After breakfast we took the Metro down to
the Musée d’Orsay. Only a one hour wait for opening, fifty or so from the start
of the queue. This is one place you have to go to at opening time, or you’ll
spend more time getting in than looking at the paintings. Notre Dame is also great first thing – when we
went there yesterday morning just before 9am I had to push the door open myself
– no queue, no crowd.
If you are ever faced with the problem ‘What can we do with this old railway station?’ look at the Musée d’Orsay. It was renovated in the 1980s to consolidate the state’s collections of painting, sculpture and fine arts from mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. (So if you want to do the art museums chronologically, start with the Musee de Cluny, then the Louvre, the Orsay, and the Pompidou. Then you can specialise with the respective Musées Picsasso, Rodin, Maillol, Dali, etc.)
The majority of the tourists head for the Impressionists up on level five, in
the new gallery that was still under construction when we were here last (I love
saying that). So we had the lower level almost to ourselves, and enjoyed
looking at the Ingres and Delacroix and early Degas and Cezanne and Gaugin without
being elbowed. We looked up a few old friends, like Gustave
Courbet’s The Origin of the World – a
beautiful painting (but definitely NSFW). We also saw my old girlfriend, Cabanel’s
The Birth of Venus, who you might recognise
from a mineral water bottle. Just as we did in Cologne last year we sneaked a
photo when the attendants weren’t around – they just don’t understand what we
have between us. (I'm not sure I do.)
I needn’t say anything about the
impressionist gallery, just look it up on the Orsay website – more Manets,
Monets, Morisots, Degas and Renoirs than you can shake a paintbrush at. The
advantage of putting so many works together is that you can see the
relationships, how painters influenced and learned from each other and how they
developed. This is especially true of the temporary exhibition downstairs on
Degas and the nude, collecting paintings, pastels, sketches and sculptures
across his whole career, and showing how his portrayal of the nude changed from
‘the body as an object of violation’ in the war pictures of his early career to
the warm, human studies of bathing prostitutes that we know better. In these
works you don’t see the slightly pervy eroticism of some of Degas’
contemporaries. He shows them performing the most quotidian, literally workaday
tasks, with sensuality but also respect.
The restaurant on level two is fabulous –
chandeliers and ceiling murals in a huge dining room, a leftover from one of
the museum’s incarnations as a hotel. I had the best meal I’ve had since we got
here, filet mignon cooked perfectly with gnocchi in a tomato sauce with basil.
The waiter said it was one of the cook’s specialties, and it was great. Service
very, very good, of a standard you usually only see in more upmarket places.
We walked up to Saint-Germain and went to L’Hotel
in the Rue des Beaux Arts, the place where Oscar Wilde breathed his last bon
mots. We sat in the bar and drank a gin and tonic for Oscar and our friend
Julie-Ann, a noted Wilde scholar who told me about the place. I think Oscar
would have enjoyed the irony in us proposing his health in the building where
he died.
After
dinner we went to a piano concert at the small gothic church behind our
building, St Julien le Pauvre. Herbert du Plessis played to an audience of
about 100 or so, in a ninety minute program of pieces by Chopin and Liszt. The
latter two were virtuoso performers, so popular that they can be regarded as
the first musician superstars (Ken Russell riffs on that idea in Lisztomania, the film that inspired me
to buy a metronome). Because their virtuosity and showmanship was valued more
highly than their composing skills (gross simplification here), they wrote to
entertain; so while their music is complex and sophisticated, it is also either
foot tapping or moving in other ways. You don’t have to be musically literate
to enjoy this stuff.
For
me the highlights of the Chopin half were the Waltz in D flat major, which I
think Daffy Duck once performed, and the Grand Valse Brillant, another piece
most people recognize but wouldn’t know the name of. I enjoyed most of the
Liszt pieces, especially the two excerpts from Years of Pilgrimage
(Switzerland), Consolation No 3, and Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, once memorably
massacred by Bugs Bunny in Rhapsody Rabbit. Our concert wasn’t quite so
chaotic, or violent, but a lot of fun.
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