot, can taste so good, and so different.
Tomorrow I head home. Will probably post a farewell to Paris.
