The Road Goes Ever On

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Louvre Out-Takes, 2019

Looking down on a stray sculpture courtyard; at this point I was thinking that
Sully, Denon, and Richelieu would be a cool name for a Parisian law firm

95% of visitors to the Louvre go to just three sites: Mr. Smoky's Special Lady
Friend, Sam O'Thrace, and the gift shoppe; 4% are guards or custodians; the above
is an attempted pano of a room that had (Vicki counted them) 17 Rembrandts;
we had it all to ourselves for a full five minutes or more until one older guy showed
up to briefly sketch the lone non-Rembrandt in the room; Sic Transit, Gloria

Right foot of Jesus, from another Last Supper, I thought I'd throw in since Mr.
Smoky's version had it cut out

Detail of a Temptations of St. Anthony by Pieter Huys, who clearly had been
studying Bosch

Maybe the French don't really abhor a vacuum; filling this space is probably
stuck in a committee somewhere

Helpful model of the Louvre/Abu Dhabi, the only Louvre we have not yet visited

I am still not reconciled to this

La Defense from the Louvre; note Arc de Triomphe and its relation to La Defense

Humiliation time: I know nothing about frames and consequently slight or ignore
them; the Louvre has some 3,000 surplus frames and has undertaken several
long-term studies of its massive frame collection (the first while the treasures were
hidden away from the Germans in WWII); maybe I'll live long enough to do better;
anyhow, this is part of a multi-room display and explanation of frames, many with
the painting in context; I promise to do better

Very historic; it wasn't always a museum

Best angle

Spare parts

Your art work here

The place was sold out for the day, but, by later afternoon, this was absolutely
the smallest crowd I have ever seen looking at Mr. Smoky's Special Lady Friend

Now that, thanks to the Pinoteca Ambrosiana, I know who Luini was, I am well
able to appreciate the Louvre's several excellent Luinis

There were more surprises and personal discoveries, always one of the pleasures
of visiting a great museum, and especially the greatest

Not an empty space

Vicki wanted this picture because she wrote a paper in the
8th grade, which she still has, on the Venus de Milo, the
subject of Heningway's famous novel, A Farewell to Arms

View you'll only see here

Us, there, again

Paris Romantique, 1815-1848

On the last day of May, while P spent some time with a Castillea alum studying in France, Vicki, Rebecca and I toured the new Paris Romantique exhibition at the Petit Palais. (Romantic, not romantic). Five years ago Vicki and I did the Paris 1900 exhibition, also at the Petit Palais, and I remember it still as the best such show I have ever seen. Paris Romantique was a bit smaller in scale but similarly organized, by genre: war, politics, revolution, fashion, furniture, literature, arts and music. I know this period in history but slightly, and largely through composers and their biographies. Romantic Paris was the nut that Wagner (and every other artist of the period) tried to crack, and against which he eventually developed. His 1841-42 apartment on the Left Bank is still well marked. The Petit Palais is another of Paris' many gems, historically, architecturally, decoratively, as well as its permanent collection, and it would be a star museum in most any country outside Europe.

Metro ad

One view of the Petit Palais

Delacroix well represented; here his Les Convulsionnaires de Tanger, done in
1838, concerning a procession he witnessed while on a diplomatic mission to
Tangiers

The great French author of the period...one of the authors of
both the French and English infatuation and idealization of
the Medieval

As I said, I approached this period and place from music, and Berlioz was
certainly one of the earlier French Romantics

Origin of the term "long hair"

Raising of the Obelisk on the Place de la Concorde in the 1830s; the Place de la
Concorde was not a Happy Place in Paris or French history, unless you were a
fan of regicide, the Terror, etc., and during the Restoration it was decided,
eventually by Louis Phillipe, to put the obelisk there; it was a gift from Egypt
and had been transported, with great fanfare, all the way from Luxor

Back to music: my favorite high Romantic opera, Der Freischutz, by Weber

In Paris, Meyerbeer ruled the opera world and was Wagner's chief antagonist; also
perhaps the first object of his anti-Semitism

Jean Pezous, La Descente de la Cortille, depicting part of a parade associated
with the Paris Carnival

The model of Pleyel piano that Chopin preferred

Poet of the Piano

Lizst was there too; I wonder if they ever did a "dueling
pianos" thing

As was George Sand, aka Aurore Dupin-Dudevant, the most
popular and prolific writer of the age; also a political activist,
socialist; adopted the male nom de plume, dressed as a male,
smoked in public, and whose list of famous paramours,
including Chopin, is beyond the scope of this blog; deserves
way more attention as a writer and feminist than she has gotten

Musical bits and pieces

Many, many famous operas of Romantic Paris

Rachel, the great Thespian of the age

When they weren't writing, singing, or acting, they were manning the barricades...
1815 marked the Allied occupation of Paris; 1830, the Young Europe
revolution that influenced Wagner, and of course, 1848; Wagner was long
gone from Paris by then, but his involvement in the revolutionary events of
that time brought a price on his head and exile from Germany that lasted a
decade; the epicenter of it all was Paris, and much larger events unfolded...

Victor Schnetz, Combat devant l'Hotel de Ville, le 28 juilette, 1830

After Romantique Paris, we also took in an exhibition of German Romantic works,
mostly drawings, from Weimar

Paysage Italien, by non-Renaissance Renaissance man Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe himself; Romanticism certainly antedated 1815-1848, and Goethe had
as much to do with it as anyone

In the permanent collection of the Petit Palais, a Steen

Rembrandt self-portrait #1,632

Show-stopper for me: Guimard's Paris dining room