As always, a personal selection of things you’re unlikely to see anywhere else and none of the greatest hits that you don’t need me to tell you about.
In the major sights nowadays mostly what you see is the back of peoples’ heads such as here at the Musée d’Orsay. It’s getting worse, there’s no end in sight, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. It’s been about ten years since the number of visitors passing through the Louvre’s pyramid entrance starting exceeding double what it was designed to accommodate. They’ve been lowering the daily maximum admissions in recent years but that doesn’t help given that 90% of them are concentrated in the 5% of the galleries that are social media blockbusters (rough numbers) and anyway it’s still double what the Ministry of Culture recommends.
Banner by Toulouse-Lautrec for the traveling show tent of La Goulue, a Moulin Rouge can-can dancer you’ve probably seen in his posters and other works. Goulue is French for “glutton”.
Pierre Bonnard, 1891
John Singer Sargent
I won’t repeat here the society portraits that formed the large majority of his work and resulted in his reputation as a superficial and merely decorative, although technically skilled, illustrator rather than a true artist who has something to say. More profound are his lesser-known evocations of air, water and light and his portraits of children.
Just to jog your memory, though, I’m also including the famous portrait of Madame X. From the name it sounds like she was involved in some sort of scandal or spy intrigue but that’s not at all the case. For most of his life it simply had the name of the society woman it depicted and he only gave it the title much later when selling it to the Metropolitan Museum. As far as I know it had no particular meaning other than perhaps he didn’t want her name associated with the controversy at the time around her dress and makeup..
The French National Library
I wonder if you can check out Edith Piaf’s dress and if so what’s the Dewey decimal number?
Louvre
The Louvre made a France-vs-Italy foosball table where players are figures from French and Italian artworks and included it in an exhibition of reproductions that went around to a couple of shopping malls.
Pictures by the Le Nains, three brothers who often collaborated and seldom signed their paintings so it’s not clear who painted what. I’m showing my photos with lots of reflections and glare because that’s how they look when you’re actually there so you get a better sense of the experience.
There was an exhibition of clocks including this fun walnut-size skull watch from the 17th century.
Roman emperor tchotchkes from the nineteenth century
