The Louvre is the most visited museum in the world and contains artwork from antiquity to 1848. The Musée d'Orsay displays art from 1848 to 1914 and houses the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world. Picking up in 1914, the Pompidou Center holds the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe. I think I know where I'd want to live if I was an art student.
My favorite feature of the Pompidou is the absence of barriers between the observer and the art. Unlike the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa is encased in bullet proof glass, barriers keep people at least ten yards away, and one can only look for a few moments before being shoved out of the way by the crowd, many of the most famous works on display at the Pompidou are so close you could touch their unprotected canvases. This left me awestruck, so I took a lot of photos. The first seven are paintings by some of the most famous artists of the 20th century. I'll give you a little art history lesson along the way. If you aren't interested, just scan through the pictures and meet me again at the 8th image.
The Siesta (1925) by Joan Miró
A number of paintings by Joan Miró between 1925 and 1927 are highly suggestive of an "automatic," unplanned and apparently "spontaneous" production of semi-abstract forms and lines. In
The Siesta, a single-color ground contains a dominant flat, white shape and a series of smaller forms and lines. The effect is of a series of fragile forms floating in an atmosphere of some kind; it is hard to suggest any more definite subject matter. (From
Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars by Par Briony Fer.)
Violin and Glass (1913) by Juan Gris
Gris oriented himself towards Analytic Cubism, concentrating, as in his famous 1912 portrait of Picasso, on the form-engendering and form-dissolving qualities of reflected light. Yet soon Gris developed an original approach. Unlike his friends, he did not take Cézanne as a point of departure. He turned the Aix master's methods upside down, as it were, first designing an abstract, tectonic pictorial structure and then inserting objects into it. Instead of creating abstractions, Gris rendered the abstract concrete. "Cézanne made a cylinder out of a bottle," he once stated; "I make a bottle out of a cylinder." In the still lifes done by this method, mathematics and poetry are combined, as in music. Gris's palette is completely liberated and independent of the local colors of things, strong and at times brilliant. As regards form, the ideal configuration of an object or figure was now no longer arrived at in a long process of analytical investigation and division into component parts, but projected according to the artist's imaginative idea. Perceptual experience was no longer conceptualized; rather, a mental conception was rendered perceptible. (From
Art Of the 20th Century, Volume 1 by Ingo F. Walther.)
With the Black Arch (1912) by Vassily Kandinsky
In this work, three moving blocks of strong color, arranged in a triangle, seem about to collide. They are kept in tension by a black line suggesting another triangle. It could be seen as the shape of a
douga, the arched piece of wood used to harness a troika. Vassily Kandinsky here asserts that the construction of a painting can be based, not only on geometry, but also on the principle of dissonance. This fundamental concept, which he discovered in the musical compositions of his friend Arnold Schoenberg, was the center of his work during the period 1908-1914. Is there a dissonant relationship between the colors here? In any case, Kandinsky plays on the dissociation of line and color. The geometric shape of the triangle destabilizes the symmetry and breaks the relationship between composition and medium. (From the Pompidou.)
The Bridal Pair With the Eiffel Tower (1938-9) by Marc Chagall
Chagall's paintings have a dream-like feel, and often include both realistic and fantastical elements. The subject of this work is grounded in reality, a bride and groom embrace in front of the Eiffel Tower, however, the couple are positioned at an unnatural angle with the ground. They almost appear to be floating, an illusion that is enhanced by the small size of the town in the distance, and the distance that seems to exist between their feet and the ground. In the top right corner of the painting, one can see a cow that morphs into a fiddle. Chagall is referencing popular nursery rhymes, and here combines the "cat and the fiddle" with "the cow jumped over the moon." (From the
Art Revived blog.)
Untitled (Black, Red over Black on Red, 1964) by Mark Rothko
In the late 1940s, Rothko marshaled together the discoveries of his transitional period (the "multiforms") to arrive at the formal idiom that distinguishes him among the American Abstract Expressionist painters, characterized by soft-edged rectangles of color set against a ground. Color, in all its vibrancy, here emerges as "the simple expression of the complex thought," as Rothko put it. From 1950 until is death in 1970, he pursued a long investigation of color, his palette becoming darker and narrower. Recently acquired by the national collection in lieu of tax,
Untitled (Black, Red over Black on Red) offers an example of the artist's working process: starting with a monochrome surface, he saturates the canvas and then blurs the outlines of the two great, frontal rectangles, orchestrating modulations of luminous, immaterial color. (From the Pompidou.)
Untitled XX (1976) by Willem De Kooning
I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art. (Willem de Kooning)
Figure (1927) by Pablo Picasso
On January 8, 1927, Picasso saw Marie-Thérèse Walter on a street in Paris and was immediately smitten. She was seventeen and he would soon turn forty-six. Within a week they were lovers; her likeness would be a dominating presence in his art for the following decade. (From
A Picaso Portfolio: Prints from the Museum of Modern Art)
Okay, enough history. The next image is an example of how incredibly close I was able to get to these paintings. Notice the really thick paint on the canvas.
I've seen Picassos at at least three different museums since I've been here. There's even a Picasso museum in Paris and another in Barcelona. This guy was prolific! One more advantage of being so close to his paintings at the Pompidou is that I was able to get a good look at his signature. Notice the difference between 1917...
...and 1956.
Paintings weren't the only things on display at the Pompidou. There were also installations and sculptures, like
Ghost Drum Set (1972) by Claes Oldenburg.
I was so excited to see
Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp. It was the very first work I learned about in my modern art history class at UT.
While the 5th floor at the Pompidou was dedicated to "modern" art from before 1960, the 4th floor was filled with "contemporary" art from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I had just a Mondrian an hour earlier when I came across this work,
Tableau No. 1 by Sylvie Fleury.
This next work,
Untitled (2009) by Guyton\Walker was really interesting because it was both a painting and a sculpture. I was also fascinated by the description of the artist: "Guyton\Walker was formed in 2004 by the American artists Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, a collaboration with its own - third - artistic identity, signified by the backslash between the two names."
We Stopped Just Here At The Time (2002) by Ernesto Neto was probably the weirdest piece I saw at the Pompidou. Neto, a Brazilian artist, created this work as "an invitation to participate in a sensorial experience.
We Stopped Just Here At The Time comprises a painting fixed to the ceiling of soft and transparent fabric in which some parts are filled with spices in warm colors and which hang like bunches of grapes. The various spices (cloves, cumin, pepper and curcumal) fill and structure the forms of the sculpture, giving it a multi-sensorial dimension. These voluptuous shapes, vivid colors and fragrances arouse the senses of sight and smell. They invite the visitor to transcend perceptual hierarchy which traditionally gives top priority to sight."
Lastly, one of my favorite works from the past few years was
Panneau Lace Fence (2007) by Demakersvan. This collaboration between Joep and Jeroen Verhoeven and Judith de Graauw makes an ugly, everyday object, like a chain link fence, into art. My backyard is never going to undergo some serious renovations when I get home...
