Paris museums 2 -- Louvre

So here we are at the Louvre, getting a bit antsy, and we still haven't seen anything.  We decided to skip the Mona Lisa and head for the Vermeers and Rembrandts, which were at the far end of the other building, away from the "Must See" six pack.

We thought this remote area would be less crowded.  And in fact it was -- that wing was closed, which we discovered only after hiking through dozens of galleries.  Even the museum attendants didn't seem to know why it was closed or for how long.

I did see some things I liked on the way.  Check out this lovely painting from 15th Century Provence.

Notice how the priests are speaking, while the breath of the Holy Spirit passes between Jesus and the Father.

I've always liked the tradition of painting church interiors, done most frequently in the low countries.  Here are two by the same guy (although his name is spelled differently on the two signs), perhaps of the same church?

Hendrik van Steenwijck, Church Interior with a Sacristan, 1608

Hendrick van Steenwyck; Church Interior, Night; c. 1610-20

I feel immense guilt over my reaction to the Louvre.  I know it's the greatest museum in the world, but it stops at 1848, just about when I think art starts getting interesting.  Perhaps because I never had a basic art history course, I don't have much appreciation for the subtleties of when perspective was invented or how the Renaissance harkened back to classical art.  And I really don't like huge crowds.

So I decided to ditch the Louvre and head for the Pompidou.  My next trip to Paris, if I am so lucky, will be in the winter and maybe I'll give the old masters another try in less frantic conditions, with a better guidebook.  But not this time.

Paris museums 1 -- Louvre

We're just back from an adventure -- two weeks in Paris.  The food was glorious, of course (I'll be writing about that part of the trip on my food blog) and the art was magnifique.  My reporting efforts were stymied a bit by the prohibitions on photography at some of the museums, which I was pretty good about following.  It was annoying to see dozens of others snapping away and not getting busted (one or two show-trials-with-guillotine would probably increase compliance dramatically).  But I'll do my best to share what I could memorialize.

First off, I confess to a mortal sin in the religion of art.  I hated the Louvre.

We were told that when the Louvre had its last major renovation it was planned to handle 2.5 million tourists per year -- and this year they're expecting 10 million.  The place was mobbed, and even though our museum passes allowed us to walk right in instead of waiting on a l-o-n-g line, once we got inside it was chaos.

We first hiked to the cellar for a spin around the old 12th Century tower, the original structure in what became a vast royal palace.  Unfortunately, somebody thought it would be a good idea to let Michelangelo Pistoletto use the beautiful old walls as backdrop for a huge neon installation that looked  to me more like Vegas than Paris.  Apparently the phrases say "love the differences" in many languages. Yuk.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Love Difference, 2010

Our tour organization had provided us with little MP3 players so we didn't have to get the museum audioguides.  We fiddled with them for ten minutes before deciding they were worthless.  The buttons were too small to see, let alone push.  We could access only one of the 20 tracks on the device.

Then we read the brochures and realized that the content was apparently downloaded from the Art for Dummies publishing house.

Not off to a particularly good start, and I will refrain from describing the condition of the toilettes.

Sign of the week

Control freak?

I took a road trip recently to deliver a carload of work for a show, and was happy to have a friend ride along for company.  During our several hours of conversation I told her how I enabled my son and his fiancee to get married.  They had been engaged for a long time but she confessed that she was so busy at work and the thought of organizing a wedding was so daunting she couldn't deal with it.  Her mother had died a few years back and there were no other female relatives to help.

So I ended up organizing the wedding (and holding it in my living room), a delightful task that mothers of sons don't expect to do.  My friend, who had organized her daughter's wedding at about the same time, marveled that I seemed so nonchalant about it, and that the whole thing got pulled together in two months.  (Heck, that was leisurely -- I did my own wedding in six weeks.)

Later she commented that it was funny to contrast my work, meticulous and controlled, with my real-life personality, nonchalant to the extreme, and speculated that all my control-freak qualities must find their outlet in my work.

It's always revealing to hear what other people think about you, and I was kind of surprised to hear her describe my work as controlled.  I see it as meticulous, yes, but controlled no.  I've never sketched things out in advance; I'm too much in a hurry to start sewing.  In fact, I often have to rip out seams because the first iteration turned out to be wrong.  But that's OK -- I'd much rather rip out the occasional seam than lose the excitement of seizing the moment of initial enthusiasm.  Spontaneity and creativity are inseparable for me.

Here's what my design wall looks like this week, the second and third panels of my work-in-progress.  Panel three was going to have both cool and warm colors, but after I sewed and sewed and sewed on the cool -- they were looking so beautiful I just wanted to do more and more -- I was more than halfway done and there didn't seem to be enough room left to properly transition into the reds.  So I'm auditioning fabrics to keep it cool throughout -- well, maybe some brown/red in the bottom corner.

Still haven't figured out what will happen in panel four since my vague plan seems to have run off the rails.  Maybe I'll keep that panel cool also.  Maybe I'll add a fifth panel.  Maybe I'll order another carload of stuff from Fabric.com, which is advertising a special on stripes this week, and the quilt will end up having ten panels.  Of course, the minute I get beyond three the piece outgrows Quilt National, and I have no idea what kind of venue will accept something vastly bigger.

I'll worry about all that when I get there.  Not exactly the thought processes of a control freak.

Photo suite 76 -- blue houses

Art reader's digest

Eva Hesse was one of the most important sculptors of the 1960s, pioneering the use of nonconventional materials such as latex and fiberglass, along with textiles.  (Her early death from a brain tumor might have been related to noxious solvents and fumes used in her work.)  Her close friend Lucy Lippard is a well-known critic and curator.  Lippard is also a staunch feminist, which makes me lift an eyebrow at some of her remarks.  I think in the last 40 years we've gotten less comfortable with generalizations about what women do or feel.

Eva Hesse, no title, 1970, latex, rope, string, wire

from "Eva Hesse," by Lucy Lippard, 1976:

The most salient features of Hesse's art can be related to her fascination with repetition:  "It's not just an esthetic choice," she said.  "If something is absurd it's much more greatly exaggerated if it's repeated.  Repetition does enlarge or increase or exaggerate an idea or purpose.  I guess repetition feels obsessive."  The wrapping and binding and layering process is also repetitive and makes the viewer relive the intensity of the making in a manner far from the abstract or didactiv way in which process is used by most men.

Women are always derogatorily associated with crafts, and have been conditioned towards such chores as tying, sewing, knotting, wrapping, binding, knitting, and so on.  Hesse's art transcends the cliche of  "detail as women's work" while at the same time incorporating these notions of ritual as antidote to isolation and despair.  There is that ritual which allows scope to fantasy, compulsive use of the body accompanied by a freeing of the mind.  The mythical Penelope is always being mentioned pejoratively in regard to art by women.  Yet hers was a positive, not a negative action, despite its impermanence.

The act itself can be known, safe, but the result can be highly unexpected.  Repetition can be a guard gainst vulnerability; a bullet-proof vest of closely knit activity can be woven against fate.  Ritual and repetition are also ways of containing anger, and of fragmenting fearsome wholes.

Hesse used the grid as both a prison and a safeguard against letting an obsessive process or excessive sensitivity run away with her.  Women frequently use rectilinear frameworks to contain organic shapes or mysterious rites of autobiographical content.  An integral part of Hesse's work is that certain pleasure in proving oneself against perfection, or subverting the order that runs the outside world by action in one's inside world, in despoiling neat edges and angles with "home-made" or natural procedures that relate back to one's own body, one's own personal experience.

Eva Hesse, Expanded Expansion, 1969, fiberglass, resin, latex, cheesecloth