Museum Day
Museé du Louvre
Museé de l’Orangerie
Museé d’Orsay
Sacré-Coueur
What is a trip to Paris without seeing its great institutions. But they are certainly exhausting to visit, and certainly I was too ambitious – my feet, and those of my parents undoubtedly, ached unyielding the next day. I suppose there’s a price to pay for culture, beyond the admission fees.
Unfortunately, during my previous trip to Paris (it was unfortunately a short one, en-route to Switzerland), the Louvre was closed – must have been a Tuesday, or the staff were on strike. Shame. Yet, perhaps it is a better experience to have seen it now than then, when I’m a little more enlightened architecturally, and better yet, in the summer sunlight. Oh Pei’s pyramid is truly a crystalline masterpiece – it remains contemporary even till this day.
I’m especially proud of the fact that we covered nearly the whole museum in about half a day, though certainly that involved skimming by much of the vast collection – simply to experience the vastness of the Louvre is something in its own right, and a draining one at at that.
Perhaps a palette-cleanser of sort, Monet’s Water Lilies were delightfully serene, almost zen-like in their oval-opalescent home. There was surreal, a zen-like calm in the space, a far cry from the busyness just outside at the Tuileries Gardens. Monet’s meditative and considered brush-strokes were a joy to appreciate, and inappropriate as this may seem, he might have been the VR artist of his time I suppose, crafting such an immersive work.
I suppose that was the highlight of my time at the Museé de l’Orangerie; it did house a beautiful collection of early modern art as well, but its hard to trump such an artistic and spatial accomplishment that it shares a building with. Certainly the Cézannes, Matisses, Derains were boldly beautiful, but Monet’s were still the most evocative.
It likely was museum fatigue by this point, but the most enjoyable part of d’Orsay was simply the building. Sure, the Impressionist pieces at the previous gallery were a good primer into this space, but we had by this point seen one too many paintings and sculptures. To marvel at how the (honestly relatively invasive) modern insertions were handled, and to enjoy the spatial richness they afforded to an otherwise cavernous former railway station, is simply impressive. One certainly does not see this sort of PO-MO forms much these days, outside of hipster architectural renderings and branding or wrapping paper, certainly a nice juxtaposition to the forms present in classical sculpture.
Ending off the day, was a lovely meal by the road-side at a bistro in the Montmartre area. Sacré-Coeur was beautiful, but I suppose its better in the day.
It was a long day.