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The Big Three: A Weekend in Paris
Our guide to best art-filled weekend in France's capital
February 2, 2023
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
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It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
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Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
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Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
For many, the Louvre remains an automatic reflex, a natural reaction to the prompt, ‘where can I see things in Paris?’. Its current exhibition, Things: A History of Still Life argues that artists were the first to take any things seriously. Still lives are put into motion over fourteen sections, from the first European vanitas, mosaics of skulls from the 1st century, through corrupted, rotting fruits, to their contemporary iterations in ceramic and film.
An audio guide is essential for non-Francophones – all the captions are in French too – which draws attention to artistic details. Joachim Bueckelaer’s ‘Marché aux poissons’ (1570) is laid bare, a visual testament to the beginnings of consumerism and capitalism in Europe; a woman brings in a great fish, to draw attention to a biblical story in the background, but it’s overshadowed by the bustling trade in the fore. The glassy-eyed fish stand in contrast to the clear vision of the traders, but their matching reds – in flesh, and uniform – indicate their close connection.
From the sixteenth century, we see how ‘objects became the silent symbols of all the world’s desires, dreams and violence’, in direct competition with human and sacred figures in art. Curated opposite Erró’s ‘Foodscape’ (1964), overseen by passages by Karl Marx, we see the contemporary ramifications of our desire for objects. It ends with Nan Goldin, currently in the popular media for her documentary about opioid addiction, here photographing stillness in COVID lockdown.
Like the Louvre more widely, expect classical, men-and-Eurocentric curation. We do see some instances of French artworks inspired by traditional Chinese subjects, but they’re few and far between. Rather, Things focuses on industrialisation, and the isolation (even alienation) created by mass production and modernity.
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ critique of war production is swiftly followed by Surrealists and Dadaists rendering trash even more useless – sticking a fluffy tale on a beer glass and calling it a squirrel.
Van Gogh, who saw the ‘accumulation of things as a source of [mental] disorder’; the fact that his thickly painted ‘Bedroom’ - one of three versions, painted for his sister, Wilhelmine – seems full to contemporary eyes, is very telling. The Impressionists, and their desire for a simple, natural life, are well represented, particularly Manet. Still, a little more meat – perhaps a little more Paul Cezanne – would have made for a more satisfying meal.
Cezanne abounds on the other side of the Seine, at the Musée d'Orsay. Specialising in French art between 1848 to 1914, the museum nevertheless promises to display the Western world ‘in all its diversity’.
It does contextualise its collection with interesting and nuanced captions. Bloody and imposing, Henri Regnault’s ‘Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada)’ (1870), is honestly described for what it is – an example of orientalism ‘under the guise of’ ethnographic realism.
The Musée d'Orsay also pays respect to those artists overlooked in exhibitions outside of France. Émile Bernard is put at the forefront of synthetism and post-Impressionism, curated in conversation with Gauguin in rooms 28-45. (Downstairs, a caption details his forty self-portraits even before Van Gogh’s.) Other rooms evocatively detail the influence of Japanese prints on nineteenth century French art, with many appropriating the elongated form of kakemono, or imitating Japanese characters in their signatures.
France’s larger museums let its curators to go into such detail and include peripheral works. In ‘Newspapers’ (1909), Édouard Vouillard lets us see a rare reading, thinking, woman. Félix Vallotton’s fabrics, painted in 1900, share the same pinks and soft textures of a Paula Rego pastel painting. Elsewhere, the screaming girl and blood-thirsty birds of Henri Rousseau’s ‘War, or The Ride of Discord’ (1894) seem to predate surrealism by decades.
This expansive approach is reflected in their exhibitions too. Take Edvard Munch; the Courtauld could only show his headline ‘At the Deathbed’ (1896), but the d’Orsay’s A Poem of Life, Love and Death delved into the works around it, highlighting the artist’s practice of repetition and building on motifs.
Curated in loose chronological order, many of an artist’s most surprising works are found not in their expected place. So skip the romantic display of Maurice Denis in room 35, and see his Munch-like nuns in the previous room, or close-cut faces with the Nabis (rooms 71-72). You’ll find a Ferdinand Hodler hiding amongst the Art Deco, and the darkest Cezannes in room 11. (His best self-portraits are back in London, like Van Gogh’s, whilst Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ were ruffed up better in Edinburgh.)
But for more perspective on the world beyond Paris, walk past the Pagoda Paris to the corner of Monceau Park. At the end of a constant queue is one of the city’s largest Asian art collections, second only to the Musée Guimet, and free, with paid exhibitions.
Henri Cernuschi, a nineteenth century politician and economist, ‘discovered’ - in the words of his Museum – Asia in the 1870s, whilst travelling with the art critic, Theodore Duret. From the first 900 crates (mainly bronzes) sent back to France, he would go on to curate a custom-built house-museum. Cernuschi’s private mansion was bequeathed to the city of Paris on his death in 1896 and has remained open to the public since 1898.
Though once considered the centre of Japonisme in Paris, Cernuschi’s collection was and remains curated around a chronological history of China, assuming the country as the source of much Asian culture. Anchored around a great Buddha, the numbered rooms are easy enough to follow. The main captions are available in both English and French; all can read how, by the eighteenth century, Qing-era prosperity placed China as ‘the most developed country in the world’.
Porcelain trays for sweetmeats, a Western taste, and blue-and-white ceramics speak to China’s position of the ‘international vocabulary’ of ceramic art and industry. Other objects in the collection challenge traditional art histories. Modernist Qing Dynasty bowls and twelfth century Junware would no doubt make welcome additions on dinner tables today.
The Museum has refocused its collection on East Asia, and expanded to include more modern and contemporary work, including its current exhibition on 20th century Chinese painting., and display of the Japanese painter, Akeji Sumiyoshi. Most visitors won’t share in Cernuschi’s privilege, but his Museum remains as his own personal guided tour of Asia, a still-dated lens on ‘the Orient’ from nineteenth century Paris.
The Louvre is open from Wednesday to Monday
Musée d'Orsay is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
Musée Cernuschi is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
