Nelson, I have something for you!

Short explanation for everyone else: Around the time I first went to Madrid – early 2015 –, I had recognised a problem regarding museum visits. I would be captivated by a few pictures that I'd talk about for hours, and then I'd forget them. On that particular trip I thus started to make notes, and ever since when returning from an exhibition I'd have scribbled down typically between two and ten highlights.

[caption id="attachment_799" align="alignright" width="697"] Moreau's "Apparition", 1876. There are a great many paintings by him using a rather conventional style, but also grand exceptions like this one. The seemingly intricate architecture in the background consists really just of rather graphical lines on an almost amorphous background.[/caption]

Here now the harvest from my short sojourn in France in the first half of July. Last time the Louvre jealously demanded all available time for itself, this time I let it be and ventured into the Musées d'Orsay and Moreau instead. The latter concerns itself with the symbolist Gustave Moreau. I went there with a worsening headache and couldn't fully appreciate the twenty St. Sebastians and thirty Salomes – there are, however, outstanding specimens. The hanging is so that every square centimetre of Moreau's apartment is covered by paintings and drawings, the amount alone is overwhelming. I'm certain to not have discovered every single worthwhile bit, perhaps not even a majority, but sure took my time for the drawing cabinets. You can flip through a great lot of hinged frames at the sidelines of the former grand atelier, probably there are between 500 and 1000 sheets within and they are a tremendous treasure if you want to research academic drawing. The unusual thing isn't that they exist, but that they are so easily accessible.

Musée d'Orsay

A few days later, this establishment yielded an unusually large number of highlights. They'll give you a good idea of how my list is usually developing: There are some curiosities, some paintings that are only interesting because of some particular quirk that warrants further research, some great masterpieces that reduce you to tears when standing in front of them – and some very obvious jewels of the collection might be missing. For example, there's no van Gogh here. In cyclists' jargon this is a Mona Lisa: Something that's drawing all the annoying visitors to one room in the museum (or, in a more metaphorical sense, any other building, or city or region), leaving a bit more space to breathe in rest of the premises. There are just too many tourists in the van Gogh rooms to grasp more than a fleeting glance before being pushed aside by a British school class, run over by retired Chinese and shoved down the staircase by a voluminous American rear side. To see the Mona Lisas it's necessary to be there precisely at opening time and even then it's still a race.

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[caption id="attachment_778" align="aligncenter" width="697"] Gustave Courbet: A funeral in Ornans, 1850.[/caption]

Ornans lay very close to our route from Besançon to Pontarlier, we did, however, not venture there. This painting is one of those in this museums I consider the really grand works. The scene: A funeral in Courbet's rural hometown. Revolutionary at the time for the proportion between a very profane subject and its tremendous size – 3 m x 7 m. It was Courbet's first grand format and provoked a grand scandal right away. All rules, today forgotten but then well-codified, of academism had been wilfully broken. The mass of mourners is so little idealised that people took them for caricatures (Gustave Moreau's pictures, painted decades later, are very conservative in this aspect and show nothing but perfect Greek profiles). No traces of pathos could be found: Even the grief inherent in the scene seems to be quite ephemeral. The craftsmen will get back to work after the burial, the women need to take care of the kids, priest and choirboys do their business and no more. Look at these characters: People don their finest dresses, but it's a village, the fineness of these dresses is quite limited. No figure is highlighted, none seems to have a special significance – another classical way that Courbet chose to not tread on. This is one of the ancestors of a grand old realistic branch in painting. I would right away suggest a close relationship to Grützke's Members of Parliament more than a hundred years later.

Are you missing the impressionists for whom the museum is so famous? Dommage: Regardless of how big that space was, the Mona Lisa effect was still markedly present. But moreover I did so much research on the painting techniques downstairs, represented in this sample here, that the completely different impressionism would have thrown me completely off the track: I simply didn't pay that much attention. All this is for another visit. Likewise what all the research has been for is for another post, set to come up much sooner than the next trip to Paris. Stay tuned!

Marseille

A few kilometres further south there's more sun and fewer paintings. The Musée de Beaux-Arts, housed in one wing of the purpose-built Palais Longchamp, has a smaller collection than some Northern towns a tenth the size of Marseille – all is centralised in France, art included, and that's why you can spend day after day without ever leaving Orsay and Louvre (both of which could, as hinted at, easily be split into several still coherent institutions).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="3456"] Palais Longchamp – photo by Georges Seguin[/caption]

Hence I'm set to include my highlights from there, exactly because they are so few and thus far more representative of a typical visit.

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As a bonus, have one of Moreau's takes on Leda. This swan is not a fucking joker, he means serious business and if you don't stay away it's all your fault.