Rouen's Musée des Beaux Arts

As Susie blogged the other day, we visited the Musée des Beaux Arts of Rouen--in two stints, actually. With our first visit, we saw the new exhibition "A City for Impressionism: Monet, Pissarro and Gaugin in Rouen." The museum didn't permit photos of the exhibition, but I'll try to describe some of the highlights. In the late 19th Century Rouen was only about 2 hours from Paris by train, so it served as a convenient escape for Impressionist artists, especially those interested in plein-air painting. Rouen also had several city natives who played significant roles in the development of Impressionism; collectively they were known as, naturally, the Rouen School.

The exhibition covers paintings of Rouen by pre-Impressionists such as Turner and Corot, landscapes of the Seine as a transition from traditional to modern painting, early visits to Rouen by Pissarro, early (1884) works in and of Rouen by Gaugin when he first turned full-time to painting, the start of the Rouen School with its "Three Musketeers," Monet's famous series of paintings of the Rouen cathedral, Pissaro's response (in 1896 and 1898) with his great series of landscapes of Rouen's industrial docksides, related Impressionist paintings of Rouen's many churches, the paintings of the Rouen School through the turn of the 20th Century, and the subsequent development of painting in Rouen into post-Impressionism.

The works in the exhibition come from not only the Musée des Beaux Arts itself but also from private collections and from museums around the world, including many museums from the United States. The exhibition's clear highlights are the Monet cathedrals and the Pissaro industrial landscapes. In his stays in Rouen, Monet painted a total of 30 views of the cathedral, showing the cathedral at different times of day and in different weather. He would have multiple canvases in progress, moving from painting to painting as the light changed. And of these 30 paintings, an amazing 10 are grouped together in a single room in this exhibition. The Pissaro paintings are less famous, and perhaps less radical, but they reflect Pissarro's taking up Monet's initiative by painting the same view of the river and the adjacent industrial area in different light and in different weather. At the time, Pissarro suffered from acute conjuntivitis, was confined to his hotel, and thus painting what he could see from the hotel's window. These paintings, with their smokestacks and smoke, ships and sailors, and light and weather are truly masterworks.

In the afternoon, we returned to the museum to view its permanent collection, which is also outstanding. And, in addition to the collections, the museum itself is interesting. The museum's central atrium, from which visitors make their way into the exhibitions, is a luminous courtyard filled with large works.

Even the stairwells are works of art, in this case by Felice Varini, whose "Five Ellipses" was installed in the Place des Armes in Metz (and now has been removed after the opening of Metz's Pompidou Center). Varini's works in the stairwells consist of elements of circles, painted on the walls and ceiling, that are visible as circles only in convex mirrors affixed at the top of the stairwells. Some of Varini's work pays explicit homage to the work of Marcel Duchamp, who grew up and began his career in Rouen, and who is well-represented in the museum. Among Duchamp's creations exhibited here are three experiments in using a phonograph turntable to create kinetic art. Here's one of these "Studies of Rotating Discs."

The esplanade in front of the Museum is named for Duchamp. In France, signs for streets named after persons typically have the person's dates and a capsule biography, such as "French patriot" or "Mayor of Rouen." With Duchamp, in keeping with his iconoclastic outlook, the city has had fun with the street signs for the esplanade, which include varied descriptions of Duchamp such as "engineer of lost time" and "Anartist."



The works of Monet and Pissarro are also represented in the museum's permanent collection. Although they don't relate to the theme of the exhibition, I wanted to include at least a couple of these paintings to provide something of the exhibition's flavor. Monet painted this field of flowers near Giverny in 1885.

And Pissarro painted this view of Paris's Tuileries gardens, with snow effect, in 1900.

The museum also includes many works of the 18th and 19th Centuries, ranging from "Orientalist" paintings of Arabia to monumental religious paintings.

I especially enjoyed one painting in particular--a view of the interior of the Rouen museum in 1880, by the Rouenais painter Charles Angrand, who could be thought of as the "fourth musketeer." The coolest thing about this painting is it is displayed in the room in which it was painted, with some of the paintings it shows, such as Boulanger's 1827 "Le supplice de Mazzepa," a kind of disturbing work, actually, that made Boulanger famous.

Le Musée de Bretagne

Le Musée de Bretagne, a wonderful museum in Rennes that reopened in new quarters in 2006, helps visitors learn about Breton peoples and cultures. I say peoples and cultures because the Breton peninsula has been home to several different groups, including pre-Celtic neolithic peoples, the Celtic Gauls, Romans and Romanized Gauls, and Britons, who, fleeing the Anglo-Saxon and Scots invaders starting in the late 4th Century, settled here and gave the area its name, Brittany, and a language, Breton. While the Britons/Bretons primarily settled in the west of Brittany, the east remained primarily Gaulish Gallo-Roman, with its own language, Gallo, a Romance language. To this day, the Breton/Gallo distinction is still reflected in the division of the Basse-Bretagne and Haute-Bretagne departments.

The museum is housed in an exciting building, called Les Champs Libres, that also contains a science museum, planatarium, and library. From the building's second floor (counting like Americans where the first floor is the ground floor), you can see the library's walls rising within the building.

The museum's permanent expositions are well-done, with lots of interactive and audio-visual exhibits. I can't really show you the interactive aspects here, but I thought I would at least show a few of the items on pre-Roman Brittany that caught my eye. These pottery pieces from the early neolithic age, about 6,700 years ago, were found in the nearby village of Saint-Etienne-en-Coglès. Note the decorative elements on pieces probably intended for storage.

The Gauls, before the arrival of the Roman Legion, maintained a culture with thriving trade. They minted coins, such as those seen here.

The Gauls' trade meant that they exported some materials and imported others. This marvelous bowl of the 1st or 2nd Century CE, with its designs in relief, came from Rome.

The museum also helps visitors understand the living cultural heritage of all these influences. One particularly interesting exhibit was a video showing speakers of Gaelic, Breton, Manx, and Gallo. The speaker of Breton discussed how she was raising her child to speak Breton.

The Salomon Contemporary Art Foundation

A renovated 16th-Century chateau, in the village of Alex, between Thônes and Annecy, houses the Salomon Contemporary Art Foundation. This unexpected and delightful museum, more properly called the la Fondation pour l'Art Contemporain Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, presents truly contemporary work that reflects the artistic judgment of the Foundation's founders, who created the Salomon ski (and now snowboard) equipment and apparel giant.

The museum's building, the chateau d’Arenthon, contains three floors of galleries, plus a gift shop and a salon de thé/library. After seeing the exposition with Susie, I skimmed a great book on Shepard Fairey while sipping a soft drink. Sculpture gardens surround the chateau.

The current exposition, "Collection 3," shows works from the private collection of Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, primarily figurative drawings and paintings. The exposition displays its most abstract works in the top-floor gallery.

The exposition contains many memorable works, all by artists born after 1960. One fun piece was Shepard Fairey's ersatz record label for "The Last of the Rebel Waltzers," part of an extensive series of related works. This particular work includes several long-running Fairey motifs, including "OBEY" and the abstract Andre-the-Giant-in-a-star logo. You can buy (at exceptionally reasonably prices) original works directly from Shepard Fairey at his Web site, obeygiant.com.

This large untitled work by Olivier Masmonteil struck me as a clever commentary on the relationship between landcape and abstract painting.

The building itself is interesting, combining Gothic architecture and contemporary art. Here's a view of across the entry toward a circular stairwell visible through a window.

A Brief Visit to the Louvre

Any visit to the Louvre that would do justice to the museum and its collections would, necessarily, not be brief. The Louvre ranks as one of the world's largest museums and its collections include indisputably the world's most celebrated works of art. So instead of a full account, here's a brief report on some aspects of an afternoon's visit.

The Louvre was originally a sober fortress, built along the Seine in 1190 by king Philippe August. The modern (i.e., 16th Century) Louvre on the site of fortress is the south wing of the Cour Carré, commissioned by Francois I. From the Left Bank, you can walk to the Louvre on the Pont des Arts.

Excavations for the 1989 "Grand Louvre" pyramid and associated remodeling revealed the foundations and moat of Philippe August's castle. Today you can walk around the moat and into the base of the Great Tower, some 15 meters in diameter.

The dry moat had served for centuries as a dumping spot for all sorts of discards. The Louvre's extensive exhibition of the building's history displays many of these items, including coins and clay pipes. The supports for the bridge across the moat still stand.

The Louvre's oldest room is the Crypt Sully (or Lower Hall), which dates from the 12th Century. The columns and vaulting were added between 1230 and 1240.

The Cour Napoleon, just west of the new pyramid, is jammed with traffic because the Louvre is a long building, and there aren't many ways for cars, buses and trucks to get across between the Rue de Rivoli and the quays of the Seine.

Other places in the building remain much quieter, even kind of lost. While some of the courtyards have been roofed over and turned into exhibition space for sculptures, others remain unrestored and tantalizingly inaccessible to the public except by looking through windows.

The great public spaces of the contemporary Louvre lie under I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, the emblem of the Grand Louvre project of the 1980s. I've never warmed to this project, which seemed like a space-age intrusion into Paris's largest-scale and most interesting building. After all, it took Versailles to supplant the Louvre as a palace. The pyramid does provide needed light for the museum's main lobby. The glass slopes and their adjacent basins make for some disconcerting views, though. For example, a couple of kids walked in the narrow gap between the pyramid and a basin, seemingly suspended in a futuristic world.

To stick with the museum's more classical aspects, the Louvre's long wings stretch from the Cour Napoleon to the Jardin des Tuileries. These wings house galleries that, for me, define a museum of art. This gallery is luminous and awe-inspiring. It's actually pretty easy to get lost in this vast set of spaces.

The painting collection includes unbelievably famous works, such as the Mona Lisa. You go from room to room, painting to painting, experiencing the shock of recognition, something like seeing a celebrity in a restaurant. For example, Ingres's Odalisque is today an iconic work, even if at first showing it generated controversy--not because of the nudity but because critics thought that the figure had extra vertebra in her spine!

Similarly, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, in addition to being a great work of art, carries with it both the artist's political message and all of the additional meaning that the painting accumlated through its use as a symbol of freedom.

More on the Centre Pompidou - Metz

The crowds continue to build for the new Centre Pompidou - Metz. The local paper report two-hour waits for Wednesday, and the word on the street has it that the waits are up to three hours. Susie saw the lines around 11:15 a.m. this morning, and they were longer than Wednesday's lines.

Although the streets were eerily deserted yesterday--Ascension is a national holiday--they teemed today, with many people who looked and sounded like visitors. At lunch, the women sitting next to us had just arrived in Metz, and hadn't even made it yet to their hotel. Taking the renamed "Artis" minibus, we ended up riding for free because the driver had run out tickets.

A few more things about the exhibition itself stand out as worth discussing. As I mentioned Wednesday, the exhibition includes works of various kinds, including traditional paintings, sculptures, videos, audios, and installations. All of the works were identified by a nearby card, about 5x6 inches, attached to the wall. I looked at one card, which didn't seem to be associated with any particular painting or sculpture, entitled "1234." As it turned out, 1234 is an audio work, eight seconds long, that is played throughout the museum at 12:34 p.m. each day. We were still waiting in line when (and if) it played, so we'll have to come back some other time for it.

There's an enormous installation by a French artist called Ben, entitled something like "Ben's Store." It's a kind of building containing and decorated with things that had to have been retrieved from garage and attic sales across France--parts of dolls, buckets, you name it. I went by this work rather quickly, having realized that it would take me most of a day to perceive and understand everything there.

There's a conceptual piece called "Three Chairs" that consists of an actual chair, a life-sized picture of the chair, and a definition of the word chair. Having just taught a semester's worth of Natural Language Processing, where we worked a lot on representing semantics, this work appealed to me a lot.

To me, aside from the great works themselves, the best part of the exhibition was the floor with the works in one long gallery and the history of each work in a parallel gallery, with space to look from one gallery to the other. The history sometimes featured written or graphical materials and sometimes videos.

Maybe by the time we get back to Metz before heading home to El Paso we'll have time to explore the Centre Pompidou - Metz with greater depth.

Centre Pompidou - Metz: Day One

After years of planning and construction, after months of build-up, and after even a restructuring of bus routes, the Centre Pompidou - Metz opened its doors to the public this morning for the very first time. The original Centre Pompidou in Paris promoted its sister museum with a giant banner.

Metz's new museum, likened to the Guggenheim's branch in Bilbao as a modern cultural treasure that could revitalize an economically disadvantaged region, captured the attention of the world's press. The press reports of the opening did not laud Metz for its own merits. Rather, Metz is "a military town off the tourist circuit." Reviews tended to lead with the wonder and strangeness of the museum's building, which was inspired by a Chinese hat.

Off the tourist circuit or not, the museum drew huge crowds for its opening day, many from out of town. In line with us as we waited to enter were a group of women from Paris who had never before visited Metz but were here for the opening. Many Germans were in the crowds, too. We arrived at about 12:15 p.m., and had about a 30-minute wait to get into the building. Then, shades of Disneyland's hidden lines, we waited in another series of lines to get into the galleries. As the afternoon wore on, the lines got longer and longer, stretching away from the museum to the edges of its esplanade.

The museum's inaugural exhibition, "Masterworks?," occupied all four floors of galleries. The ground floor's theme was the history of masterworks in art, and this story fittingly began with a 9th-Century ivory coffret from the School of Metz as its very first item. Other local masterworks, including a remarkably ornate crystal chandelier from the St-Louis glassworks, helped to tie the exposition to the region and strengthen the relationship of the museum to its location.

The exhibition eventually moved to more modern works, including pieces by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Ellsworth Kelly, Jackson Pollock, Fernand Leger--too many to recount, actually. The Pompidou Center has lent some 700 of its works, and other museums have lent another 100 or so. This show knocks your socks off. It culminated on the fourth floor with ultra-contemporary works. Along the way, there were simply marvelous works of all kinds, including this study by Theo van Doesburg for the projection wall of his Cine-Dansing de l'Aubette, of which I'd seen a model at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

One of the key parts of the exhibition was the treatment of museums in France since 1937 as possible masterworks in themselves, which fit well with how the Centre Pompidou - Metz is being reviewed. An architect's model of the museum shows its real structure, not clearly understandable as you look at the finished building.

The top-floor gallery points, on its northwest end, toward Metz's center city and its cathedral. The arrangement of the walls makes the cathedral loom large as you enter the gallery and recede as you move toward it.

The view toward Metz, at the end of the exhibition, drew visitors like a porch light draws moths. It struck me, looking at the museum visitors looking at the city, that while the museum draws people away from the center of Metz, it ends up returning their focus to the city itself.

The Bitche Citadel

No matter how funny the town's name looks to Americans, Bitche holds meaning for the French as a wrenching yet noble part of their history. On its long sandstone ridge, the Citadel of Bitche stands above the town, both the emblem and the actual place of a remarkable story of French survival in the face of the Prussian army.

A castle stood on the ridge as early as the 12th Century, but Vauban gave the citadel its present form in the 1620s. And even though much of the fortress was destroyed in 1698 when the area was restored to Lorraine, the fortress was rebuilt from 1741-54 to Vauban's original design. Here's how the fortress looked in 1794, when this scale model was built. (The history of the model is itself an interesting story, even involving Metz, but would be something of a detour for this post.)

Since then, the city of Bitche grew around the base of the citadel. The entrance still impresses. Imagine trying to force your way up that ramp to the gate, while being attacked from the walls above and behind you.




The design of the fortress shows Vauban's ingenuity. There are bastions at the east and west ends of the citadel, separated from the main fort by deep moats. This bridge crosses from the main part of the fortress to the "small head" bastion at the east end of the ridge.


The gate to the bridge is closed, but here's what it would be like if you wanted to cross.

The citadel is complex. Here's a diagram of the fortress's layout.

Indeed, the Bitche citadel, conceived by Vauban and built twice to his design, suffered through multiple attacks and sieges but never broke. The most celebrated and heroic defense came in 1870-71, when the French garrison, swelled by troops staggering to the citadel from horrific battle losses to the Prussians, and by townspeople fearing the Prussians' attack, successfully defended the citadel during a 230-day siege, attacks from the 7000 Prussian soldiers massed against it, and three periods of intense shelling.

While the citadel's ramparts, moats and underground spaces are intact, all the buildings on the top of the fortress, save the chapel, were destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War and World War II. The citadel's underground passage, tunneled into solid rock, now house a remarkable multimedia experience--a sort of feature film that takes you from room to room--that makes the siege and its defenders real.

This "cinematic tour" is brilliant. You start out in something of a traditional movie theater for the first eight minutes, then move to subsequent spaces for succeeding segments, with the screens integrated into the rooms in a number of ingenious ways. You hear the audio on the same wireless headphones that you use for visiting the whole citadel, with commentary in your own language. The movie is graphic, personal, and simply incredibly well done. It's the best introduction to the history, and best use of, a historic monument that I have ever seen. When you walk back up to the surface of the fort you feel like the fighting is still going on around you.

The movie handles transitions between rooms cleverly, too. In the first segment, at the end, the characters in the film are watching the film in the very room you're in, and when they--on screen--get up to move to another room you get the idea quickly. The movie, produced in 2005 and installed in 2006, involved nearly 700 extras, 100 technicians, and 40 principal actors. The movie includes imagined newsreel footage of historical figures such as Napoleon III and Kaiser Wilhelm that concisely explains the political and military events leading to the siege and its aftermath.

The underground part of the citadel stored a huge amount of supplies, especially flour and gunpowder. Water from rainfall ran into cisterns, and a human-powered machine drew water from a deep well. Two soldiers would walk inside the machine, something like a giant hamster wheel, causing the a full bucket to rise while an empty bucket descended.

Faced with the Prussian attack, Commander Louis-Casimir Teyssier, who had been sent to Bitche as a backwater assignment, and his soldiers rose to the occasion. Indeed, Teyssier refused to give up the fight even after France's defeat and the subsequent armistice until he received official orders. The garrison marched out of the citadel, undefeated, after the final peace treaty. Teyssier earned the Legion of Honor, among many other honors. Bitche's high school is named for him. Commander Tessier lived until 1916.

The city of Bitche also expressed its appreciate to a later group of soldiers. This plaque, placed on the walls of the citadel by the city and the U.S. 100th Infantry Division remembers the nearly 3,000 soldiers of the Division who were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the three-month battle for the Bitche region in 1944-45.

Today, the base of the Bitche citadel shelters a Garden of Peace. The citadel's looks over a city and surrounding mountains free of battle and bombardment. The ramparts still stand, and grass grows over the roofs and the slopes.