even*cleveland: musée d'orsay

musée d'orsay

The view of Sacré Couer from behind the clock in the Musée d'Orsay.

I tend to roll my eyes a little bit at the French Impressionists - too many waterlilies and ballerinas endlessly reproduced on so many posters in so many waiting rooms, on innumerable PBS totebags and museum shop scarves. It's always a bit of a shock to see originals in person and remember they are actually pretty kickass.

Degas particularly is poorly served by reproductions, I think. This ballerina's skirt has about seven different shades of blue in it, like a living butterfly wing, and her tights are almost a shocking pink. It is ravishing.
I took about ten pictures trying to capture that blue and pink. Nothing doing.

The musuem's collections only span from 1848 to 1915, and it's mostly French art, but the absolute plenty of gorgeous things bends your brain a little. They have five (FIVE) of Monet's cathedrals - lined up on the wall, it's a bit like impressionism meets Warhol.

We thought these two looked like they could have stepped right off the street today. Both were painted around 1890.

After all that art, we had to refuel, so we stopped in the museum café for $6 coffees and Sean was especially taken with the waiters' aprons - they came equipped with a special pocket for ties:

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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