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.