I'll always have Paris, part 2

Saturday 22nd

On Saturday I made the first of three trips to the Louvre, which for me combines art gallery and airport in the same word. The number of people coming under the famous pyramid every day is staggering, so much so that automatic ticket machines have been installed in an effort to reduce the massive queues. Even then, it can get pretty busy; provided one arrives close to opening time, however, the worst can be largely avoided.

The first point of call in my visit was the Islamic art section, which although one of the smallest in the Louvre, would still be enough to richly endow any more modest gallery. Not having been exposed to much Islamic art, I found myself first surprised that the oft-repeated claim that Islam forbids "graven images" is false - such prohibitions extend only to religious art. Because sacred art was so often the prime driver of the art world in pre-modern times, however, the most highly-developed aspects of Islamic art revolve around intricate geometric designs and calligraphy, for which the Arabic script is clearly very well suited.

After enjoying the relative peace and quiet of the Islamic arts section, I next headed off to have a look at the art of the ancient Mesopotamian civilisations which had been nicke..., ahem, removed for further study by enterpris..., sorry again, I mean enlightened French archaeologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Judging by what they decided to bring back, they must have had a practically unlimited budget for shipping the enormous Assyrian bulls, walls of the most intricate friezes and monstrous column-caps. More seriously, and an art gallery is nothing if not a place for some serious contemplation, it is a necessary experience to get close to these relics and to remember that some long-dead and anonymous hand once chiseled those severe profiles into stone. Surely, that lies at the heart of all this effort in the first place? It's customary to say that they wanted to "leave something behind", but surely we mean to "leave something forwards", beyond the point where we cannot ourselves continue.

The afternoon was devoted entirely to a leisurely stroll through the Object d'Art section of the museum, which made such a deep impression on me last time I was here. The collection is the most heterogeneous of all in the gallery, and as such offers the greatest capacity to surprise. Especially delightful were the plates from Renaissance Italy, with their frequently lewd vignettes from classical antiquity. When one thinks about the Renaissance, one normally thinks only of the great painters or sculptors, but this cultural revolution ran deep, influencing all areas of design.

On my way home to my hotel room I noticed that the Eiffel tower was wonderfully lit up by wonderful orange floodlights, and so I decided to go for a short walk to get a better look. The tower at night is truly spectacular, soaring like some exotic glowing crystal into the pitch-black sky. But there was a surprise in store - at the hour, thousands of little flash lights broke out into some frenzy across the tower, producing a dazzling effect of a shimmering diamond which is only very imperfectly captured by the photo on the right.

Sunday 23rd

Not wanting to over-do it on the Louvre, on Sunday I decided to head off to see the Pompidou centre and its collection of modern art. This audacious inside-out building stands in stark but not entirely discordant contrast to the surrounding 19th century apartments. As you can imagine from the cloudless skies, it was terribly cold this morning, as you can also see in the completely frozen-over pond in the photo on the right. The pond itself contains bizarre mechanical water fountains, which weren't functioning when I was there, although one multi-coloured lump was aimlessly twisting about.

Modern art is a rather strange beast. More has changed in European art in the last 100 years than in the last 500, and it's an entirely valid question to ask how much of what was inside the Pompidou centre will still be hailed as art in 100 years time, although one could equally well respond that it is irrelevant. But I couldn't shake the feeling that much of what was inside (especially the work from after WWII) were just more-or-less clever intellectual jokes or merely visual puzzles. Should art be anything more than that? Certainly it was a challenging experience which provoked some rather intense responses from me. I happily admit that much of it I found incomprehensible, and quite a bit of it was rather too close to just being "cute". Other works were spectacular, products of great imagination; some were moving; others still even made me angry.

The most interesting part of the museum deals with the artistic revolution of the early 20th century, which must have truly been an exciting time for all involved. It's not everyday that you drive a stake through hundreds of years of tradition, and when cast adrift in such a way from the past, it's only natural to expect a proliferation of countless different styles and movements. Trying to make sense of this all is a daunting task, but one thing I liked about this part of the exhibition was how they interspersed displays of the original manifestos and magazines of the movements in between the galleries.

In the evening I drifted over to the Eglise St Eustache, an interesting late-gothic church without a steeple not too far from the Pompidou centre (the photo at the right shows the church in the early morning light). There was a short organ concert scheduled before the evening mass, and again I was struck by the very large numbers of worshippers. Exiting the church just as the mass got underway, I decided not to immediately head home but rather to go for a wander down to the Seine, passing through the hordes of last-minute Christmas shoppers. At left you see a photo of the river at night (looking east on the Pont d'Arcole) and below, of course, Notre Dame itself.

Monday 24th

On Christmas Eve I was back at the Louvre, this time to spend a day with the paintings. My first stop was the Grande Gallery, with the masterworks of the Italian Renaissance. I had found this very enjoyable before, but I was in for a somewhat bittersweet surprise.

The "direction of the exhibition" had changed somewhat since the last time I was here (admittedly 1998), but not necessarily for the better. In order to get to the jewel in the crown of the collection, the Mona Lisa, one now has to walk through the Grande Gallery to the Mona Lisa's own room; previously, such a circuitous route was not required, and it could be accessed directly from the 19th Century "large format" French paintings (think "The Raft of the Medusa", "Liberty leading the People", etc). What this meant was that previously the Grande gallery was relatively calm compared to the scrum of tourists surrounding the poor old Mona. Today, however, the result of shepherding us through the long-way-round is that the Grande Gallery is really *packed*.

Now, of course I'm coming over all snobby - "How dare the proles spoil *my* morning with the Italian Renaissance masters!" - and although I would prefer to enjoy this in solitude and without the noisy crowds (who wouldn't?), the thing that really got to me was something else entirely - digital photography. I was really shocked by how this has changed the gallery experience. People seem to no longer look at the paintings except through the LCD screen of their digital camera or telephone. But why bother? There are, after all, reproductions in the gift shop. The shallow pointlessness of this all really left me rather depressed. The signs which gently implore people not to use their cameras might as well be asking the waves at the beach to stop rolling in.

Although I'm not making the experience out to be attractive in any way, it is fascinating to walk through the first half of the Grande Gallery to track the development of modern perspective and techniques - played out over 100 years or so, this revolution in the idea of painting was as great as anything in the Pompidou centre. When you think of it, perspective shouldn't be a big deal - so why did it take so long to stumble upon? The impression I got from this section is that during this time the aim of painting shifted from being mainly symbolic to also being realistic. When you think about it, this would have undoubtedly required a major and non-trivial shift in the visual imagination of not only the artist but also society.

After lunch I took a leisurely stroll through the collection of French paintings, tracking the development of French art over 300 years. This was particularly fascinating for showing the progression as something like an organic evolution - each new movement and its inevitable reaction returned and drew so clearly on the foundations below for both thematic and stylistic inspiration, sometimes from the same source, and yet did something new and unanticipated with them. My favourites in this section nevertheless had to be the still lifes by Chardin, which one could argue as verging on the impressionistic, as well as the large collection of small Corot landscapes, which by and large stood outside of the great movements.

After returning home for dinner, I took the Metro to the Trocadero Palace to see the Eiffel tower from Friday's vantage point. I was a bit concerned that this place could be creepy at night (not very well lit) but although the garish glow-in-the-dark miniature towers were a bit gauche, there were plenty of other tourists around to keep me company. Walking down towards the base of the tower itself, I stopped to have some fun with long-time exposure of the cars speeding by. Really, I was just killing time until the late-night concert at the very distinctive Eglise de la Madeleine. Starting at 10pm, I was treated to a selection of traditional carols, folk tunes and also organ music. This segued rather seamlessly into the Midnight Mass, which I stuck around for until communion. As all churches do a this time of year, there was a creche, but this had somewhat bizarrely a Japanese theme, with a black-haired white-faced Mary in a luxurious kimono and what looked like a samurai Joseph! Quite unusual, and an uncommon example of a failure of taste in France.

Tuesday 25th

You can tell how big a city really is by how it responds to a holiday like Christmas. In Stuttgart, I would expect to be able to see tumbleweed blowing down the streets. Paris is of course another matter, and as I walked to the metro station I passed several open bakeries and cafes. I was off to enjoy my own Christmas present - an exhibition of the works of Arcimboldo at the Musee de Luxembourg.

You'll no doubt be familiar with Arcimboldo's works even if you don't at first recognize his name. He was a technically rather mediocre painter from Italy at the strange court of Rudolf II of Austria, who neverthless had a first-rate imagination. This was manifested in his incredible compositions of human faces by arrangements of mainly fruits and vegetables, although books and flowers also figured prominently. The exhibition attempted to put him in some kind of broader context, which I'm not sure it really managed as he seems to have been really something of an anomaly, without drawing any obvious inspiration from predecessors and having no lasting impact on European art. In this sense, he cuts something of a tragi-comic figure. Despite the wonderful paintings, the exhibition was rather disappointingly small, and I agree with the Pariscope guide which gave it only two out of three stars. Ironically, it was this much more positive review in the International Herald Tribune which initially gave me the idea to come to Paris.

After my morning with Arcimboldo, I took a walk into the Luxembourg gardens to have my lunch. There were quite a few people about, including young children enjoying their first hours with their new toys, proudly riding their tricycles or bicycles up and down the central avenue. The weather was slightly overcast, but I enjoyed my short stroll through the gardens, especially the optical illusion of the pond of Catherine de Medici which you can see opposite: the sides of the pond slope slightly upwards, giving the impression that the pond itself slopes slightly downwards.

After enjoying a little time in the Luxembourg gardens, I walked down towards the Seine. I had my second baguette in the little garden just below the statue of Henri II on the Ille de Paris, before continuing down towards the Louvre, and the 1st Arrondisement. My goal was again the Eglise de la Madeleine, where there was a Christmas-day organ concert at 4pm. The concert was really quite well attended, and for the most part very pleasant, but then the organist insistd on playing one of his own compositions. Although technically clearly very gifted, and probably doing all the right things in terms of contrapunctual and fugal devices, it was not very pleasant to listen to and dragged on much too long. Thankfully, his encore was much better.

Wednesday 26th
On my last full day in Paris I returned once again to the Louvre - I find the place endlessly exciting, and I would travel to Paris simply to see the Louvre and Chartres. One probably needs four days to properly see the entire gallery, and in this trip I would largely miss the artifacts from classical civilization. First up today, however, was the temporary exhibition of Iranian art, "Au chant du monde" (song of the world). Like any pleasure which is unexpected, this made a very deep impression on me, and was clearly worth every one of the three stars given by the Paris guide. The exhibition centred around the art of the Iranian illuminated manuscript from 1550-1750, in particular the illustrating "minatures". Typically illustrating a books of epic poetry or accounts of the elaborate wine ceremonies of the court, these "minatures" (actually, they were usually about A3 size) were exquisitely detailed, with every petal of every flower lovingly rendered. The works also displayed a strong influence from China, with dramatic bulging mountains figuring prominently in the background and the serene expressions of the humans. Nevertheless, the colours and the strange jellyfish-like clouds seemed to be purely Iranian innovations. I spent the entire morning with those treasures. It was sad to note that many of these were now in European possession and only a few (and the least impressive) coming from Iranian collections. Although with the ancient Mesopotamian art I think that this displacement can be justified as the modern-day cultures in these places bear no connection to the ancient civilizations, in this case I think that the continuity of Iranian artistic civilization makes such a justification impossible. Of course, the precedent of returning some number of the manuscripts would be impossible, and I think it will never happen.

The afternoon was spent with a leisurely stroll through the northern European paintings, mostly the heritage we have from the Dutch miracle of the 17th century. Since most of the works were painted for wealthy merchants as little more than wall decoration, there is a lot of stuff here which is not really very spectacular. Nevertheless, this makes the acheivements of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt all the more stunning. Of course, one could argue that by definition most art is mediocre, but it is clear that the work of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt cannot really be compared to the others, and the few example of their art more than compensated for the endless genre paintings.

In the last hours of my time in the Louvre, I took a walk through the enclosed courts holding the monumental French sculpture. I could not help but reflect on the nine years that separated my two visits to this place, and how so many things had changed out of recognition in that time. Tomorrow I would return to Stuttgart, and throw myself back into my work - and I eagerly awaited the new year of travels ahead.