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.