Musée d'Orsay

In September, when my spouse and I visited Musée Marmottan Monet, a stone’s throw away from our home, we couldn’t wait to go to Musée d’Orsay, the mecca of impressionist and post impressionist paintings. As time was short, we promised each other to wait until next time to go to this architectural marvel which wraps around 2000 odd wondrous canvases. The time finally came! 

We booked the tickets online, waited in long queues of tourists, as we talked about museums back home and how rich a culture they inhabit and how little people value it, and different ways to make museums part of our culture. This conversation helped immensely, as it ended at the same time we were at the museum’s revolving door, all set to enter. 

The inside of the museum is like no other. It was an old railway station, later rehashed into a museum, with a grand transparent clock at its helm through which one can see the left bank of the river Seine. The French are remarkable in preserving their monuments, however they then might have not thought that keeping the railway track, at least one track intact would have only added a greater charm to the museum, heralding its history even further. May be everything should not be out there, some things are to be pondered upon, some are to be read about and some are to be cherry-picked from conversations with people. 

Two temporary expositions, Renoir pére et fils and Picasso’s Bleu et Rose were at the museum. However, we could not make it to the Picasso one due to exceptionally long lines. Renoir pére et fils (Renoir father and son) displays the works of the equally talented father and son combination, Auguste Renoir and Jean Renoir, respectively, the former a painter and the latter, a film maker. We also came to know about an interesting anecdote that Jean Renoir married his father’s model, Catherine Hessling and moved to film making to make his wife, in his own words “a star.” Jean Renoir has also made a movie La Fleuve, which is based in Bengal, around the waters of the Ganga. 

Starry Night

Moving from there to the next gallery, the most beautiful, but always over crowded, the Van Gogh galley was everything we wanted to see. The church that I visited at Auvers-sur-Oise stared back at me, so did Dans le Jardin de Docteur Paul Gachet. Van Gogh’s self portrait somehow reminded me of his endless conversations with his brother Theo, and the both of them in eternal sleep next to each other at the cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise. What awaited us next was sublime. La Nuit Etoilée or the cosmic Starry Night. Deviating from popular frenzy for the Starry Night at Met, this one is my most favourite among the three Starry Night series, and I froze in front of it, as my audio guide told me how Van Gogh felt, seeing the stars in the sky by a bridge in Arles, gas lights playing reflections in the waters, as two lovers strolled along, a setting not even the fanciest hotel or “experience facilitators” could ever give anyone. I made Muzzu stand with me to click a picture with the painting. Impression Sunrise in Marmottan and this one at Orsay, something I could not stop myself from selfying - a generational vice!

We would have stayed and stared at the stars for longer, only if the crowd would have not pushed us out. The neo-impressionist gallery welcomed us with Muzzu’s favourite form of painting pointillism. When classical painters mixed colours on their palettes, impressionists did it on their canvases, while pointillists let the colours stay on the canvas, independently, next to each other, letting our eyes to mix them. His favourite painter Georges Seurat’s Circus was divine with horizontal strokes representing movement while the vertical ones giving a stillness that froze everything, bewitched by the motions of the circus. A collection of Paul Signac’s paintings were also a treat to the eyes. 

Degas' Ballerina

Notre Dame de l'assomption

Cezanne’s Nature Morte aux Pommes, The Hanged Man’s House in Auvers-sur-Oise, Claude Monet’s  Étretat, Camille on her Deathbed, La Rue Montorgueil with the flying French tricolour, La Gare Saint Lazare, Renoir’s Bal du moilin de la Galette were like a crescendo of impressionism itself. It will be unpardonable to not mention Edgar Degas and his Répètition d’un ballet sur la scene, where he painted ballerinas not on stage where they danced like white swans, but behind the scenes where their muscles twitched, where they cried in pain and exposed their bruises. He also moulded sculptures of them which give his paintings a tough competition.

The Floor Scrapers.

I have reserved the last (special) mention to Gustav Caillebott’s The Floor Scrapers, where three ‘proletariats’ scrape the floor, in the blistering heat, of a bourgeoisie mansion, only with a bottle of vine to the rescue. This is a painting that talks a lot too, for those who can see. There we ended this, with only more colours added to our experience. 

The Seine flew gently as we walked towards Notre Dame for a Lebanese supper and coffee and book shopping from Shakespeare & Co, reminiscing Hemingway’s A Movable Feast.