Paris Day 5 Pompidou & Louvre

We walked to the Pompidou Centre and after going to the top level discovered that the exhibits there are not covered by the Paris museum pass. This was not an issue really as we were there to see their main collection anyway, just once again signage in French galleries is less than clear. The free galleries are two floors of modern art - from 1905 onwards. I liked that it's all in chronological order - as it meant I could mentally doze off once we got to the abstract art of the 1940s. Once again this was a case where for quite a few artworks that I've known for a long time I was finally seeing them first hand. The Pompidou clearly rotates their collection a lot, with only a few rooms devoted to surrealism the display had too few of my favorite artists to be believable. For example there wasn't a single painting by Yves Tanguay that I would say showed his real quality (visions of an infinite field). I guess the payoff is that locals will over time get to see more of it - and I can't begrudge them for doing that. We had lunch at the nearby Cafe Beaubourg. A curiosity was that the waiters were dressed very formally but the waitresses not. From there we went back to the apartment for a rest before our next sally. And fittingly, for the finale gallery-wise we spent the late afternoon and evening at the Musee du Louvre. We took the subway to be foot-ready for the gallery. Or museum passes let us bypass the queue of people getting tickets. It is impossible to do it all of course, so we settled for a full sweep through their Egyptian holdings and then took stabs at several other areas. I was pleased to get some surprises as well as see some familiar works being either mobbed or ignored by the throng. Also, it was as I had hoped, a chance to see art and artists that we don't get to know about in our home galleries. Alas there are too many of these and time is too short to pause in the gallery to make notes. From memory, two unfamiliar artists that were well represented with interesting works were Derain and Maillot. We also saw a lot more sculptural works by Degas than I knew existed. Of course, like the Hermitage in St Petersburg, this is a former palace, so in many spaces there is as much to marvel at in looking up and around at the walls and ceilings as there is at the art thus framed. In one particular long room, which now holds many portraits of artists, the degree of magnificence makes it hard to understand what King Louix XIV thought was so deficient about this palace that he had to build Versailles. Other areas of the Louvre are inherently modern and practical but these don't seem to clash. The covered inner courtyards that are now sculpture galleries had a relaxing open, spacious feeling. Depending where you go there are either voids or crushes of people. The oddest of these is of course at the Mona Lisa. It was probably more civilised than I was expecting but still had a crush of people about 8 persons thick around the third semi-circular barrier that guards it. Staff were opening the rope barrier to let people out (from the front in effect) so they wouldn't have to work their way back through the crush. It was like a paparazzi pack, all cameras, phones and tablets raised in the air rather than a bunch of people using their own eyes to view this famous painting directly. Do they not get the irony of seeing it through a device despite getting so close? I held back at a distance, luckily it's placed high enough that I could see it directly from a few paces behind the crush. I've seen enough detail explorations of it anyway. I know what I think of art - I only get confused about what most people think about it. At least no-one was being able to do the "here I am in front of the Mona Lisa" photos. It would be interesting to know which paintings get all the attention. In a large room of paintings by David, it was Napoleon crowning Josephine that had a crowd. Nearby my interest was caught by a painting of his that is referenced in a series of Magritte works. I think we were running out of puff just before they started announcing that closing time was approaching. We opted to walk back home through a pleasant Paris evening.