Day Four - Paris: Musée d'Orsay, Musée de l'Orangerie, La Seine

This was the first day on which I left early to shoot some photos. It was also also the only day for wet Paris streets. The multiple versions of the same images illustrate the challenge of post processing. Once you start … where to stop? What is the best crop for this shot? Would it look better in black and white or color? Heavily saturated or desaturated and highly contrasted? Sigh.

After returning we all traveled together to the Musée d'Orsay, which boasts the greatest Impressionist collection in the world. I really is an impressive museum and one I wish I lived near. We wandered the museum separately. I was with Dietrich most of the time and we started with the post-impressionists and almost missed the main impressionist collection.

Some highlights of the museum were:

Learning more about the influence of Medieval stained glass upon the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. This was a revelation to me, clearest in Emile Bernard’s, “Moisson au bord de la mer.” Many things about modern art begin with the impressionists.

Up close, Van Gogh’s 1888 portrait of Eugene Boch and 1889 “Portrait De l’Artist” each demonstrated an intensity of the eyes that I did not know could be captured with his technique.

Théo van Rysselberghe’s “L'homme à la barre” reminded Dietrich of the spirit of The Old Man and the Sea.

Edgar Degas’ “Danseuses montant un escalier” was a surprising wide format painting, particularly interesting in light of my recent experiments with the Facebook banner format -- a very wide and very precise 851 x 315.

Jen was particularly struck by the vividness of some of the impressionist snowscapes, especially those of Alfred Sisley.

Here are a few more intriguing pieces: Gustave Caillebotte’s “Les raboteurs de parquet”, Gustave Guillaumet, “Le Sahara”, Gustave Courbet, “La Falaise d'Etretat apres l'orage”, Jules-Alexis Muenier, “La leçon de catéchisme”.

Nickolai Ge’s “Crucifixion”, however, was the biggest stumbled-upon surprise of the whole trip, as it is the crucifixion that has most moved me over the years. Ge was not an orthodox believer, but was moved by the humanity of Christ and the passion at a time when a little humanism was probably needed in approaching our Lord. I turned a corner into a side room at the Musée d'Orsay and there it was!

We grabbed lunch at a crêperie right near the museum (one word: “Don’t”) and took it down with us to banks of the Seine (one word: “Do”).

Lingering along the banks of the Seine for a while, at a place where they had beautiful wildflowers growing along the wall, Dietrich played chess with Jen on a board that was two squares too wide and used for some other popular game in France that we never could find the name of. The girls played something like hopscotch. A local fisherman caught a giant catfish. And, as at many stopping points, I was able to shoot candid shots with great gratitude for me 70 - 300 mm kit lens.

After lunch, we went to the the Musée de l'Orangerie, of which, though intriguing, I have little to say except that it was here I discovered that Emily has a deep interest in Picasso.

We then walked through the Champ de Mars towards the base of the Eiffel tower, where, after a stop for some ice cream, we embarked upon a boat tour on the Seine. The tour was interesting, but, even better, the boat was excellent for observing and photographing people along the banks and getting a quick overview of life along the Seine. (Most of these shots, along with the aforementioned, are in Parisians: Volume II).

After disembarking, we had a very nice simple dinner at a small restaurant nearby. I will say, nowhere in Europe was it a simple task to find seating for nine. A regular elderly patron seated near Nora slipped her a chocolate.

After seeing the kids to be, I went out for wandering the streets around our apartment again in the evening and started experimenting with some longer exposures, though I had left my tripod at home and had to work handheld and on makeshift stands.

Day 04 Reflections:

Reflection One -- In general, despite being an Art History teacher, I am not much of a museum person -- or at least not for very long. I love to study paintings and find illuminating new dimensions in single works of art when I view them. I love a small installation of a single artist’s work or of a time period. I love to have new questions opened up, and to begin to speculate as to answers.

But casual  museum going or the need to get through a museum in a rush tends to simply frustrate these aims. When I have thoroughly studied even one work of of art, or when I have given some attention to perhaps a few over the course of a couple hours, my artistic mind and spirit are full. There is simply no more space for serious contemplation, and I am left with the decision to either leave the museum or take a different approach to art than I care to take.

At the Musée d'Orsay, this point occurred just after the Degas piece and so the rest of the noted ‘intriguing paintings’ along with “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” (more commonly known as “Whister’s Mother”), “Le déjeuner sur l'herbe,” all their Bouguereaus and even Nickolai Ge’s “Crucifixion” will have to wait until I return to Paris someday.

Reflection Two -- I was struck today by how different it must be to live in and amongst these buildings, buildings that are not just old, but were conceived of, developed, and built for a another time entirely, for a different way of life -- for a life of hearth fires and candlelight, a life of horses and stables, a life of goods that were handcrafted out of necessity not luxury. The stairs in our apartment are ancient by American standards, the wood hand-cut with a necessary sense for the particular space it occupies. Doors and doorways are not standardized, the buildings were not made to be wired for electricity, plumbing was an afterthought.

All of this contributes both to the sense of living history I mentioned yesterday, but perhaps also to the sadness of Paris. The electric wiring just doesn’t fit in. Home appliances are garishly out of place and violate the Medieval or Renaissance sense of space. The roads aren’t made for cars. Fluorescent lighting saps the warmth from the architecture. Any contemporary expectations for a certain kind of modern convenience simply couldn’t be met without razing everything and starting over (Baron Haussmann’s solution under Louis Napoleon). And who would ever do this to the Paris we now have?

So the city as I experienced it exists as a kind of twilight world -- an museum of a way of life that has all but vanished inhabited by a people who seem also to have a foot in both worlds.

Romano Guardini on the passing of the pre-technological world into the technological age Guardini in his Letters from Lake Como:

“A time that is sinking is always sad, but sorrow is especially profound for a life which is doomed to perish and which we feel belongs to us. With it the possibilities of living go under too.”

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