Sixth Monday after Pentecost
My apologies for being late with the blog today. We are now in Manteo in the beautiful OBX. Our drive out here put me behind on all my day's normal activities. We haven't unpacked everything yet, so i don't have the lectionary texts immediately available. I'll just continue to talk about Paris, my favorite city of the world. Last week I talked about the Louvre. This week a few more museums.
If you're going down the Champs E'lysses from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre (2 miles), after you pass the Place de la Concorde (1 mile), there are two museums, one on the right, one one the left before you get to the Louvre. The one on the left, the Jeu de Paume, used to be the Impressionist Museum, before the the Musee d'Orsay took its place. It is now an art storage facility. The one on the right, the Orangerie, is still open, because its central works are immovable. Those works are the Water Lilies Murals of Claude Monet, painted during the last couple of years of his life (d. 1926), while he was becoming increasingly blind. They are magnificent.
The Musee d'Orsay is on the right bank, across the river and slightly up the river from the Louvre. It is directly across the river from our houseboat, which we had for two weeks in July, 2017. It was formally a train station. It is all impressionist art, all the great late nineteenth and early twentieth century artists of that movement, Monet, Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Seurat, Degas, Pisarro, Sisley, Toulouse-Latrec, Gauguin, and on and on, including the two great women impressionists, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt (an American). I think it's one of the five or six great art museums or the world, and just a walk across a bridge from the greatest art museum in the world, the Louvre.
We went to one of the great Asian art museums of the world, the new Quai Branley, about a kilometer further up the river. As I was writing this, the museum's name slipped my mind. I checked on the internet. What Google immediately brought up was entitled, "The Three Top Asian Art Museums in Paris." Quai Branley was one. It was huge, magnificently laid out, with superb art, including a couple of entire temples.
There is a fascinating Modern Art Museum called the Pompideu (named after a former prime minister of France. The museum itself is work of modern art. It really stands out boldly on the city skyline as viewed from the top of Montmartre. It reminds most of the work of Ferdnand Leger, with all its (and his) cylinders.
Marianne and I have been to another seven or eight smaller museums, the Picasso being my favorite. There is so much more art everywhere in the city. A nightclub evening at the Moulin Rouge will let you see a score of original Toulouse-Latrecs on the walls. In 1985 Marianne and I went to a huge and fabulous Renoir exhibit at the Grand Palais. It is not an art museum but has vast exhibit space. When we finished looking and walked out onto the sidwalks of the Champs Elysses, we founded them packed with excited people. We stopped to see what was going on. Just then a horde of fast bicycles came roaring by with enormous cheers from the by-standers. We suddenly realized. It was the end of the Tour de France.
Lord of the Arts, God of all beauty,
We give you thanks that you have created a few, a very few of us, with incredible artistic talent. Help us to preserve their works and to admire them at ever deeper levels. Amen.
Faithfully,
Christian
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