Le Centre Pompidou

I would like to dedicate this post to the unknown Frenchman who helped me out of the predicament I will presently describe.

It was another overcast morning; I got up late, and walked north, going by my usual route, following the North-South axis of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. While I was just about to cross over to the Ile de la Cite (the island on the Seine where Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle are located), one of the deaf-mute Romani girls with the charity petitions started heckling me, and chased me for some time. I dodged around groups of other pedestrians, and was wondering why she was so persistent in going after me in particular, when there were so many other victims around, when she sideswiped me on my right side, and I felt her going for my wallet, which was in my pocket. I instinctively clamped my hand down on it; but she continued to push into me; I'm not a violent enough person to push back, but, out of nowhere came a French man, who looked to be in his sixties, and bore a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill. With an outstretched finger, he stopped the girl cold, and said, in very clear French "Laissez les gens tranquilles" (leave the people alone); she scrammed, and I thanked the man, who smiled at me.

I continued on my way, and arrived at the industrially-inspired architecture of the Centre Pompidou. It is impossible to accurately describe this mass of pipes and colored tubes with words; search for a photo online, or check out my FB photo of the to-scale model. In any case, it was the first Sunday of the month, so admission was free -- to the permanent collections. My student ID, strangely, didn't get me into any of the expositions, but I decided that the permanent collections would be enough for me. While getting my ticket, I met an American senior from New York City, and we chatted a bit; she wished me good luck (which I need), and I headed off to explore.

The enormous escalator gives a fantastic view of Paris; as I was ascending to the upper floors which house the museum's main collections, I spotted the Pantheon, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre-Coeur, the Tour Montparnasse, and a slew of other Parisian landmarks.

I decided to look at the Modern Art, and to look at the earlier selections first, before browsing the later Modern, and the Contemporary exhibits. There was some OK Picasso, who's style is fairly recognizable, as well as some paintings by his friend Georges Braque, of whom I had never heard before. I particularly liked the room of Fauvist paintings, many of which were landscapes which made me think of upstate New York and of Maine. "Fauve," in French, literally means "tawny," and has similar bestial connotations to the English word; the phrase was first coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles, who, upon seeing a classical-style sculpture among all of the Fauvist paintings, remarked that the artist as "Donatello parmi les fauves" (Donatello among the tawny beasts). Matisse, writing about the inspiration of the movement, explained that "on ne peut pas vivre dans une menage trop bien fait" (One cannot live in a household that is too well made). In any case, Fauvism is colorful, and reminds me of impressionism, especially of Van Gogh.

Another room not to miss, if you ask me, is the very first, which has a very interesting cubist painting by Picasso, "Atelier de la modeliste," 1926, and a cubist painting of a billiard table, "Le billard," by Georges Braque. Why do I mention these two in particular? Because they remind me of Prof. Schwarz's class, The Modern Tradition, which first introduced me to Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," the first cubist painting, and to Rodin's sculpture of Balzac, which I saw for myself several weeks ago. Modernism, whether speaking about the visual arts or about literature, is all about multiple points of view, and of subjective worldview replacing older, more rigid, objective views of the world. Cubism, for instance, distorts perspective by forcing the eye to see the same object from all angles; in poetry, poems like Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" reveal that there are a multitude of ways of looking at and appreciating the same object; and in prose, throughout Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Marlow slowly relinquishes his rigid scale of moral values, questioning if he ought not to condemn Jim so harshly, and wondering if others, too, might have shown themselves to be cowards, in a similar situation. Now you don't need to take the class, right?

As I went along, I found that there were some things I liked, and some things I didn't like. I recognized a couple of the Soviet artists, Malevitch and Kandinsky, as well as the Suprematist movement, thanks to Prof. Verhoeven's wonderful class (shameless plug). Matisse is a very famous name, but very little of what I saw by him did I find particularly interesting, and the same goes for Le Corbusier. I do not like Dada, nor biomorphism, nor early surrealism. I began to think about a line from Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, in which Clarisse tells Montag, the main character, that she once heard that paintings used to depict real things. All I can say is that I continued to find interesting pieces, in all media, until the post-World War II period, after which I could walk briskly through rooms without stopping to look at anything, because nothing really caught my eye (this second half of the modern period lasted from 1945 until 1960). I've been thinking about it, and I've come to the conclusion that art afford to depict the ugly (I find "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" fascinating) and the erotic (see my photo of "Alice" on FB), but it cannot afford to disgust or to bore.

The contemporary art wasn't as bad as some of the late modern pieces; artists became quite creative with subjects and with media. There was a very amusing sculpture of a giant mushroom, which made me smile for reasons I can't quite explain, as well as other colorful, three-dimensional works. All in all, though, nothing much to write home about.

I left in the middle of a heavy drizzle, and wandered around in circles for about an hour, trying to find the Picasso Museum (which was closed, when I found it). I was wet, miserable, and tired, and decided to take the Metro back to my dorm, rather than walk back, and stop by the student cafeteria on the way. Sometimes, being warm and dry is worth the Metro ticket.

~JD

"De plus, Versailles retrouve son eclat dans le deuxieme tiers du XVIIIe siecle et la vie de cour y connait une nouvelle 'epoque,' en particulier sous la houlette de la marquise de Pompadour" [What's more, Versailles regained its eclat in the second third of the 18th century, and the court experienced a renewal there, in particular under the leadership of the marquise de Pompadour] (Bernard Hours, Louis XV et sa Cour: Le roi, l'etiquette et le courtisan, p. 26).

Montmartre

Montmartre, from its northern perch, looks down on the rest of Paris, and is easily recognizable for its fantastic basilica, Sacre Coeur. When I visited Paris in High School, Montmartre was my favorite region of the city: despite being crammed with tourists, I found it beautiful, and mysteriously peaceful, in spite of the crowds. Last Monday, another overcast misty day, Prof. Longino led an EDUCO tour to the historic neighborhood.

A tour through Montmartre is necessarily a tour of the artists, actors, and entertainers who lived there; although I've never taken one, I imagine that a tour of Greenwich Village wouldn't be much different. This is where the starving artists lived, because rent was cheap and light was plentiful -- no indoor heating, and little indoor plumbing, but large south-facing windows. Here, for example, one can visit Pablo Picasso's Parisian house, where he painted the famous Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, the first cubist painting, which anyone who has taken a certain modern literature class with Prof. Schwarz should remember fairly well. You can also visit a certain inn, le Lapin Agile, where many of these artists spent their evenings. The name of the inn derives its name from the shop sign depicting a rabbit, painted in 1893 by an artist named Gill: le lapin à Gill ("Gill's Rabbit") quickly morphed into le lapin agile ("The Agile Rabbit"), which I'm certainly was hilariously funny for the regular clientele, who all knew Gill.

Montmartre abounds with this kind of story. There were so many actresses, dancers, and painters who had all left some kind of a legacy or a memory, sometimes with monuments, sometimes without a trace, that only a Parisian could tell you the full story. Montmartre has that kind of liminal atmosphere to it, to the Parisians: it is located on high ground (always a good starter), and was originally a town independent from Paris, dominated by the strong-willed abbesses of its convent. It is the perfect site for French mystery novels. It is also the site for some of the most expensive wine around; we passed the first urban vineyard I have ever seen: every year, the wine is sold at a special auction at the mairie ("mayory," city hall), and the bottles are stamped with collectible labels -- collectible, that is, for the ultra-rich! These same vineyards, located on the south-facing slope, once provided revenues for the convent of nuns.

The only remains of this convent is the Eglise de Saint-Pierre, just ancient enough to contain a few Romanesque elements amidst the Gothic. For those of you interested in such history, it's also where Saint Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier decided to form the Jesuit order.
In addition to the church, there is, of course the wonderful Basilica of Sacre-Coeur, built during the 3rd Republic, as a place for prayer, with an emphasis on love (for God). It is really a beautiful monument; the family that welcomed us for the atelier de cuisine referred to it as "the Mosque," because of its domed towers (in fact, the real Mosque of Paris is fairly well-hidden, not far south from the Pantheon). Flanking the entrance are a pair of monumental bronze equestrian statues, depicting Charlemagne and Joan of Arc.

Sadly, the mist was too thick for a good view of the rest of the city, but Montmartre was worth visiting for its own views, and not just those it provides of the rest of Paris. Furthermore, the weather prompted Prof. Longino to invite us out to cocoa, which I wasn't about to turn down.

~JD

"Moine lui-meme des l'age de sept ans, partageant entierement avec une profonde satisfaction les benefices religieux, culturels et sociaux qui lui offre le monastere, et dont est privee la majeur partie des hommes, Bede ne sait pas et ne peut pas voir que ce sont precisement ces caracteristiques des fondations monastiques qui encouragent ces mecanismes pervers dont il stigmatise les resultats" [A monk himself since the age of seven, sharing fully and with a deep satisfaction the religious, cultural, and social benefits which the monastery offered him, Bede did not know and could not see that it was precisely these characteristics of the foundations of monasticism which encouraged the perverse mechanisms whose results he stigmatized] (Giovanni Miccoli, "Les Moines," in L'homme medieval, 58).