Friday 7 September 2012

Paris Museum Tour de Force

Yesterday, me and another italian artist who has just arrived at Centre Recolléts made a epic NINE HOUR marathon through the Centre Pompidou (except Gehard Richter's exhibition) and then the Musee d'Orsay (everything except the temporary salon style exhibitions). I will endeavor to document these in parts, while still going on my epic plan of going of a continuous museum tour for the next four days owing to the fact that I have a four day ticket. The only benefit of having the ticket is being able to walk right in with queuing for the tickets, but there is no way in humanity that anyone can possibly see and absorb all two dozen museums in the short amount of time that the ticket provides. Not if you are going to read everything and listen to every single ridiculous audio guide stop and refer to the guidebook.

If I had come to see the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre, or the Musee d'Orsay while I was a child, I might have had a very different picture of painting; in fact perhaps I might have wanted to become a painter. I suppose this is why going through all the museums is important, its like seeing a giraffe for the first time. I always said that since the Singapore Zoo did not have a giraffe and since I never went to a zoo outside of Singapore till I was a teenager, during my childhood I could not prove or know for a certainty whether or not giraffes really existed or if they really looked the way they did in cartoon drawings (in which they frequently appeared). So I suppose Starry Night is the giraffe in the room. Staring at an image of it and photoshoppping bits to make other educational materials, I could not be sure which part was the color and which was the play of harsh museum light over the physical textures of the thick paint daubs.

I think the most striking observation I could make there was actually the physical nature of the brush strokes. Things like the size of the dots in "pointillism" were actually a lot bigger, some works were much darker or brighter than I expected, some had paint daubs which were huge, protruding at times, and in the harsh, intense museum light they were greatly accentuated as shapes and 3d forms on the canvas, giving it a strange effect of almost having been hewn out of some material, with a lot of physical energy.

MUSEUMS VISITED
Centre Pompidou (to be updated)
Jeu De Paume
Musee d'Orsay
Musee du Louvre
Musee d'Art modern de la Ville de Paris



Due to time limitations, I've decided to write reviews and notes only on the places that show contemporary or modern art.

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