Claude Monet, La Pavé de Chailly(The Road to Chailly, 1865, Musee D'Orsay)
Gustave Caillebotte, Les Raboteursde Parquet (The Floor Scrapers,
1875, Musee D'Orsay)
Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione
(1515, Louvre)
Vincent Van Gogh, self-portrait
(1889, Musee D'Orsay)
Tracy and I did a weekend jaunt to Paris mid-January, 2004. For each of us, it was a second visit to the city.
My own first visit to Paris was a 10 day trip in March, 2000. I spent three of those days at a swank but cramped hotel in the 4th Arrondisement, followed by a week in a rented apartment in the 7th Arrondisement. The extra few days gave me a brief chance to break away from the usual tourist routine. I visited a few of the museums such as the Pantheon and the Hotel Des Invalides and hotspots like the Buddha Bar on Champs-Elysees, but I put a bigger emphasis on blending in and putting myself in situations where I had no choice but to use my Alliance Francaise beginner-level French.
Blending in isn't easy when your six feet tall, blond and underdressed for the Paris spring, of course. Most times, before I could get the second, halting sentence out of my mouth, things would have switched over to default English. Still, the very effort of going native can lead to surprising insights. One of the more humorous moments on that trip was a David Sedaris-like epiphany on the Paris Metro. Jolted out of my commuter stupor by weird smell -- one third cheese, one third red wine, one third bar smoke -- I glanced right and left in search of the offending passenger. When I couldn't find anybody, I tucked my nose into my coat collar and was practically thrown back against the seat. The smelly Frenchman was me.
This time around, Tracy and I went the full tourist route: prixe fixe meals, the Louvre, Sacre Coeur, etc. Like Rome, we relied heavily on our guidebook, albeit with less satisfying results. Old Rick didn't seem to put as much effort into getting the facts straight as he did with Rome. Either that or the French make a habit of moving paintings, scultptures and entrances. My guess is it was a little of both.
Anyway, the highlights of the trip were your standard postcard images: The Mona Lisa, as much as I hate to admit it, lives up to the hype. Here's a quick journal entry dashed off at the Louvre:
- Having been told to expect an anticlimactic experience, I have to say it was pretty climactic. First you have the cultural factor -- hordes of tourists snapping photos like it's a fashion shoot. Then you have the artistic aspect: The painting is very simple, a portrait of an unknown but good-looking woman with an intriguing look on her face. She isn't Madonna. She isn't Mary Magdalene. She's just a chick looking at the artist (or the viewer) with something halfway between knowingness and unknowingness. Compared with the other portraits, it stands out on this fact alone. As you get closer you take in all the elements that make ti dramatic: the subtle smile with the edges blurred in the "sfumato" style, the soft but direct gaze, and what I think is most important: the relaxed right hand draped over the left. Tracy summed up the whole composition as "relaxed," but I think without that hand, it wouldn't have the same feel. Given what was mentioned in The DaVinci Code about the arms and face forming a triangle with proportions equal to the Golden Mean, it's pretty clear that DaVinci saw the hands as foundational to the image.
Speaking of battle scenes, I have to give a quick mention to Salvatore Casas. He's the guy who painted the Trojan War scene that sits on the wall directly adjacent to the Mona Lisa. Talk about upstaged. After leaving the room, I made sure to jot down his name for future trivia purposes. On the way out, Tracy and I jokingly pictured Casas speaking with St. Peter after his death:
-
Casas: Tell me the truth, your holiness. Will anybody remember the name and work of Salvatore Casas?
St. Peter: Let me put it this way: I've got good news, and I've got bad news...
Over at the Musee D'Orsay, Van Gogh's self-portrait and Monet's "Road to Chailly" both had me hovering like a transfixed moth. Van Gogh has become a bit of a rock star in recent decades. This leads to a conundrum: You want to sneer at his work if only because so many people make such a big deal about it. And yet, when you're standing in a room filled with gentle, understated brush strokes, Van Gogh's aggressive, dangerous style literally pulls you in. Sometimes it's like you can practically hear the work humming on the wall; it has so much trapped energy.
Monet's works are at the opposite end of the energy spectrum. In fact, I normally associate his stuff with the artsy posters girls in college used to decorate their dorm rooms. Boring. "Road to Chailly," on the other hand, impressed me in two ways. First, I could picture myself being there, hearing the birds, smelling the wet leaves, etc. Second, I liked the cinematic use of perspective, i.e. the tree in the foreground placed for dramatic effect. If a modern day movie director was setting up a shot in this same stretch of woods, I'm pretty sure he would have chosen the same angle. I'm sure a few people might sniff at this insight, noting a dozen prior examples, but I came away impressed, which is pretty ironic since the painting is one of Monet's least "impressionistic" works.
I also liked Gustave Caillebotte's "Floor Scrapers." I've only come across one other Caillebotte painting, a portrait of a French soldier standing at ease at the Metropolitan Museum. It jumped out at me as unique and relaxed the same way the Mona Lisa jumps out at the Louvre. Unfortunately, the soldier portrait has since cycled back into the Met's warehouse, so I haven't been able to follow up on the title or the historical info. In the case of the "Floor Scrapers," I was savvy enough to jot down the information. Once again, I was struck by the offbeat, "common man" topic -- ordinary workers, resurfacing a wooden floor that looks a lot like the one in our house, their bottles of water (or wine) waiting at the side. If it wasn't so dark and it didn't have a fluorescent blue Van Gough self-portrait competing with it on the adjacent wall, it would have easily been the dominant painting in the room.
The Cathedral at Notre Dame and Napoleon's tomb were less awe-inspiring but fun to visit. I found myself ironically comparing the interior of Napoleon's Tomb with Grant's Tomb, a stylistic knockoff here in New York. Because I visited Grant's Tomb first (in 2003), it stands out in my mind as the original.
Like Rome, Paris offers a respite from the American media. On that score alone, the three day trip was a worthy break. The Iowa Caucus occurred during our final day there, and I was pleased to note absolutely no coverage of it on any of the French language television stations. Aside from the occasional American voice in the restaurants we visited and the Hollywood movie ads on the bus stops, it was possible, if only for a moment, to forget that America even existed.
Not that I want America to disappear, but the fresh perspective helps remind oneself of the many blindspots and hidden assumptions that shape you worldview. Take trash, for example. As a relatively new immigrant to New York, I'm still struggling with the litter problem here. Whenever I walk through a swirling dust-devil of potato chip bags and cigarette butts in Brooklyn or Manhattan, I have to hold my breath, grit my teeth and remind myself that, when you pack a million or so people into a city, you're gonna get trash.
Then I go to Paris, where the population density is the same as Brooklyn and yet, the trash never seems to build up to nuisance levels. Suddenly, I'm forced to ask hard questions like: Are New Yorkers just filthy slobs too lazy to pick up after themselves?
Tough call. I will say that the French attitude toward smoking -- about the only place you can't smoke is in church, depending on the whims of the local priest -- means most of the cigarette butts in Paris get deposited on the floors of bars and cafes as opposed to sidewalks and gutters. The common New York sight of a harried commuter sucking in a few quick drags between the subway and the office or the shivering smoker in the building doorway are both relatively rare in Paris, at least in the few neighborhoods I visited.
A second thing that comes into sharp relief whenever you go to France is the dysfunctional relationship most Americans, myself included, have with food. Maybe it's because we all came over poor and hungry (including the Indians) and don't want to experience that feeling ever again, but the American affection for mid-meal noshing really stands out in a culture where coffee and cigarettes serve as lunch.
Dieticians and doctors have, of course, devoted manypages to the French homeopathic diet, so I won't belabor the point. I will say this, though: When you're walking through the giant courtyard of the Louvre, picking out the American and British tourists is as easy as picking out the elephants on the African savannah.
Finally, there's health care. The liberal in me fantasizes about European-style health care and nine month maternity leaves, and how nice it would be not to talk to a doctor without needing an attorney present at all times. The conservative in me, on the other hand, knows that every American is a born short-cutter and such a system would be so rife with abuse as to be comical. Still, there has to be a happy medium somewhere. The one thing that stands out when you watch French TV -- aside from all the people who don't speak English -- is the absence of health care products in the commercials. No adult diaper ads during the nightly newscast, no ads for prescription drugs whose side effects include possible bone loss, nausea, headaches and explosive diarrhea. You don't even see ads for antacid, which is really weird given what a steady mixture of French cofee and wine can do to a human stomach.
What do you see in their place? Lots of ads for vacation trips to Brazil and North Africa. Taking the "visitor from Mars" perspective, you get the feeling that the French culture views lesiure time as higher priority than health. Then again, a visitor to America might deduce a culture unnaturally obsessed with death, dying, disease, and decay.
Granted, from what little I could grab off the TV newscasts, the French seem to be experiencing their own mini-health care crisis at the moment. Like a lot of things French, however, it came across as a putting-more-cops-on-the-street type story. Instead of focusing on victims, the stories focused on harried health care workers running from house call to house call -- a weird concept to an American unused to that kind of service. Overall, the stories had the feel of a New York 1 feature on spring potholes or slow subway service.
Assessing a culture by its television programming is, of course, the height of journalistic laziness. Then again, I only had three days to make an assessment. France isn't on the travel itinerary this year or next, but I'm hoping the next time I get to visit it will be for at least two weeks if not the entire summer.