Getting Around

Trottinettes

As I write this second post, the temperature in Paris is 88°.   The streets are all torn up to install bike lanes, which has snarled traffic even more than usual. (Sound like Seattle without the heat?)  You can imagine what tempers are like as so many drivers sit in un-air-conditioned vehicles of various kinds.  To top it all off, Paris has had an invasion of motorized rental scooters, known locally as trottinettes, which has caused all sorts of grumbling as they speed along in the street or on the sidewalks at will and are dumped on the sidewalk or in the curb lane when no longer needed.  My friends just roll their eyes and offer a Gallic shrug.

But if one can get to a museum, then all sorts of wonders are available, usually in air conditioning.  In the last week, I have had the opportunity to visit two lovely little museums on the Left Bank, the Musée Maillol and the Musèe du Luxembourg.

Toulouse-Lautrec

Van Gogh

The Maillol has an exhibit of the French masterpieces in the collection of Swiss industrialist Emil Bührle

Gaugin Still Life

(1890-56).  They will eventually join the rest of his collection in a special wing of the Kunsthaus Museum in Zurich and will be well worth seeing for any of you who may travel there in coming years.  Bührle owned the statue of Degas' wonderful 14-year-old ballerina, which is on display, as well as a stunning collection of Impressionist art.  As with so many private collections, you find you've not seen many of these pieces before, although it sometimes seems otherwise because so many artists painted the same scene many times.  This is also the first time I've seen an exhibit that took head on the issue of looted Nazi art.  Bührle apparently collected almost a dozen pieces of looted art without worrying too much about the provenance (he started collecting in 1936), but eventually he had the pieces restored and then returned them to their owners.  Over the years, he re-acquired quite a few of them on the legitimate art market.  One of the most interesting paintings was a Gaugin still life (done at the urging of a gallery owner) that features both an eggplant and a papaya (his two lives sitting on a kitchen table!).

Nabis Design

Ceiling Painting

The Musée du Luxembourg had an exhibit of an art movement I'd never heard of, the Nabis -- a word that means prophet in Hebrew and Arabic.  I recognized the names of some of the artists who featured in the short life of this group (roughly the last two decades of the 19th century): Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard.  But I was unaware of their association.  The Nabis were one of many artistic movements that are now generally lumped into post-Impressionism, but their rejection of the Impressionists had more to do with breaking down the barrier between fine and decorative arts than with creating new ways of seeing familiar objects.  They were also heavily influenced by the Japanese prints that became so popular during that time and so there is a certain flatness to their work.  It must have been quite a job to pull this exhibit together since so many of their pieces were created for homes -- e.g. panels for dining rooms, wallpapers, designs for stained glass lamp shades (many made by Tiffany in New York), and the like -- and therefore easily dispersed.  I am particularly fond of the ceiling painting to the right above.

Wall Panels for a Dining Room

In 1895, Siegfried Bing, a gallery owner who had been a patron of the group, opened an exhibit in what he called his Maison de L'Art Nouveau.  Unlike other galleries, this one was like a home -- rooms filled with furniture, trinkets, paintings, sculptures and prints were furnished like an apartment.  The works of recognized artists combined with the furnishings of talented artisans -- a merger of the fine and applied arts -- swept Paris by storm.  I guess you aren't an art movement any more when items based on your ideas can be purchased in a department store as well as an art gallery!

Plus ça change...

Notre Dame (front  view)

I'm back in the apartment in which I spent 18 very happy months but many things have changed.  The climb up the staircase seems a little bit steeper for openers.  My favorite traiteur (take-away) has been replaced by an Italian restaurant (quite good and very charming, but all the same...).  The grocery store has been enlarged, a blessing, but I can't find anything in it without wandering for what seems like hours.  The butcher has been replaced by a bistro that is so new it doesn't yet have a name or any customers.  But this is Paris, after all, and no great city stands still.

My formula for getting over jet lag didn't work very well last week and it is now as hot as blue blazes -- but, I promise, that's it for complaints.

Notre Dame (view of south side)

I was very consoled by my visit to Notre Dame.  It is, of course, difficult to get close.  In the picture above, you can see the skeleton of the interior arch but no organ and no roof.  Another view from the side shows the extent of the scaffolding.  But behind that mesh screen on the right the rose window is still there and the flying buttresses are holding up the walls.  Some of the ideas for rebuilding (like using a glass roof) are quite breathtaking, so I feel genuinely heartened that all will be well.

What doesn't change in this great city is its art.  There are an astonishing number of special exhibits on at the moment and they are really remarkable.  It's likely that the rest of my blogging from Paris will be about this aspect of my visit more than the reunions with conversation partners or a lovely lunch with ex-pat friend Barbara Stickler and dinner with Seattle friends Doug Hurley and Sally Marks, whose visit overlapped mine for a few days, .

Joseph (1818-19)

My first stop this time was the Musée d'Orsay where there is an exhibit of Black Models: from Géricault to Matisse.  In addition to being an exploration of the use of black models by French artists, the exhibit also spoke to France's complicity in the slave trade and slavery; the role of blacks in French society; and changing attitudes and mores from the late 18th century to the early 20th.  I was ignorant of most of it.  For example, the French abolished slavery in the French colonies in 1794 but Napoleon re-established it in 1804 and it wasn't until 1848 that the Second Republic definitively ended the injustice.

Portrait by Matisse 

Artists were naturally caught up in the contradictions surrounding slavery.  One of the most striking studies by a 19th century artist was Géricault's portrait of a man named Joseph (above).  And there was another of a beautiful woman.  Both of these studies reveal the humanity and dignity of their subjects in a striking way.  New research is revealing who some of these models actually were.  Times and attitudes eventually changed.  The celebrated Alexander Dumas was the descendent of a black from the Caribbean who had fought for Napoleon and Matisse had a mixed race mistress.  By the 1920's Josephine Baker had arrived; blacks in French society occupied a very different place than blacks in the United States.

It was hard to tear myself away from this fascinating subject and exhibit, but there was another on at the same time at the d'Orsay: a gathering of the paintings of Berthe Morrisot (1841-1895).  She was one of the great Impressionist painters, though often overlooked because so much of her art concerned the intimate lives of women, the only part of her society to which she had ready access.  Nevertheless, she was a rebel whose brother-in-law Edouard Manet, introduced her to such friends as Degas, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro.  She remained an important figure throughout her short life and I just love her work.  Here are some wonderful pieces from the exhibit.