Hey Blog! Salut! Last post I said I would tell you all about what I did when in one of the many museums in Paris. Well, here you are!
We visited two museums in Paris. La première was the Musée d’Orsay, on the south bank of the Seine, and was designed to pick up where the art in the Louvre left off (the 16- 1700s), and cover the art of a more recent period. It is not the most modern one, as there is an entire museum which we didn’t go to dedicated to Picasso, who lived in the 20th century; and there is also another one we didn’t go to called the museum of modern art – as far as I’m concerned, art is currently going very, very strange, with weird-in-a-confusing-way shapes and random everyday objects all piled together. However, I like the art from the Musée d’Orsay, it covers the impressionists and those to either side of them. This means there are great names like Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Sisley… the list goes on and on.
If you’re wondering how I know all these names, it’s primarily because we have binge watched the entire set of ‘Fake or Fortune’ documentaries, where people with works of art suspected to be from one of the art world’s big names send in to the program and the experts try to trace it to the artist. There was also a specific reason for going to this museum instead of the Louvre, and that is to see one particular painting – the one I told you a bit about in the post about my drama performance. This is Cezanne’s The Card Players, an impressionist painting of two gents playing cards at a table with a bottle of wine. We incidentally saw a group of men doing just that as we walked to our hotel the first night! As I had portrayed it in the dramatic sketch, it was fun to find it.
The museum itself is in an old station building, and there are parallels to the Natural History Museum in London. There are also several cafés dotted around, and for lunch we went to one of these. Their baguettes were very good! But the other thing that was really important in the Musée d’Orsay was the special exhibition of Manet and Degas’s works, which was really good. This took most of the time in the museum, and showed the similarity and difference between the two artists. There were many examples of the latter, even though they lived in the same time and were both in the same community. There were some very famous paintings in there, by many different artists (though primarily the two the exhibition was focused on) and one of my thoughts was if someone managed to rob that gallery, they would be so rich they wouldn’t have to do a day’s work ever again! It’s hard to describe the exhibition; we went for both the Art value and the History value, which is not the same with all exhibitions! There was a lot of history to the impressionists, and a lot of art, generally in a kind of detached style, though sometimes realistic, with non-formal paintings rather than the stiff formal portraits of the previous centuries – they were groundbreakers at their time, but now they would almost be considered realistic, judging the standard of today’s art! I don’t know if the exhibition is still up, but if it is, it’s definitely worth a visit!
I have one more post to do about Paris. This will detail the exhibitions I originally went to Paris for – the Prehistoric art exhibitions for my Arts Award. See you soon!