We're in Paris. Our original plan was to visit the Musee d'Orsay, the Pompidou Centre and the Louvre in addition to having some lovely grub and doing some shopping.
I can see us cutting back a bit on the arty stuff after our experience today. We had to queue for almost two hours to get into the Musee d'Orsay by which time we were quite tired. Then we were faced with my regular issue with art galleries - so many people, so many pictures, so little time and tranquility to really study things.
There was a lot to study. For a kickoff, the museum has a special exhibition running at present entitled "Van Gogh/Artaud - The Man Suicided by Society."
Antonin Artaud, I discovered, was an artist who had similar "convulsive" mental issues to Van Gogh. In 1946/7 Artaud was encouraged, initially against his will, to study Van Gogh and ended up taking the view that society had driven Van Gogh to suicide "by its indifference or in order to prevent him from uttering unspeakable truths."
Anyhow, all of this was of special interest to me because I'd been reading all about Van Gogh in Will Gompertz's "What are you looking at" book, in which he says, forcefully, that seeing a print of a Van Gogh is one thing and seeing the real thing is totally different - the only way you can really experience the energy transmitted by the painting.
So I couldn't really bottle out of queuing to see the exhibition and there was no entrance charge.
Did I experience the electricity buzzing in the genuine Van Goghs? Not really. I could see that they were painted in a very dramatic way but they didn't bowl me over. Maybe they would have if I'd had some peace and quiet to study them?
The Musee d'Orsay is we'll known for its collection of Impressionist paintings, which I've also been reading about in Will Gompertz's book. We whizzed through the large numbers of Renoirs, Monets, Manets, Degases, Cezannes and so on. Should have spent more time on them but we were tired out!
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