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August 21, 2006
Paris Chronicles Four
Ahh...this time last year we were savoring our last few drops of Paris...
So, here goes another installment. Enjoy!
This time the Paris Chroniclers will take you to some artsy-fartsy stuff - the Musée d’Orsay, the Opera Garnier, and the Louvre. For you artsy-fartsy types out there, enjoy. For you Philistines who would just love to break the glass in front of the Mona Lisa painting and draw a handlebar mustache on her, the next few episodes will be more juicy (about street life and our adventures (and misadventures!) therein). Stay tuned! It will be worth it – Tim gets attacked!!!!!
All the art in the Musée d’Orsay was overwhelming. This is the place to see the Impressionists. We saw Degas’ ballet dancers, Pissarro’s scenes of the French countryside, Cézanne’s apples and oranges, Van Gogh’s self portraits, Gauguin’s Tahitians, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge dancers (ooh-la-la!), Signac and Seurat’s pointillist masterpieces, Rodin’s statues, Corbet’s monster-sized paintings, Renoir’s luscious portraits, four of Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral (our favorites!), and so much more. Some of Gustave Courbet’s paintings were so large that it made us wonder how they got the things inside the museum. A few of his paintings had to be at least 15 feet high by 30 feet wide!
Joanna used the clock to frame three places in Paris that we loved--the Sacre-Couer (up the street from our hotel), the Ferris Wheel in the Tuilerie Gardens (see Chronicles 3), and the Louvre.
The next day, we did a tour of the famous Opera Garnier which was finished in 1875.
We got the student discount (cool!) and basked in the over-the-top opulence of the place. We should have put on some sunglasses before we went in because everything about it was overwhelming to the eye—gold, marble, mirrors, flamboyant paintings—the building is more of a show than the ballets and operas performed inside!
Our favorite thing was the ceiling in the main auditorium painted by Marc Chagall. What a profusion of bright colors! Even though he painted the ceiling in 1964, 90 years and a staggering number of stylistic changes after the building was constructed, the brushstrokes of Chagall created a harmonious and complementary affinity with the red velvet seats and rococo décor of the auditorium. Joanna was in rapture staring up at this panoply of joy and color. Of the ballets and operas depicted, she was able to pick out The Firebird, Swan Lake, Fidelio, Tristan und Isolde, Pélleas et Mélisande, Carmen, Daphne and Chloe, Boris Godunov, and The Magic Flute.
We Metroed and found ourselves in front of this really big building.
There was a sign that said “Louvre”, so we surmised that we must be at the Louvre. Since we were there and had some time to kill, we decided to take a gander at what was inside. It was 6:15 pm so we had about three and a half hours to explore. We made first for the Sully wing and found the Venus de Milo and her big sister, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Here was the height of Greek Hellenistic sculpture. There was a display cabinet near Venus with possible reconstructions by various experts – what the statue might have looked like before she was de-armed. The Winged Victory of Samothrace had part of her hand sitting by itself in a little display window several yards from the statue. It looked so lonely! She stands in the middle of a wide stairwell, at the top of a staircase, dominating all who stand below her. The surface is very rough, as if the statue has lived through a lot, but from a distance, she is radiant. By contrast, Venus is more smooth and seems to have met with less adversity in her 2300 years of existence – she only lost her arms, where the Winged Victory lost her arms and her head! Poor old girl!
The museum was crowded but not so much that it was a drag. When we got to the Mona Lisa, the crowds, of course were much more densely packed, a horde of camera-toting gawkers anxiously waiting to have an audience with that enigmatically smiling lady. It took me a few minutes to wedge my way to the front. Joanna stood off to the side and watched all the madness. The Mona Lisa was, well, the Mona Lisa! She looked bemused by the phalanx of tourists gazing at her. Looks as though she found her long lost family. Buon giorno, mi figlio! Buon giorno, mi marito!
We walked through several other areas marveling at all the beauty. Our feet were sore, our legs were tired, but it didn’t matter. We were doing the Louvre!
Paris Chronicles | By Tim and Jo | 10:01 PM
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