January 28: Musée de la Monnaie (Museum of the Mint)

I’m beginning to think that every branch of the French government has a museum: public hospitals, the postal service, now the national mint, and I haven’t even made it to the police museum yet.

Not a lot of surprises here: you start with ancient Greek money and work your way up to the Monnaie’s operations in the 20^th century. There are some mildly interesting things, such as a display on how Revolutionary authorities ran out of precious metals and tried to coin money from melted-down church bells (which presented all sorts of problems, since the bells apparently thought “screw you, Supreme Being” and stuck in the molds).

But I did think of a perfect use for this museum. It’s free, it’s not too overwhelming (three big rooms – about an hour for someone who’s really into it), it’s got both historical interest and machines, it’s really easy to find (in a bigass building facing the river), and it’s surrounded by antique shops… in short, a perfect place to send your visiting parents for a morning while you run errands (aka, sleep off a hangover). One of them can shop, and the other can think about the Vichy government or how s/he wishes that her/his home drill press was as big as the Mint’s. Forget “Paris with Children” – we need more “Paris with Parents” activities.

January 28: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (School of the Academy of Fine Arts)

Resisting… urge… to give history… of the French Academy….

Ok, urge has passed. All you have to know if that the Academie des Beaux-Arts is a long running training-ground for artists, and that for approximately the 16^th-early 19^th centuries every student’s goal was to be the next Michelangelo (obviously somewhat simplifying here). And, it has a custom of receiving gifts of artwork from students, alumni, and professors, so it has a great collection of works to draw from for special exhibitions – which are, after my trip to Cognacq-Jay, refreshingly fake-free!

The current (free) special exhibition is “The Academy Stripped Bare,” about 15 drawings in what appears to be someone’s office of nude male models by Academicians from the 16^th and 17^th centuries. They were good – I seem to have a weak spot for Michelangelo-esk drawings – but the real reason that you should check out any future special exhibition is the balls-out decorative gilded mishmash which coats the interior of the Academy. (I was going to describe it in more detail, but I’m so happy with that string of adjectives that I’ll leave it at that – just trust me and wander in).

January 28: Musée Cognacq-Jay (Cognacq-Jay Collection)

Another three museum day, although mostly by accident – they’re all small, and I had three hours between class and attending a very French student elections debate, in which people yelled at each other about social justice and how hard it is to find a cheap apartment in Paris.

First up: the Musée Cognacq-Jay. Mr. Cognacq was the 19^th century founder of a big department store in Paris, and wanted to have a museum named after himself and his wife (the former Mademoiselle Jay). But not being a connoisseur of art, he gave a heap of cash to various art dealers (swear to God, this is how the museum introduces itself in its brochure) and thus, unsurprisingly, amassed a collection of really bad 18^th century art with a large interweaving of bad fakes (I literally laughed out loud when I read the label attributing one painting to Tiepolo). It is free, and the carved paneling of the house (built by an unrelated family) is charming, so you may want to run through – if only to see the erotic genre scene paintings, which include what seem to be white slave and maid-on-mistress action.

January 27: Museum Tip of the Day: How to Find the Least Gross Bathroom

I had class for large chunks of today, plus an inflexible commitment to eat dessert for lunch at Bertillon (oh candied chestnuts, where have you been all of my life). So, preparatory to making it up with a museum later on, I offer a museum tip of the day: how to find a museum’s least gross bathroom.

This can be a big problem. First, if you’re an American travelling outside of the U.S., you’re probably not too happy with the bathroom situation per se: starkly industrial, under-sized, and always cold, as if every bathroom were a time warp to a ‘70’s East German run by midgets.

But add to this already questionable base a steady traffic of tourists, with their attendant kids, different customs of bathroom behavior, and jet-lag-disturbed digestive systems, and… well, you can imagine.

If you want to avoid this conflux of no-good, very-bad, break out your plan of the museum and find the bathroom with the highest number of the following qualities:

• Far away from the entrance(s). This is especially important for free museums, to avoid the “let’s just pop into the BM for a BM!” phenomenon (“BM” is the scholarly abbreviation for the British Museum, a fact which caused me to giggle like a third grader each of the 700 times I used the abbreviation in my dissertation).
• Far away from the café(s).
• In the most boring section. If you’re thinking “why would anyone want to visit the study collection of North American seashells?” you’ve found your bathroom hunting ground.
• And, for bonus points: in a recently renovated section of the museum.

January 26: L’Adresse: Musée de la Poste (The Address: Postal Service Museum)

Are you the Rain Man? If so, you’ll love this museum, which chronicles in painstaking detail every nuance of the history of the French postal service, mostly by the use of terrible dioramas. No aspect is too small to escape attention – for example, there are scale models of postal service train cars from 1845, 1848, 1860, 1870, 1926, 1973, 1979, and 1984 – because, of course, we’re all burning to know about the sweeping developments in in-route mail sorting between ’73 and ’79. Frustratingly, someone got a little too much grant money to update the place, because anything that you would actually want to see is obscured behind techno-gismos. E.g., there’s a room which displays all of the postage stamps put out by the French state… but the LIGHTS ARE TURNED OUT so that digital projections can play. Seriously? Not letting people see your collections? Kinda lame.

The museum has a special exhibition space on a separate floor of the building. Until March they’re showing “From Hermes to Text Messages… Or, the Saga of Messages,” which bears a somewhat bizarre relationship to the museum’s permanent collections, in that (1) the exhibition covers literally everything covered by the permanent collections, i.e., the history of sending messages in France, but (2) the exhibition adds more, e.g., sending messages in antiquity and in other parts of the world, and (3) the exhibition is much, much better than the permanent collections, because of more interesting choices of objects and better signage. It’s still pretty school-kid centric – I kept having to bend down to see into low-hung display cases – but there was just enough information and cool objects for me, like a collection of beautiful seals or an explanation of how people folded their letters before the invention of envelopes. The most heart-breaking thing was a display-case full of letters thrown from Germany-bound trains during WWII – some of them with documentation showing that they actually got to their destinations, sent by people who picked them up from the tracks.

January 24: Maison Européenne de la Photographie (European House for Photography) (but “House” sounds stupid, so let’s call it a “Center")

I like to think of myself as an adventurous globe-trotter (if by “globe” you understand “those portions of the globe equipped with flush toilets"). My body, by contrast, tends to be about as happy about travelling as a grandmother from Boise trying to order Ranch dressing in Rome (hint: ain’t gonna happen). As soon as I cross an ocean, my body treats everything as allergens – and, seriously, it’s January, so it’s having to work hard to find allergens. Anyway: this is just to say that I’m sorry I’ve been slow in posting, but it’s because leaving the apartment hasn’t been so much of an option lately.

Ok, so: the European Center for Photography! I chose it for proximity to my warm, warm Kleenex nest (I mean, apartment) and because photography is usually pretty non-challenging to look at. And I was right. Pretty pictures, generic-with-whiff-of-modernism atmosphere, and fashionable 20-something visitors: you could be in any photography collection in the world. (That’s a recommendation, by the way.) Seemed like a good place to pick someone up with a discussion about how overrated Ansel Adams is – although, big caveat, the guy who showed me the most attention did have a goatee. (That’s not a recommendation.)

January 19: Musée National Eugène Delacroix (National Museum of Eugène Delacroix)

Dear curators of creative-person house museums: this is how it should be done. Eugène Delacroix was a 19^th century painter – think Liberty Leading the People (patriotically stirring) or The Death of Sardanapalus (just plain stirring). This museum solves the following house-museum problems with flying colors:

• Where do we put the museum? The Delacroix House is in a very chi-chi Left Bank neighborhood – it’s a fairly small apartment with an attached atelier/ show-room specially built for Delacroix. It was the last apartment he lived in; as the French-English-Spanish signage cheerfully informs you, he died in its bedroom. May chills of historical frissons run down your cultured spine!
• What do we put in the museum? The Delacroix House doesn’t do the whining about its inability to restore the place to its exact past appearance; rather, they clearly indicate the purpose of each room and list its former contents (from an inventory made at Delacroix’s death). Then, they use the rooms to display drawings, preparatory sketches, and a few paintings.
• Why do we have this museum again? Too many house-of-famous-person museums fail to even think about this question, preferring to have an attitude of “aren’t we all just here to look at Paul Bunyan’s dentures?” By contrast, at the Delacroix House you’ll learn a lot about Delacroix’s working methods (and, by extension, those of painters in general), thanks to a range of items from doodles in pocket notebooks to careful drawings of posed models to oil studies working out color balance. Everything is enjoyable to look at – Delacroix has a flexible, fluid drawing style which reveals what he’s most interested by in a scene and what he finds tricky to reproduce. And the subject matter is enjoyable, too: he was absolutely obsessed with lions and tigers, as well as stuff from Morocco, pretty women, horses, etc. Even his more traditional subject matter is interesting – for example, all of his female saints seem to be experiencing an ecstasy only partially spiritual.

In sum: educational, aesthetically pleasing, and bite-sized. And, yes, I know that Paul Bunyan was not a real person.

January 19: Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts)

I’m pretty sure that this museum is like an abusive relationship:

• Stage One: when it starts, it’s so fun and playful – it’s like the best museum ever! First stop is the Toy Gallery, currently featuring an exhibition on Playmobile: a bajillion Playmobile figurines set up in elaborate tableau by OCD artists! Videos showing how they’re made by automated machinery! Ten-foot-tall statues of giant Playmobile Indians, complete with giant feather headdresses! It’s like I’m on the set of 3-2-1 Contact!
• Stage Two: from toy funland, you’re suddenly plunged into the pain and darkness of the medieval and Renaissance collections of “decorative” “arts.” What happened to the creative, caring museum that I first knew? Why is it now attacking me with the crappiest collection of broken, over-restored, possibly fake, and just generally terribly ugly collection of objects I’ve ever seen? (Sobbing) I’m sorry that I didn’t recognize this painting by the anonymous master of some other altarpiece in a town that I’ve never heard of! I won’t ever do it again! No, please don’t show me ten more of his paintings! Noooo….
• Stage Three: just when you’ve decided that enough is enough and that you’re leaving – suddenly everything is good again. 17^th century Chinoiserie – how charming! Elegant period rooms, a gigantically elaborate bed of a 19^th century courtesan, amusingly high concept/ low comfort 20^th century furniture – I’m so glad that I didn’t give up on you, museum my love! You never really meant to hurt me!

The problem is that I can’t tell if I actually liked the later collections, or if I only convinced myself I did as a self-justification for suffering through the early ones. Somebody needs to visit, starting only on the 4^th floor, and let me know.

January 19: Musée de la Mode et du Textile (Museum of Fashion and Textiles)

Introductory note: within the Louvre building are three other, separate museums of decorative arts, fashion, and advertizing. They’re run by the Union des Arts Décoratifs, which is also in charge of the nearby Nissim de Camondo house-museum. Separate admission charges and spaces, so I’m counting them as separate museums (although you can buy a combined ticket to visit all four for the jaw-dropping price of 17.50 euro).

Ok, so, the Musée de la Mode et du Textile is essentially a special exhibition space (two exhibitions a year). It’s currently showing the work of Madeleine Vionnet from the ‘10’s to the ‘40’s, with well-organized signage in French and English, which I’m sure would have been very informative if I hadn’t spent the entire time thinking either “pretty pretty WANT” or “does bias-cut crepe ever really look good on anyone?” Plentiful vintage photographs and film clips let me know that the answer to that question is, reassuringly and yet oddly enough, “nope – not even on the models employed by the designer!”

Aside from the exhibition space, there are two other small, but packed, rooms of jewelry. You could spend a long time here, learning about materials and stylistic history from the Middle Ages to the present, or you could just wander around muttering “Shiny! Shiny! Ooooh, rare example of First Empire shiny!” like I did.

January 18: Musée Jacquemart-André (Jacquemart-André House and Collection)

A couple of unbelievably wealthy art collectors roam the 19^th c. globe, buying works of art to fill a specially-built mansion in a city’s most fashionable district. It’s the same story behind the Frick Gallery in New York, the Wallace Collection in London, and the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. And, after visiting the latter twice, with art historians and with non-art historians, I’m realizing that this genre of collector’s house museum presents the same sort of difficulties to the non-art historian visitor.

Why? Well, the non-art historian in Paris might reasonably think “why am I paying more than a ticket to the Musée du Louvre, which is full of works that I’ve actually heard of, to go to this place, which is 100 times smaller and which only has somebody’s old furniture and second rate works by second rate artists that not even my high school AP Art History teacher has heard of? Carlo Crivelli? Seriously? Forget this – I’m out. Me and the Mona Lisa are going to hang.”

So, just to give you insight into the mysterious mind of an art historian, here’s what’s going on when we spent hours joyfully screaming at each other in a collector’s house museum: it’s like going on Maury to argue about paternity tests. Collectors’ house museums have a lot of fakes. What else is going to happen if someone with more money than expertise starts shaking fistfuls of cash in the art market’s face and saying “I want to buy an [artist’s name here]!” Some less-than-scrupulous dealer is going to say “Oh yes, I heard that you wanted one of those, and I have one just for you. I think it’s almost finished drying… um, I mean, I’m dying for you to see it!” Hence, there is plenty of opportunity for art historians to get into arguments which go something like this: “This painting is totally by Paolo Uccello! Look – that’s how he paints his noses, that’s how he paints his ears…” “Uh-uh, you lying sack of slut! True, Uccello was one of the Early Renaissance painters struggling to develop perspective, leading to some rather risible errors in spatial construction, but he didn’t suck as hard as this painting sucks – so why don’t you go back to teaching AP Art History, you Sister Wendy wanna-be!”

So… kinda a specialized pleasure.

January 15: Musée de l’Assistance Publique et Hôpitaux de Paris (Museum of Public Assistance and Hospitals of Paris)

I like medical history museums. A lot. To the extent that I have probably made more visits to medical history museums than to actual doctors. So when I say that the Musée de l’Assistance Publique et Hôpitaux de Paris is a particularly good medical history museum, I fully recognize that that might sound to you like “a particularly good NASCAR race” sounds to me.

That said, I think that this place is worth a visit if you are at all interested in medicine, social history, or bizarre artworks commemorating moments in said history, such as a 1908 painting entitled “First Treatments of Cancer by X-Ray” featuring a very professional-looking doctor swathed in white robes accompanied by a top hat. Yesssss.

The ten or so rooms of the museum trace the evolution of French public hospitals from charitable institutions run by religious orders to their current selves. The signage (all in French) is very smart, addressing large issues such as the changing ideas of who belongs in hospitals (e.g., the blind, beggars, homosexuals, criminals, etc.). The whole presentation is very influenced by Foucault – fans can treat the displays as an illustrated version of The Birth of the Clinic. And well-illustrated: there are some serious objects here, like recognition tokens left on abandoned infants, a collection of baby-bottles through the ages, and, as an illustration of the secularization of health care, some rather moving photographs of the ceremonial departure of the last nuns from Paris’ biggest public hospital in the early 20^th century.

A note for the squeamish: no worries. This is the least-gross medical history museum I’ve ever seen – not even one anatomical specimen floating in a jar. The worst it gets is a couple of display cases’ worth of historical medical instruments, from the world’s least effective-looking stethoscope to the tools for everybody’s favorite useless medical procedure, trepanation.

P.s.: It’s totally worth going to this museum just to see the reactions of your friends – no one I’ve told so far has been able to resist laughing at the spectacular nerdiness of a trip to what is basically a Museum of Medicare.

January 14: Musée Marmottan-Monet

Since I didn’t title this blog “A Museum Rant a Day,” I’ll be brief but: there is a conspiracy of coat-check attendants in Parisian museums. The entrance hall, the ticket office, the cloakroom: all of these initial areas are nice and toasty. BUT: as soon as you’re tempted into checking your coat – boom! the rest of the museum is exactly the same temperature as it is outside (right now: maximum chilly). So don’t be fooled into giving up your coat – I myself have vowed that the Musée Marmottan-Monet is the last time my fingers will turn into little ice-lumps.

Anyway… this museum is a mixed bag, with Napoleonic era decorative art from the collections of Paul Marmottan on the one hand, and about a hundred Impressionist paintings from the holdings of the Académie des Beaux-Arts on the other (plus a special exhibition space). The real reason to go is to see Monet’s late works, donated to the museum by his son. Seeing these led me to my Third Stage of Monet Acceptance:

• High School: Monet is so laaaaame. Only dentists like him, for posters in their waiting rooms.
• Grad School: Since I have to teach Monet, I’ll fake an appreciation, so… hey, kids, isn’t it cool how we think that Monet is so tame, but he actually seemed like a threateningly revolutionary artist when he was young!
• At the Musée Marmottan-Monet: Hot damn, these late paintings, when he was losing his vision to cataracts, are amazing. Who would have thought that monumental close-ups of water lilies, irises, and roses could combine the mimetic splendors of representational art with the beauties of abstraction?

So, I might now actually like Monet – if only I could have stayed long enough to look as long as I wanted, without the risk of succumbing to frost-bite. There’s also a good assortment of works from others periods of Monet’s life, including some portraits of his children which will make you realize why he shied away from the human form in his main work (because he sucked at rendering it) and also the painting, “Impression: Sunrise,” which gave its name to the whole Impressionist movement (not that the incredibly thin signage tells you).

January 14: Maison de Balzac (Balzac’s House)

I’m a big fan of Honoré de Balzac, a 19^th c. French novelist, probably in great part because I can actually understand his French. Thus, out of the five books that I’ve read in French, three are by Balzac (and, just to give you an idea of the quality of my French, one of the others was Harry Potter et la Chambre des Secrets). Nonetheless, the Maison de Balzac was a big splotch of disappointment on my day. Even the museum itself calls its location a “banal apartment,” chosen by Balzac because the rooms and neighborhood were so boring that they would offer no distractions while he wrote for 16 hours a day. Most of the objects on display are pretty banal as well, e.g. some armchairs which belonged not to Balzac but to someone to whom Balzac occasionally wrote letters – try not to be overcome with excitement! The best part is his study, with his heavily-scarred desk, where he wrote overlooked on one side by a more than usually painful looking crucifix and, on the other side, by an over-life-sized heroic bust of himself. There are some other personal relics, such as his favorite cane and a cast of his hand, both so small that it seems as if the great writer would have barely come up to my armpit. There’s also his custom-made coffeepot, from which he claimed that he drank “torrents” but which looks like it would barely hold the contents of a Starbucks tall.

The whole thing is tiny – and free – so perhaps worth dropping by if you’re in the area for the Musée Marmottan-Monet or the tasty shops surrounding Passy’s covered market. Just be aware that the spirit of Balzac has left the building…

January 14: Musée de la Contrefaçon (Museum of Counterfeiting)

So, this isn’t really a museum, in the sense of an institution devoted to the disinterested advancement of public knowledge. Rather, it’s a display of fake goods juxtaposed with genuine ones, organized by a manufacturers’ association which wants you to pay a couple of Euro for the privilege of walking through an infomercial about the evils of counterfeiting.

You will learn something (especially if you can read the all-French signage) – for me it was that there are almost-perfect counterfeit versions of cosmetics, food products, and… wait for it…. CONDOMS, leading to an increase in my standing anxiety level about face cream, Nescafe, and sex.

However, the real fun of these couple of rooms is the hysterical tone and over-reaching claims made in the signage, composed by manufacturers who, for example, refer to counterfeiting as “industrial terrorism.” At various points, they tell you that you shouldn’t buy fakes because:

• they are made by child labor (while, of course, genuine goods never are)
• they will kill you (e.g., fake cell phones present the risk of “explosion, overheating, and catching on fire”)
• they are ugly (a claim made about all the fashion fakes, along with the plaint that counterfeit fashion leads to the “irredeemable banalization” of luxury goods)
• they are made from “dubious ingredients, such as animal urine” (this on a display of those imitation, “smells like” perfumes, which I don’t really think count as counterfeits, and, besides – urine? Really?).

There’s also a small display of art forgeries, which are mostly so bad that it takes a while before you can figure out whom the imitated artist is supposed to be.

So: check it out if you’re a hypochondriac or a critic of capitalism in the neighborhood with a half-hour to spare. Otherwise, you can replicate the whole experience by screaming “animal pee industrial terrorist!” at anyone you see carrying a fake Louis Vuitton bag.

January 12: Nothing Except a Eunuch

Today I took a delightful stroll across Paris with A. - three miles which will translate into three croissants tomorrow morning, following the internationally recognized standard (or does one measure croissants in kilometers? If so - sweet!). However, I was not well organized, and the Grand Palais, putative goal of the stroll, turns out to be closed on Tuesdays. Self-assigned penance was a coffee followed by another two miles of walking, ending for A. with going to class (haha!) and for me with the church of Saint Germain des Prés, which rewarded all my efforts with 1718 painting by Nicolas Bertin entitled "The Baptism of Queen Candace's Eunuch."

January 11: Musée Dapper

I can’t make up my mind about this place, which describes itself as “an artistic and cultural space for Africa, the Caribbean and their diaspora.” Or, I should say, I’m conflicted about their exhibition, since, once again, the scene in the café and the gift shop/ book store was completely separate and much more populated. Both the café and the store seem excellent, by the way, especially if you’re looking for an educational yet fun illustrated novel about sub-Saharan Africa for the French-reading young adult in your life (really).

As for what you get when you pay the admission price: there’s only enough space for a single exhibition. They seem to have about two exhibitions a year; currently, it’s “The Art of Being a Man in Africa and Oceania,” a collection of various ornaments worn by men and a description of the cultural situations and rituals in which these ornaments signify.

I can’t decide whether to describe it as:

• Pretty fantastic. Unlike most displays of African or Oceanic art, this exhibition treats the cultures as still very much alive. E.g., the exhibition begins with video and photographs of members of the SAPE, the “Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes,” a group of men in the Congo who parade around in elegant European suits in Palm Beach color combos (see photos here). The video is the best, with lots of shots of dudes hopping around pulling up their pant legs to show off their socks. So then, when you walk into the next rooms, stocked with the masks, bracelets, etc. of traditional “African art,” you can appreciate how there is a cultural continuum. Also, the choice of objects was superb, e.g. a Hawaiian feather cloak, or a hat made out of gazelle horns (which looked like the most awesome sea urchin EVER).
• Weakly popularized. Other details of the exhibition felt patronizingly un-scholarly. E.g., no dates on any of the labels – and I know that it’s sometimes hard to date African artworks, but at least give me a line on whether this mask was made and used yesterday or belongs to a now-disappeared cultural tradition. Also, the subject of the exhibition was very broad – there’s not a whole lot of detailed analysis you can do on “stuff worn by dudes.” And that it combined Africa and Oceania was additionally weird – one could describe the exhibition as 150 randomly-selected objects worn by dudes from several centuries ago to the present over a large portion of the globe’s landmass.

Also – one of the world’s greatest museums of ethnology (or, at least, the world’s newish and shiny-brightest museums of ethnology) is right across the river, so you’re probably better of there.

January 10: Palais du Tokyo (Tokyo Palace) (not like that translation helps)

Another two-museum day, since I spend yesterday on the couch in such an allergy-medicine haze that following the plotline of “The Jersey Shore” took all of my attention.

The Palais du Tokyo is a contemporary arts space, which is called the “Tokyo Palace” in reference to some formerly nearby monument (I think). The museum itself doesn’t explain its name; in a similar fashion, it doesn’t offer too much guidance in understanding the works on display. There aren’t too many of these – the admission price works out to about €.50 per piece – but they are well chosen, thought provoking, and in general aesthetically pleasing. They’re big into programs for kids, with a whole room full of cute little tables and art supplies for budding conceptual artists, and roving activity stations – there were some cushions set up with a sign announcing story-time for 3 year olds next to a replica of the Unabomber’s cabin, but I wasn’t around for long enough to hear what sort of fairy tales those were.

The exhibition galleries didn’t seem to be the main point, though. Most of the visitors – early 20’s hipsters – were there for the three eating areas (full service café, self-service cafeteria, and coffee bar) or the two shops (bookstore and gift store featuring things like a doll dressed as Johnny Rotten), none of which require paying an entrance fee. Good to know, since you’re pretty much contractually required to go to this area of Paris to see the Champs-Elysees and the Eiffel Tower, but aside from these things, the neighborhood is dully residential.

Also – I was worried that the whole experience was going to be painfully hip, which is why I made my fellow student M.K. come with me, so I could hide behind someone cool (since I’ve had a few experiences on former trips to Paris of walking into chic places and having everyone who worked there avoid eye contact and just generally ooze around me until I gave up and, chastened, walked out). But it wasn’t like that at all – much more the “gee whiz, running/ attending an arts space is cool!” school of hip people.

January 10: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Put this museum on your “to avoid” list. Unless you’re into:

• second rate works by semi-known modern artists, e.g. ceramic plates painted by Matisse;
• grim collections of ‘30’s decorative art; e.g. an armchair set which has now become one of the grand mysteries in life to me, because how can “upholstered in python-skin” seem so good in concept and yet be so lame in execution?; or
• absolutely awful contemporary “art.”

And I mean awful. I enjoy going to contemporary art galleries, because the works are either good or so bad that I can make fun of them in (hopefully) hilarious ways. But in every gallery there is a work so bad, so stomach-churningly aesthetically offensive, that my displaced-Victorian soul dies a little when I see it. Apparently, all of those works are shipped directly to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, home of, for example, a 2009 work whose creator seems to have skinned some road-kill, wrapped the only-partially-cured pelt around some rebar, and then sprinkled the whole thing with confetti.

And if that piece seems like something that would appear in a movie satirizing the art world, so much more so was the featured special exhibition: “Deadline.” It featured the works of terminally-ill artists who used art to meditate on their approaching deaths…. Yikes.

January 8: Musée Guimet (aka, the National Museum of Asian Art)

Has your chamomile tea lost its savor? Are your discussions of “East, Pray, Love” falling flat? Why not revitalize your book club with an outing to the Musée Guimet?!?

Honestly, I have no idea if the “book club lady” is as much of a feature of the French national landscape as she is of the American, but that is how I would describe 95% of my fellow visitors. Imagine your aunt – you know, the one with a few too many cats, who sends you books on feng shui on your birthday, and who refers to herself as “53 years young!” The remaining 5% of visitors were book-club husbands who seemed like they were still making up for being caught pinching a waitress’ bottom twenty years ago.

But – don’t be scared away by the probability that you’ll be the only person in the building who doesn’t possess a CD of whale sounds set to soft jazz, because this is a truly great collection. It features works from everywhere that could conceivably be called “Asia,” from Japan to India (like, who knew that Myanmar had such great art?). The bulk of the collection was formed in the 19^th century, which means that you are faced with the lesser (in my opinion) ethical dilemma of colonialist collecting, rather than the problem of looted and smuggled art, which is too often the origin of more modern Asian art collections. The objects are rationally grouped by country, era, and type, with lots of English signage and a free audio guide. If you want, you can emerge able to discourse on the stylistic differences of representations of the Buddha in Vietnam and Thailand… or you can just wander around and look at the pretty, pretty things. Don’t miss the monumental sculpture from Cambodia or the art from ancient Afghanistan, which melds Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese influences.

In sum: not really a must-do unless you like Asian art, but it’s the next closest thing to a whirlwind tour from the Imperial City to Angor Wat if you’re into that sort of thing.

P.S.: Aunt P., I don’t mean your book club.

January 7: Maison de Victor Hugo (Victor Hugo’s House)

On my way to the Place des Vosges, I realized that I had thought that I was going to visit the house of Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musket-awesomes. But no – this place is a memorial to Victor Hugo, writer of The Hunchback of Notre Lame. But my grumpiness was soon dissipated by the sheer enthusiasm shown by the French nation for their favorite literary lion – it’s like when a cute little kid insists on explaining how their Pokemon cards work (“and then, he moved to the Chanel Islands – bam! and then, Les Misérables was like level up! and then…”). The first floor is a temporary exhibition space, currently filled with what seemed like hundreds of photographs of Hugo from the 1850’s, all in literary beefcake poses: with hand clutching immense forehead; with a melancholy gaze off into the distance; sitting backwards in a chair…. Basically, he looks like a Jonas Brother in Teen Vogue. The second floor is where Hugo lived for… umm, I dunno – 10 years? It was confusing. The apartment was repeatedly renovated after he moved out, so only a couple rooms are reconstructions of his life there, while other rooms are done up as rooms in his other houses. The best is an incredibly elaborate, “Chinese”-style room coated with carved panels designed by Hugo on the walls and ceiling. This room was taken from the house of Hugo’s long time mistress – one of my favorite things about the French is how they generously glorify the mistresses of famous men, too.

January 6: Grande Galerie de l’Evolution (Grand Gallery of Evolution)

I don’t know whether to count this as a triumphal day when I went to two museums or a loser day when I failed to make it to all parts of a single museum. Both the Le Cabinet d’histoire du Jardin des Plantes and the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution are technically part of the Natural History Museum, but they’re in different buildings in different parts of the Jardin des Plantes, and have separate admission charges. So let’s just say two museums, shall we?

So: the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution shows the diversity of life through lots of stuffed animals (pardon me: taxidermy). I suppose that there is some educational intent – there are lots of smaller cases around the edges of the space which will tell you about things like the process of preparing zoological specimens (neat-o), life forms found near undersea geothermal vents (something I always think that I should be interested in, but can’t really pay attention to), or different types of wool (yawn). But the star attractions are the dramatic parades of animals, arranged by geographical area, marching around in the wide central space. I soon gave up trying to read anything and instead just wandered among the critters, thinking profound thoughts such as:

• Oh, right. Now I remember my phobia of taxidermied fish.
• Baby giraffe!
• Ummm… taxadermied rhinos bear a striking resemblance to taxidermied fish. Great, a new phobia.
• Baby elephant!

Although the animals themselves tend to be a bit scraggly, with some disturbing cracks, the presentation alone is worth a visit. They’re all standing on the floor with you, so you can compare heights (profound thought: giraffes are TALL), and there is nary a sign of the cheesy dioramas favored by most natural history museums. Context is provided by unobtrusive video displays – be sure to watch the video about the life of Siam the elephant and slowly realize that it’s him, stuffed and looming above the three-minute highlight reel of his existence. The signage is in French, but it’s not too problematic to understand – most of the words are similar enough to English (like, did I really need to translate the name of the museum?), and if you’re all gung ho, you can buy a guide in English. The floor plan explains a lot of the conceptual arrangement of the gallery, and is available in English - including the charming and rather risqué admonition not to touch the exhibitions because “the exposed animals are fragile.” I know that I’m always in a fragile state when I expose myself...

January 6: Le Cabinet d’histoire du Jardin des Plantes (The Cabinet of the History of the Jardin des Plantes)

I’m going to start feeling sorry for myself if there are many more utterly boring museums like this on my list. And when I say boring, you know it’s boring, since I am a person who finds, for example, exhibitions of “Sundials through History” completely fascinating. But plans and models of the different buildings of the Jardin des Plantes – Paris’ botanical garden/ zoo? Not so much. On the plus side, it’s only about five rooms, and the exhibitions seems to rotate frequently, if you like your tedium contained and varied. Although this rotation means that you might not get to see the room full of prints and drawings of volcanic eruptions – although I probably found this interesting only because it brought back memories of the guy I briefly dated in college, an unwilling virgin with a very Freudian National Geographic poster of an erupting volcano hung above his dorm room bed.

January 5: Musée Carnavalet

I made it to two museums today, putting me back on track for the one-a-day goal. I actually went to the Musée Carnavalet first, but had to write about the Musée de la Chase et de la Nature posthaste, as it is much more exciting. The Carnavalet is your basic town historical society: school kids and sedate older folks looking at paintings of Paris, relics of Paris’ history, innumerable portraits of people of you’ve never heard of, etc. Of course, Paris is not your basic town, so there are some interesting relics, such as a reconstruction of Marcel Proust’s bedroom or souvenirs from all stages of the Revolution – the third floor is a must-see if you start to feel all tingly at the thought of seeing the makeup kit Marie Antoinette used in prison before her execution. There are also some entertainingly bizarre objects scattered about, such as a 19^th c. tableau of four tiny stuffed monkeys posed as glassblowers, or a Terror-era children’s toy model of the guillotine (seriously, WTF?). But unless you’re a big history buff, I would take advantage of the lack of admission charge to stroll through the ground floor only, which has the most aesthetically pleasing stuff, notably a big collection of the signs that used to hang in front of Parisian businesses, including giant pairs of scissors and eyeglasses and lots of just darn cute animals.

January 5: Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature)

HOLY CRAP this place is amazing. Just forget the Louvre – proceed directly here from the airport. It’s now my favorite… I was going to say my favorite museum, but it’s more like a unified work of art. And I had such low expectations: “How quirky I will be,” I had thought, “going to look at a dumpy collection of flea-bitten skins and rusty guns!” But no. First, it’s in a beautifully modernized building – kinda pomo Renaissance. Next, it’s a unified mixture of natural history, old masters, contemporary art installations, and cultural history – not so much of hunting per se, but of the history of man’s relations to the animal world. For example, the first room draws you in with an enormous Rubens hunting scene, from which you look down to see a very realistically posed stuffed boar looming up out of the darkness. Seriously, I kept glancing nervously at it while I walked around the room – it’s just standing on the floor, looking like it’s going to charge. And then, all amped up from the boar, I nearly wet myself walking into the next room, which features a ceiling coated in, ummm, stuffed owls? Owl masks? Sorry, dear reader, but I couldn’t stick around long enough to find out, because I have enough nightmares as it is. The early rooms are all dedicated to animals – boar, stag, hunting dogs, etc. They set the stage for the rooms on the second floor, which tip the balance towards contemporary art and which question man’s impact on the animal world. A weird place for a vegetarian to feel happy, but that’s what happens. Basically, what the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA wishes that it was. Just go.

January 4: Louvre

I know, I know. I started this blog with a promise that I would avoid the tried and true museums, and then it’s only day 4 before I’m hitting the Louvre. But I went because a friend asked me to check out a special exhibition on Titian and Tintoretto, which closes today. And because I’m a good friend, I went. However, because I’m not a perfect friend, I promptly abandoned the “Big Ts” plan when I found out that there was a two hour long line to get into the exhibition. And I thought that Europe-Disney was outside of Paris…

The lobby of the Louvre – a huge, underground space – was filled not only with this special exhibition line, but also with what seemed like every tourist in Paris, mostly wandering helplessly or running around with small infants screaming “Where baby changing room?!?” at museum guards. I decided to find the least-visited section of the museum, and hit gold with “objects d’arte.” Just me and 500 tapestries, baby. The best object was an Italian Renaissance-era birth salver (or “plate,” for those of us without a compulsive need to use the fancy word). First of all, birth plates make me happy. They are wooden platters which were given as “congrats on your new baby!” gifts during the Renaissance – only they were given pretty much immediately after birth. Some of them are painted with gift-giving scenes: the new mom, still in bed, looking like crap; the new baby, getting its first bath from the maids; and all the mom’s friends, busting down the door to come fondle the infant with hands that haven’t been washed in twenty-seven years. Just what I want if I ever give birth (please, sweet Jesus, no): all my friends coming to visit.

Anyway… this particular birth plate is painted with the “Triumph of Venus,” meaning a very-nude Venus, ancient goddess of love, floating above some of great male lovers of history (sorry – Paris is the only one I can remember), with golden rays shooting out of her cooch and landing on all of their faces. For the art historians: the painter has adopted the iconography of the reception of the stigmata by St. Francis. For the rest of us: it looks like she has Jedi pee.

But while I’m laughing to myself about birth plates, I had to notice that the prevailing emotional state exhibited by the visitor to the Louvre is misery. I think many people go there because it’s something that you’re supposed to do, but then don’t know what to do when they get there, besides reverently admiring Great Works of Art. Which, honestly, is something you can do for a half-hour, tops. So here’s my list of suggestions for ways to amuse yourself at the Louvre (or any museum) when your capacity for aesthetic reverence needs a recharge:

• People-watch. My favorite people-watching games are “You Wore What Shoes?” and “Who’s the Most Miserable?” – i.e., the grandfather who collapses onto every bench he can find with a big sigh, or the 13-year-old boy burdened both by his parents and an unfortunate mustache?
• DIY Tour Guide. Gather round, for I am about to tell you the secret of art history, which I learned only after long years of PhD program toil: we make up probably 90% of the crap we say. You, too, can explain an artist’s choice of medium/ subject matter/ color by reference to his or her troubled relations with estranged family/ confused sexual orientation/ reaction to political and social turmoil of the period. Appoint one group member the official guide for a room, and award points based on authoritativeness or ridiculousness. Bonus: the Louvre is decorated with many allegorical paintings on the ceilings – it’s always way, way more fun to make up what these should be symbolizing than read about what they actually do.
• Look for hidden penises. Artists have usually always been the goofy, out-there members of society, and they must have gotten pretty bored painting portraits of dukes or their three thousandth scene of a saint’s life, because damn, there are a lot of bulges in togas/ robes/ hot pants (or whatever you call what dudes wore in the 18^th century). Look for them. Really. Although this game can be socially awkward - all of my friends are now used to saying “Very nice, yes, I see the hidden penis, too. Sure, it’s there. Yes, I believe you.”
• Play “I bet you can’t find ten horses!” My go-to solution to the problem of wanting to tear children limb-from-limb is to ask them to find ten whatevers in the room, so I can engage in some reverential admiring of Great Works of Art while they run about exhausting their competitive and pattern-recognition-loving selves. If they can’t find at least ten horses, dogs, birds, or funny people with wings in whatever room you’re in, you may have accidentally entered a McDonald’s instead of a museum. Bonus: in the Louvre “objects d’arte” section, you can easily increase the required number of dogs and horses per room to 1,000.

More museum-going activities later. Now I’m going to go to sleep and dream about the tapestry featuring a waist-high elephant being slain by hunters with another elephant in the background being gored by a unicorn. Ah, the middle ages…

January 3: Petit Palais

As I waited for my friend outside the Petit Palais, sitting on the steps underneath a monumental sculptural group representing, no doubt, some sort of personification of the arts, a guard bustled up to me. This is generally a bad sign, and I prepared to be yelled at for some offense – perhaps step-sitting was not OK? “Attention, miss!” he said sternly (in French, but it’s easier to translate than to remember where to put the accents). “Be careful, because above your head… there is a foot!” Then he laughed, pointing to the foot, belonging to the statue, dangling about 10 feet above my head.

From this, I knew I would like the Petit Palais – if the security guards have time and inclination enough to make cute little jokes, you can be sure that the museum is delightfully obscure enough that their lives aren’t poisoned by tourists asking “is THIS where the Da Vinci code thing was?” And this prediction came true. The Petit Palais, about half special exhibition space and half permanent collection of wacky 19^th century, Academic works (like, life-sized terracotta glazed sculpture of a woman with her pet monkey) is populated exclusively with French pensioners from the surrounding posh neighborhood, occasionally accompanied by their well-behaved grandchildren (“yes, it’s a nice monkey, Grandmere”). The building itself is very grand, with lots of architectural sculpture and little gardens. A good place to go if you don’t actually want to see a lot of art – the works are pretty light on the ground – but would enjoy feeling like a lady who lunches for an hour or so. Ps – not even a little bit of English on the signs; however, all you need to know to understand Academic art is that the artist is trying to be the next Michelangelo, and is failing…

January 2: Centre Pompidou

My first museum of the trip. Did I choose it for the avant-garde collections of modern and contemporary art? The innovative architecture? The sweeping view of Paris seen from the outdoor escalators? Well, no. It’s because it has free wifi. So, I and a bunch of other jet-setting twenty-somethings are all on our computers, although I hope that no one else is googling “Paris apartment how to turn on water.”

Well, also, I had a blind date. So, without future ado, the ways in which my date, “A.,” was like the Centre Pompidou:

• Both claim to be fluent in English, but have significant gaps. The Pompidou translates most, but not all, of its signage into English. This led to experiences such as looking at a sculpture that looked like something your plumber pulls out of your blocked drain and really needing to know what it was made out of, only to be confronted by a sign saying “crin.” Only now does my dictionary tell me that this means “horsehair,” leading me to wonder why A. claimed that he couldn’t translate that word, but that it was “some sort of textile.” Maybe he doesn’t understand French either?
• Both are hard to understand in general. A. tended to mutter, leading me to have to ask him to repeat pretty much everything he said, which makes for an awkward date. The Pompidou is aggressively anti-signage: you get the title and artist’s name, and that’s about it. Occasionally there are larger signs offering a quote from the artist, routinely having little to do with the work at hand.
• Both are foreign! Yes, I was out with an authentic French guy, at an authentically French museum. Guess what – they have different artists over here! I recognized only a few of the names. It’s funny how the who’s who of art changes by country. The prime benefit of this in the Pompidou is that you’ll see many more Middle Eastern, African, South American, etc., artists than in American museums.
• It’s hard for me to decide whether I don’t like them because they’re not likable, or if it’s just me: Ok, this is a bit of an exaggeration. A. was truly boring, with a weird habit of always covering up his mouth and nose with his hand, which led me to think that I was more smelly than I thought (a reasonable guess, given my failure to make the water work in my apartment) (but which was apparently untrue, since he’s subsequently asked me on another date). The Pompidou is a harder case: they seem to specialize in idea-based, politically active art which leaves me longing for something pretty.

So: final thoughts. The Pompidou is great for people-watching – mostly agitated families and impossibly hip youngsters. The art is great for either those who are globally up to the minute, art-world-wise, or those who love to make fun of modern art. And don’t forget the free wifi…

January 1

I should change the name of this blog to “a Paris museum a day or the equivalent thereto,” since my research showed not a single open museum on New Year’s Day in Paris. A good number aren’t open at all until next week. Parisian curators must celebrate the New Year in a major way. I’ll just have to go to two museums someday soon – Sunday, probably. Perhaps a good thing that I couldn’t grace a museum with my jet-lagged presence, since packing for five months means that certain articles dear to the heart of the traveler, such as, say, one’s toothbrush, end up somewhere in the bottom of a bag. At least I hope it’s there… I’ll find out tomorrow when I move from this hotel to my apartment.

But before I go, a bonus story about a closed museum: a few years ago, I was in Rome, and decided to take a day trip to Naples to visit the archeological museum there, which holds most of the stuff from Pompeii. Probably a good thing for someone who claimed that she was a specialist in Roman art to see, right? I went to the train station in Rome and bought a ticket to Naples for the following Monday, and then realized that, probably since the days of the Empire, Italian national museums are generally closed on Mondays. So I wandered along to the train station’s tourist information office, and enquired, in my best Italian (which makes me seem only slightly mentally challenged), if, by any chance, the archeological museum in Naples was closed on Mondays…. The woman I was asking replied “Of course!” with a horrified expression, as if I had just asked her, in my pathetic ignorance, if perhaps an espresso made in Rome were superior to coffee served in a diner in Duluth. So I changed my ticket (an undertaking not to be embarked upon by the light-hearted; I actually have no memory of how I accomplished it, but I’m sure that I could un-suppress the memory given intensive therapy) and went to Naples on a Tuesday.

The train ride from Rome to Naples is only a couple of hours, but on the way I developed a headache and fever. This was in July, by the way, when a fever is not necessary in Naples. Which was hot. And smelly. And hot. And did I mention hot?

The archeological museum is, theoretically, a ten minute walk from the train station. After about forty minutes of wandering, I realized that I was not merely walking very slowly, or in some space-time warp, because of my fever; rather, I was lost. Really, really, lost, it seems, since a municipal policeman just laughed when I asked where the museum was. And then refused to talk to me about directions until we had covered the crucial subjects of:

• Was my bracelet made of gold? If so, why was I wearing it? Didn’t I know that thieves riding motorbikes would rip it off of my arm and speed away, perhaps severing my hand if not my entire arm in the process?
• Then, once I took off the bracelet and put it in my bag: why was I in Naples? A student? How nice. Studying what? Where did I come from?
• Then, once he found out that I spoke English, I obviously needed to talk to his partner, who had been a busboy in Brooklyn! So the partner and I have the entire conversation over again, in English – complete with the part about the danger of thieves, since he’s heard of my bracelet follies.

Finally: directions. The English speaker has no idea where the museum is, so it’s back to Italian. I have wandered so far that I’m beyond the zone shown on the map I have. They both start making the Italian hand gesture that means “go that way… a really, really long way that way” back in the direction from which I’ve come. I manage to make it a few hundred feet back that way before I start to cry. And cry. And cry. At least it gave me something to do for the forty minute walk back to where I started. I consoled myself with pizza, and then finally made it to the museum.

Fevered, exhausted, but finally ready to take in the wonders of Pompeii (which one of my professors calls “the Roman Hoboken”), I dragged myself to the museum doors… only to find that the Naples archeological museum, while joyfully open to the public on Mondays, is most definitely closed on Tuesdays. I.e., the day I was standing there. Sigh.

So, lesson learned: be prepared for the closed museum. I recommend pizza as a consolation device.

December 31/ January 1

After a week of intense discussion on the subject in my French conversation class last year, I can now (somewhat) understand Canadian French and (fully) understand why the French make fun of it. They sound like snotty Chihuahuas trying to speak in Great Dane. So I’m pretty sure that I would have known if my Air Canada flight made an announcement wishing us a “bonne nouvelle annee” somewhere over the Atlantic, but – nada. I either spent midnight watching “In the Loop” or asleep, with the head of the little kid next to me resting on my shoulder. There were two unaccompanied boys in my row, who were miraculously well-behaved. Or sadly well-behaved – if they were annoying I would have felt no regrets about stealing their special halal meals while they slept, since my vegetarian meal order got lost in the internet ether. As it was, I buttered the bejeezus out of my roll and dreamed about croissants.