But after a day inside yesterday we were definitely going to explore Nantes. First on our list: La Musee des Beaux Arts and the Picasso Exhibition. We had not expected the school children! We walked the distance to the museum and even followed one of the classes as they marched resolutely to the entrance. But the museum was still closed when we got there and stairs were crowded with youngsters so we decided to walk around the building first.
To the side we found broken stone sculptures, as if they had been cast out the back door to crumble and rot as mold and greenery ate them away. One was a mother and child, her arms shattered by an ancient calamity, so her babe hung precariously on her knee. The other was an angel, buffeted in the wind, his arm severed at the shoulder in a ragged stump. We returned to the front to find that the children had not dispersed but that the doors were open. We waded through a sea of young faces to buy our tickets.
Our first stop was the main display, Picasso La Peinture Seule, a series of works that had not been displayed since just after his death, the works from the final decade of his life. Picassos’ work, for me at least, is a strange mixture of perfection and grabage. His was a lifelong struggle to find beauty without form, an ideal that he reaches only rarely, one painting out of every hundred. To convey the feeling of a thing, a place, a person, without recourse to the fragile shell that makes its form, is to understand it as well as its creator, and that is a gift handed out parsimoniously.
It seems like Picasso found that ideal once, in a painting from his youth, and spent the rest of his life trying to find it again, his few successes only spurring him to try all the more desperately. Perhaps that accounts for his prolific collection. So many works, so few successes, but those spectacular.
Even more interesting than the works of Picasso was watching the desperation of the teachers as they tried to explain to their classes of eight year olds what his work meant, why he was such a force in the art world and what, exactly, that man in that painting was doing to those women. To their credit the teachers were a lot less flustered than any adult in North America would be in such a situation. They told the children that the couples were making love and left it at that. Our museums would, I think, just ban those paintings.
We left the main floor and climbed to the displays above, surrounding the museums central court. Here we found classics paintings mixed with an exhibit called The Uninterrupted Dialogue. The classics paintings were good. I enjoyed a scene of the eruption of Vesuvius; in fact I enjoyed all the ones that referred to classical myth or history. There was a piece called “The Aftermath of Lucretia’s Rape” where Rome was about to become a Republic that I enjoyed. Also memorable was a composition that was an allegory for the Parisian school of fine arts.
The detail in the women representing Gothic Art and the Art of the Renaissance, respectively, was magnificent and they seemed to shimmer with an internal light. The artist had done a smaller study of them, along with some priests from the main image, and they seemed almost alive.
Paul Delaroche was the artist.
But by far my favorite, and I think Heather’s as well, was “Jeune Fille” by Hippolyte Flandrin. It was a painting of a young woman with downcast eyes, coy and seductive. It was enthralling.
One other painting in the museum really stood out for me, in both a positive and negative fashion. “The Deluge” was an amazing painting, capturing the desperation of those last left alive during the biblical flood. An amazing painting that captured the suffering and the anguish. It also raised the question “How can God claim to be compassionate and yet do this?” A truly awe inspiring piece.
But it was also part of the Museums “Uninterrupted Dialogue” show. The show was meant to show older works reinterpreted through modern eyes and was quite successful. The old must constantly be re-evaluated in the context of the new or it becomes irrelevant. But the “artist” who reinterpreted "The Deluge" had draped the painting with netting filled with stuffed animals, almost totally obscuring the original painting. We only saw the original in a photograph hung next to the work.
Covering and obscuring the work of another artist, in the interests of promoting your own work, seems like one of the most obscene acts an artist can commit. The modern "artist" had a screed posted with the works denouncing the use of nude women in the painting, ignoring the naked men alongside them I suppose. She claimed to be obscuring the original in the name of feminists everywhere, doing more damage than good from my perspective.
We left the musem and went to the nearby Jardin Des Plants, a beautifully manicured garden, to discuss art and feminist theory and feelings without form. We meandered through patterned lawns, past trees and monuments to Jules Verne, and left finding our thoughts in close accord.
We went through the St. Peter gate and entered the St. Peter and St. Paul Cathedral I had seen the other day.
The inside of the cathedral soared above us, great gothic columns supporting a high ceiling. It was most impressive but cold and empty. The only art was on two tombs, those of the financial supporters of the cathedral. One was surrounded by beauty, justice, virtue and temperance in the shapes of women. But one of the sculptures, we could not figure out which, had a man's face carved in the back of her head. His beard flowing where her hair should be.
Interesting.
Overall the Cathedral and, to a lesser extent, the museum, had left us both feeling a little cold and unsatisfied, as if we had seen a beautiful body with the soul departed. The heart of Nantes seemed to have little heart.
Perhaps there are unforeseen consequences when you cover a river. The River Edre had once cut through the part of Nantes that we visited today, until in had been encased in an underground canal. A river can give a city energy and vitality might encase that power so that it can never be used.
We wandered the streets of downtown, looking for a bookstore. We went into the church of Ste. Croix and found it filled with the homeless and destitute drinking in the pews.
We went into the Palace of the Dukes and found its inside beautiful and closed to the public. It’s history inaccessible.
We walked the forever back to our campsite and found the insides of a tent small consolation after the bleakness of the gloomy day.
Paul Delaroche was the artist.
But by far my favorite, and I think Heather’s as well, was “Jeune Fille” by Hippolyte Flandrin. It was a painting of a young woman with downcast eyes, coy and seductive. It was enthralling.
One other painting in the museum really stood out for me, in both a positive and negative fashion. “The Deluge” was an amazing painting, capturing the desperation of those last left alive during the biblical flood. An amazing painting that captured the suffering and the anguish. It also raised the question “How can God claim to be compassionate and yet do this?” A truly awe inspiring piece.
But it was also part of the Museums “Uninterrupted Dialogue” show. The show was meant to show older works reinterpreted through modern eyes and was quite successful. The old must constantly be re-evaluated in the context of the new or it becomes irrelevant. But the “artist” who reinterpreted "The Deluge" had draped the painting with netting filled with stuffed animals, almost totally obscuring the original painting. We only saw the original in a photograph hung next to the work.
Covering and obscuring the work of another artist, in the interests of promoting your own work, seems like one of the most obscene acts an artist can commit. The modern "artist" had a screed posted with the works denouncing the use of nude women in the painting, ignoring the naked men alongside them I suppose. She claimed to be obscuring the original in the name of feminists everywhere, doing more damage than good from my perspective.
We left the musem and went to the nearby Jardin Des Plants, a beautifully manicured garden, to discuss art and feminist theory and feelings without form. We meandered through patterned lawns, past trees and monuments to Jules Verne, and left finding our thoughts in close accord.
We went through the St. Peter gate and entered the St. Peter and St. Paul Cathedral I had seen the other day.
The inside of the cathedral soared above us, great gothic columns supporting a high ceiling. It was most impressive but cold and empty. The only art was on two tombs, those of the financial supporters of the cathedral. One was surrounded by beauty, justice, virtue and temperance in the shapes of women. But one of the sculptures, we could not figure out which, had a man's face carved in the back of her head. His beard flowing where her hair should be.
Interesting. Overall the Cathedral and, to a lesser extent, the museum, had left us both feeling a little cold and unsatisfied, as if we had seen a beautiful body with the soul departed. The heart of Nantes seemed to have little heart.
Perhaps there are unforeseen consequences when you cover a river. The River Edre had once cut through the part of Nantes that we visited today, until in had been encased in an underground canal. A river can give a city energy and vitality might encase that power so that it can never be used.
We wandered the streets of downtown, looking for a bookstore. We went into the church of Ste. Croix and found it filled with the homeless and destitute drinking in the pews.
We went into the Palace of the Dukes and found its inside beautiful and closed to the public. It’s history inaccessible.
We walked the forever back to our campsite and found the insides of a tent small consolation after the bleakness of the gloomy day.Next Entry: Heather's Picasso
Previous Entry: Day 69. Nantes
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