April 22: Musée Adam Mickiewicz (Adam Mickiewicz Museum), Musée Boleslas Biegas (Boleslas Biegas Museum), and Salon Chopin (Chopin Salon)

Paris’ Polish Library boasts three museums – and “boasts” is the operative word here, since three rooms, although located on different floors/ hallways, does not three museums make. Craft your own politically incorrect joke about Poland trying desperately to expand its size/reputation. Anyways… one room celebrates Chopin, with a recreation of his Parisian apartment’s salon, autograph music, plaster casts of his face and hands, and portraits of his students (a lot of whom were hot chicks – Chopin was a baller!). Another room is packed with the “art” of Boleslas Biegas, a 20^th century “sculptor” and “painter,” of which all I need to say is look at this. And the last room is a dense and surprisingly interesting monument to Adam Mickiewicz, a Romantic-era Polish poet who taught Polish culture in Paris for a long time and was at the center of the “we’re just as awesome as France! ok, maybe, as Spain” homeland pride movement among Polish émigrés.

Admittedly, I may be biased, since I took a tour of the museums led by an extremely enthusiastic (and cute) guide, and enthusiasm about random stuff is why I love museums in the first place. That said, unless you, too, are hot to trot for Chopin, Biegas, or Mickiewicz, I can’t see very many reasons for you to visit.

April 15: Musée Clemenceau (Clemenceau Museum)

Look – my knowledge of political history stops at the fall of the Roman Empire (and even there, I’m pretty darn shaky after the first Triumvirate). So I walked into the Clemenceau Museum knowing only that Georges Clemenceau was a great statesman of some sort. Thanks to an audio guide which only sporadically functioned – e.g., it went on and on about his childhood cradle, but refused to say anything when I punched in the number next to a set of dueling pistols – I left without much added to my understanding of the great man, aside from learning that, in addition to his thousands of political speeches and articles, he found time to write novels and even produce a play adapting a Chinese fable. (Photographs seem to indicate that it was a tedious version of the Mikado.) Impressive – even though it can hardly compare to my busy life of visiting museums, fitfully studying for the bar, and napping.

New Museums

Seriously, Paris, I'm never going to be able to finish if you keep adding new museums. Just opened: one about chocolate and one about video games.

April 15: Musée Jean-Jacques Henner (Jean-Jacques Henner Museum)

I hadn’t known about Jean-Jacques Henner, a late 19^th century painter, before my visit to the Henner Museum, and even the museum itself admits that he’s not exactly world-renowned: their brochure describes the visit as “an opportunity to learn how an academic artist working in the era of Impressionism,” which is certainly damning with faint praise.

But I enjoyed my trip to this small (about 100 works) collection, since I liked Henner’s style – think Cezanne mixed with Titian, with a dash of Toulouse-Lautrec’s linear drawing manner. Most of all, I liked how the female nudes show Henner’s cheerful fandom for girls – an appreciation which is neither prurient (like Monsieur “I just did this model, and when I finish painting I’m going to do her again” Courbet) nor disinterested (like Signore “I’d rather be drawing boys” Michelangelo).

So, go if you like Henner or if, like Henner, you like plump, pale, auburn-headed girls. Oh, and there’s also a complete set of Goya’s Tauromachie.

April 13: Musée de la Poupée (Doll Museum)

The Doll Museum wasn’t nearly as creepy as I thought that it would be. Well, aside from the fact that the whole collection was the loving work of a father-son team, who did things like sew clothing for their little preciouses, but that’s another matter.

It’s not really much of a museum, either: six rooms, of which half are for special exhibitions (currently, some arty concept-fashion dolls who are shown shaking their bare, and disturbingly realistic, tatas). The other three rooms show the permanent collection, which focuses almost exclusively on 19^th century, porcelain-headed, professionally-made, female dolls. The signage (in French and English) goes into lots of technical details about production processes, but doesn’t really address more interesting sociological questions (although there are some attempts in this direction in the two cases of Japanese- and colonialist-influenced dolls).

It’s probably a good place to deposit a visiting grandmother while you go hang at the nearby Centre Pompidou, or a venue for covert anthropological observations on the Parisian yelling-centric method of child raising.

April 12: Centre de la Mer – Institut Oceanographique (Sea Center – Oceanographic Center)

I’m sorry, but if your website is going to go on and on about how you were founded by Albert the First, Price of Monaco, I’m going to expect something much cooler. There should be roulette, and tuxedos, and possibly James Bond. A couple of aquariums and signage which looked like it was produced by a kindergarten teacher to decorate her classroom is just not going to cut it.

Well… maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn’t quite so not-phobic-but-close about fish. Seriously, those things are weird. But still, your average PetCo has more of them than this so-called Oceanographic Center.

April 11: Musée de La Vie Romantique (Museum of the Romantic Life)

A Museum of the Romantic Life? That must encompass so much, I thought. The Romantics were painters, musicians, poets, dancers, party-goers, diplomats – and it was a sweeping, pan-European movement. How would you even start when planning a museum?

Well, if you follow the example of this museum, you take the house of a crappy fashionable portrait-painter from the Romantic era, add some random crap that used to belong to Georges Sand, and voila! by calling it the Museum of the Romantic Life you assure that some people will be fool enough to visit your craptastic collection.

Sometime in late February: Musée National Gustave Moreau (National Gustave Moreau Museum)

Sorry, folks – my mind was so blown by my visit to the Moreau Museum that I forgot to write about it. But it’s fitting to post a review on the same day as the Pasteur Museum, since both are museums dedicated to one man’s life and work, located in that man’s last living space. The difference is that Moreau knew that he would be donating his house as a museum after his death, and spent the last years of his life arranging it as a tribute to himself – e.g., arranging portraits of his ancestors in family-tree order on every available wall surface in his bedroom. Creeeepy.

The core of the museum is in the two floors of studio space, which are filled with cases of drawings and, on the walls, oils sketches and paintings. If you like his style, you’ll have a lot of fun (and his work looks a lot better in person than in pictures). Moreau is called a “symbolist” artist, but I would describe him as “educated psychedelic” – a mixture of Christian imagery with classical lore with sexy androgyny with blood with Indian architecture with hot demons, all rendered in shimmering paint and obsessive drawn details. In short: full-on crazy-pants (a quality which may extend to the guards as well – one of them was polishing his shoes while I was there, complete with shoe polish tins, sponges, and brushes).

April 6: Musée Pasteur (Pasteur Museum)

The Pasteur Museum is confusing. Not because of its subject-matter – even I know about pasteurization, and the signage and displays do a good job briefly explaining Pasteur’s other activities (work on rabies, fermentation, crystallization, etc.). Rather, it’s confusing because of its administration. You make your way to the museum entrance through the Pasteur Institute (still a medical research center). The door is locked, with a sign saying “wait patiently until the next visit begins.” You don’t trust signs that say “wait patiently,” so you go bother someone in the nearest open office, who tells you to wait patiently. You wait. An intimidating woman bursts out of the museum door, takes your money, and pushes you into Pasteur’s old laboratory. You contemplate still-well-preserved rabbit spinal cords in jars and visit Mr. and Mrs. Pasteurs’ bedrooms, just down the hall (in case he hasda hankering to preserve some rabbit in the middle of the night?) and then think “Well, that was mildly interesting. Time to go meet my friends for Japanese pastries!” You walk out of the museum and get halfway down the hallway to the exit when the intimidating woman comes shouting after you “No! Now we will visit the first floor of the Pasteur apartment!” The intimidating woman is scary, so Japanese pastries will just have to wait. You are led back into the museum/apartment and down some stairs to see the dining room, sitting rooms, etc. You notice that someone seems to have pressed “pause” in 1900. After you have shown sufficient appreciation for this scientific Graceland, the intimidating woman takes you to the basement to visit Pasteur’s crypt. Truly one-stop-shopping for the Pasteur admiration!

Yeah, so a little complex. But it’s all worth it for the crypt, which is coated in beautiful Byzantine-style mosaics symbolizing Pasteur’s achievements – e.g., rabid dogs frolicking on a gold background.

April 1: Pavillon de l’Arsenal (Pavillion of the Arsenal)

Yawn-fest. This space has special exhibitions (they’re currently dismantling one), along with a medium-sized permanent exhibition on the urban history of Paris – you know, prehistoric settlement patterns, urban planning projects, and… sorry, just fell asleep there for a second. It’s just texts, videos, and scale models, and has much more detail than the casual tourist will want and far less detail than the urban history buff would demand. Go to the City of Architecture instead.

April 1: La Maison Rouge - Fondation Antoine de Galbert (The Red House - Antoine de Galbert Foundation)

Massive, massive PR fail for the Maison Rouge – just one mention in NY Mag and this place would be overrun with visiting Brooklyn hipsters, dancing at its Thursday night DJ happy hours in the café, slouching through Sunday morning brunch + guided visits, ogling at the current exhibition of album cover art… wait, wait. It’s probably better to leave all this to the few, the proud, the really cute in-the-know French bohemians. Yeah, so, contemporary art foundation – no permanent collections – just special exhibitions. The current one, a massive and fascinating collection of albums designed by artists (Leger, Dali, and did you know that Sonic Youth had LP covers designed by Gerhard Richter and by Richard Prince?, oh and a whole ton of Fluxus stuff). Not too much text or analysis, leading to a bunch of “ummmm, am I supposed to know about Polish avant-garde electronic music?” But you know that records are cool enough on their own – you don’t need no stinking analysis.