Art

Hello Friends!  My computer now has Internet access, so no more posting from my phone.  Hooray!  I think this also means that I can insert the pictures between paragraphs instead of piling them all up at the end, so maybe this post will be the beginning of a new era.

My mom has arrived in Paris, visiting me at my home-away-from-home for ten days, and we hit up some of the city's main tourist attractions today.  We bought Paris Museum Passes, which turned out to be a terrific investment. (No, this is not a paid advertisement.)  We were able to skip insane lines at the Louvre and the Orsay, and plan to do the same at Versailles tomorrow.  I would recommend this to anyone interested in visiting more than one museum/monument plus Versailles in two consecutive days. Honestly, we would've spent hours in lines without them.

Anyway, the art was obviously incredible.  With over 30,000 works on display, the Louvre is too big to possibly see the whole thing.  With the help of Rick Steves, we managed to find the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, Michelangelo's Slaves, and hundreds of other examples of Greek and Roman sculptures, Neoclassical and Romantic paintings, and Renaissance masterpieces.  Take a look at the famous glass pyramid at the Louvre's main entrance, designed by I. M. Pei.

Haha, just kidding.  That's the Rock Hall, also designed by Pei.

Next we headed across the Seine to the Musse d'Orsay and feasted our eyes on the 19th and early-20th century works of Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, and Rodin.

Then we went to the Orangerie, back on the right bank to check out some Matisse, Rousseau, more Cézanne and Renoir, and early Picasso.  But the highlight of this gallery is a set of eight of  Monet's Water Lilies murals.  They are displayed in two adjacent oval rooms and fill the walls, engulfing you in an impressionistic haze.  Monet painted them from his gardens at Giverny during the last three decades of his life, when he was supposedly going blind.  I can't really do it justice with a picture, nor was I allowed to take pictures there, but this video might give you an idea:  http://youtu.be/WyV96j971vs  Thanks asianimpuls!

Since you can find perfectly lovely shots of all this stuff on Google, I will instead share with you the first installment of my Urban Art Blog Museum collection in the following photos. I believe the first one is by Invader, who has been putting up mosaics of Space Invaders characters on street corners all over the world since the mid 90s.  I have no confirmation that this is actually his work, but he is from Paris, and I have found four of them so far, so I'm pretty sure.

The next example, also a tile mosaic, is an excerpt from a larger installation just up the street from my apartment.  Artist unknown.

Next up, we have some stencil art in the neighborhood of one of the famous street markets, on the Rue d'Aligre.  I don't think it was related, but there happened to be some impressive fish markets one street over, with lots of raw oysters and escargots still squirming in their shells.  Isn't it ironic that there's graffiti on it?  Don't ya think?

The next example is perhaps the strangest, but also by one of the most celebrated of all artists in the Urban
Art Blog Museum.  It is Standing Figure (1969-1984) by Willem de Kooning.  Very abstract.

I'm not sure who created the next one.  Can you spot the sculpture?

Lastly, I'd like you to see a communal art project that is taking over the pedestrian bridges on the Seine.  These "Love Padlocks" are all the rage and symbolize everlasting love.  Evidently, the government thinks they're an eyesore and cut them all off a few years ago.  But they're here to stay and we probably saw tens of thousands of them today.