At this point in our trip I was feeling slightly over stimulated by all the museums and churches that we had seen but we had the museum passes for four day and we didn’t want to waste it. So we decided that it would be best not to go to Versailles, the palace that the Kings eventually lived in because that would be an all day trip, and for some reason that is just doesn’t seem worth it. If it was in Paris I think that we definitely would have made an effort to stop by, but I am not interested enough to spend a whole day there. Instead we decided to basically go the opposite route and see he Pompidou museum, which houses a huge modern art collection.
On our walk we saw a lot of cute little boutiques with my favorite French word in the window, soldes (which means sale). These stores we much different than the ones we had seen on our previous walk, in that they were much more price and style appropriate for me. The other store would have been fun to walk into and look around but way too intimidating to try on anything. This neighborhood seemed much more my style, but we were on a mission and fashion could only pull me so far away from modern art.
It was a bit of a walk but we finally made it to our destination. The building itself was built for the modern art and its architecture reflects its contents. It is made out of glass that curves around the building in big tubes. It kind of reminds me of what people thought the future would look like in the 1950s. The building adds a bit of color by leaving the pipes exposed for different necessities in the building, like water, electricity and the elevator, all color coded based on function. I thought it must be very difficult to keep clean, and my Mom said that the last time she went it was much dirtier.
Then we went inside and had to stop at the café so Mom could get her coffee fix. The interior was very bright with polished metal accents and a lot of color everywhere, including the blue ceiling and the neon signs telling you where everything was. After coffee we made our way to the fourth floor to the permanent exhibit. It was actually really cool because we figured out that the museum was devoting a large part of their permanent collection to women artists. The opened the exhibit by feminizing a lot of famous male modern artists, like Francine Bacon and Annie Warhol on these huge shiny buttons. It was interesting to see, but a lot of female modern art is very political and although I think this is a good step, I think it’s more important to have just a better balance of women artists in a modern collection, rather than just giving them their special women’s section. Since a lot of women’s modern art deals with issues about women and women in art I think the message gets water down when you have them all next to each other. I was certainly glad to see it though, although I wasn’t a fan of all of it obviously. I think that’s why most people don’t like modern art, because they feel afraid to say they don’t like something or that they don’t understand one piece and so they dismiss the whole genre as if it is all something they don’t like or they can’t understand any of it.
Anyway then we moved up onto the second floor, and I found some really great pieces from artists that I had never heard of, like Tamara de Lempicka, Nathalie S. Gontcharova and then some pieces from the masters of the modern like Picasso and Matisse and Colder. There was a patio on the fifth floor with some statues and some great views and sunshine, which is always nice. I’m always a fan of modern art museums but I feel bad if I don’t spend a lot of time looking at every piece because so many people just skim over so many pieces, that I feel as someone who likes modern art that I really have to pay extra attention to everything. This is a hard way to look at every museum, especially one that you are trying to see in a couple of hours. I wish there was a modern museum like that close to me especially since the Pompidou is suppose to have great temporary exhibits, which we did not get a chance to see, since we only had the museum pass.
After the museum we went to go look for somewhere to eat and so we followed the advice of Rick Steve’s again, and looked for the whimsical fountain and ate at one of the restaurants. Unfortunately there are no pictures of the fountain, because at this point the camera ran out of batteries (our only time this happened in Paris, which I think is pretty good). I was actually using my parents’ camera, and this made me realize more than ever that I need to get a new camera with better shake protection. Even though my camera is only a couple years old, pictures inside or without the flash just don’t come out like they do on the new cameras. I was fading pretty fast at this point but I got a really great dish of chicken and chanterelle mushrooms and rice. It was pretty heavy but I was hungry and then I got some coffee and that perked me right up. I’m not quite the addict that Mom is but I am definitely a convert.
Then we were done with museums (at least for the afternoon, I mean what else would we do on vacation without art museums??) but now it was time for shopping! We went to a couple stores and some were more successful than others. I got a pair of flats for 10 euros (which is about 14 dollars) and some other great finds. It was a little awkward because we didn’t have our shopping vocabulary and we were warned in the guidebooks that it was a little different in the boutiques, so we tried to follow what other people are doing. The only mistake I made was going into the wrong dressing room, because it was connected to the office, so that wasn’t that bad.
After that we went back to the room for a bit and then we still had some energy so we decided to do a preview of the Orsay Museum, since it was open late that day. So we walked down there and saw a bit of Max Ernst’s illustrations and all of the Art Deco stuff, which was mainly furniture, glass work and ceramics. This was great because we had a limited amount of time but we knew we were coming back, so we didn’t feel like we had to rush through anything. So we could just stop and peek at stuff, like the Klimpt painting. I really enjoy the Art Deco style and they would set up entire rooms of artifacts and it was amazing to look at (and imagine actually living in a set
(I'm actually on my way home here so I'm feeling really tired because it's super late back in Paris but I still have my flight back to Milwaukee... I'm trying not to sleep though because I want to overcome jet lag)
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