This is the last full day in Paris. There is, as always, too much to see and too little time. However, the most important things – taking time to talk and listen, discussing weather and politics, wondering what daily intake of cafe au lait might be considered acceptable – were accomplished.
I did not spend a great deal of time in expected places. I did photograph la tour Eiffel, but from a distance through trees with Montmartre at my back. The tower is iconic. It certainly doesn’t need me posing in front of it in a bizarrely angled selfie shot. The tower, and what it stands for, deserves better than that. I did not go to the Louvre (in full disclosure, it wasn’t open). I didn’t eat a formal breakfast in an overpriced bistro. I wandered with a hunk of baguette and several bottles of water.
Here is what I saw. Look through the tress (and possibly a quizzing glass if you happen to have one) and see the beloved tower in the last photograph.
I also went to the Tuiileries hoping for open green spaces and shade. There was some, but the heat had taken its toll and the trees and flowers wilted painfully. Fortunately, the Musee de l’Organerie (my intended destination) was open and blissfully cool. It was also filled with tourists and several hundred school children aged roughly 6-7 who walked neatly in little rows and behaved exceptionally well. Think of Madeline.
A Parisienne had described the exhibit as the work of Claude Monet. In fact, it was Alex Katz’s homage to Monet. It was not what I expected, but it turned out to be just the ticket. While Katz’s work is interesting, it doesn’t particularly appeal to me. It was designed as an exhibit in the Contemporary Counterpoints Series (see more information here). The concept behind this seems timely. Regardless of how we feel about an individual time period, artist, or work, it holds meaning and provides context. It is part of a larger discussion on the creative act and on the nature of the artist as audience, and the artist’s audience. Essentially, art tells us about ourselves in our often unglamorous human condition. How interesting, then, to bring together works from radically different time periods as part of our ongoing discourse on that most confusing of subjects: ourselves.
My first question about this was: why waterlillies? This was followed by: why Monet? The answer was staring me – quite literally – in the face. Check this out.
This is a wall-length, nearly ceiling-to-floor version of the painting in question. I’m one of those people the docents always have their eyes on. I want to look, and I want to look closely. With my nose almost touching, I looked at each brush stroke, each movement of paint on canvas. Of course this is hyperbole, but I was interested in the bits that made up the whole. How can the slight twist of a brush mere inches from the face become something perfectly clear at a distance?
Take a look. Think about perspective. Think about form. Think about color. Think about composition. This could be so many halved avocados on a counter top. But they’re not. Those pink wads are paper towels used to clean up the beets you chopped earlier. Bloody things make a mess everywhere. But they’re not. How can this scribble and dash make sense?
More importantly, how can it not?
Notice the curvature. Notice the fact that the murals dwarf the audience. Notice that it took me forever to get shots of the art without all those annoying people who actually wanted to look and see.
As if the great curves of the walls were not enough, look up.
This is the ceiling, reminiscent of eyes and wombs, showing structure and superstructure. In this exhibit, the greatest gift is the space, the ways in which curvature and the unexpected invite closer examination of works of art so embedded in the culture it is quite possible we never really see them.
So ends my time in Paris. I say farewell to the AirBnB, with a little side note on the display case in the living area. It held books. How could I not look? And it held pieces of a lifetime of work and collection. I understand that the owner of the apartment is elderly (well into her nineties) but these are not things for strangers like me to gawk at. I did anyway.
On the picture to the left, notice the lovely softcovers. There might have as many as two hundred stacked several layers deep. The books on the right of that top shelf are Victor Hugo. On the second shelf down, there are wedding photos and a few family shots. On the picture to the right, notice the bound books which held issues of a French language magazine put out by a petrol company (I believe) regarding new research and development over the course of many years. This is the history of someone’s life. I’m honored to have shared this space, even for so short a time. It would be a tragedy if these things did not continue to exist after the people who created and curated this collection are gone.