A Couple Of Museums

We want to see all the incredible art we can while in Paris, but when it's a breezy day in the 70's it's so hard to stay indoors. We're grateful for the mild weather, but it does challenge us to choose our pleasures wisely.

Yesterday we decided to see a show titled "Du Greco a Dali", at a private mansion on boulevard Hausmann in the 8th, the musee Jacquemart-Andre. We really appreciate Spanish artists so this sounded great. While there was some really good art, there was only one tiny piece by El Greco, and there were some beautiful Dali's. I hadn't before noticed works by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida and I loved the many they showed. It was one of the few shows containing Picasso's work without using his name in the title. Although worth the trip, it wasn't as good as we had hoped.

So we hopped the #9 Metro down to Muette for a nice lunch and then back through the small park to the Musee Marmottan Monet. (Closed when we had come earlier due to electrical failure.) We were expecting some lovely Monet's but the show they had put together really knocked our socks off. Called "Monet and Abstraction" it explained that Monet was somewhat forgotten later in his life, until the 1950's when abstract artists like Pollock, Stills, Richter, Gotlieb and Rothko realized he had been exploring the use of color and form to capture reality at its most immediate, just as they were. In Monet's late works,"the subject recedes, giving way to visual and memorial sensations translated into paint....he was instrumental in establishing the relativistic and vitalistic principles of abstract painting." The mid 20th century artists made pilgrimages to the Orangerie to see what Monet had done with those water lillies.

The curators hung works by these later abstract artists right next to Monet's. Pollack's work looked almost like those scribbly autumn paintings of the garden at Giverny. Richter's looked like the broad blue pond with an occasional pale water lily. A red canvas by Rothko that "saturated the picture plane with the sheer vibrancy of color" was shown near Monet's Haystack with its "juxtaposition of contrasting pure colors to convey natural light, with all it's variations of intensity."

For me it was an, "Ohmygod!" experience, like "It really wasn't just his cataracts then...". We had given up buying cards and catalogs to dutifully carry home and put in a box with our travel books, but we did buy this catalog to show any interested friends what they were trying to express in this show. If you like impressionism and abstract art, it's a humdinger.