Paris Part III: A Quiet End to the Storm

The last day I woke up in the hostel around 9:00 am and grabbed my breakfast and checked out. I headed back into the city and went right to the Grand Palace, since it was the museum I had wanted to see the most but it wasn't included in our Museum Package for the two days. My flight wasn't until 6:00 pm so I set out to enjoy a leisurely day of sightseeing alone (although this time, intentionally).

I arrived at the Grand Palace around 9:30 am and, while enjoying the blasting sounds emanating from my ipod, I waited in line for about an hour plus. Although I am typically the most impatient person, which is saying something since I am already seen as an "impatient-American" when traveling through Europe, I didn't mind the wait and possessed an uncharacteristic calm during my neverending wait.

The Side Entrance to the Grand Palace

The neverending line, snaking down the marble stairs and around the side of the Palace

A fountain out front of the palace

Inside they had an amazing exhibit which showed all of Picasso's masterpieces alongside the masters that inspired him. Throughout Picasso's career, he was inspired by the classical artists of his day, and often did cubist or abstract versions of the classical paintings. Throughout his career, Picasso kept a collection of thousands of postcards and slides of art he admired. But the Spanish master wasn't interested in copying them explicitly. Through sketches, still life paintings, nudes, portraits and early cubist works, the exhibition at Paris' Grand Palais notes connections between the 20th-century Spanish artist and earlier painters, taking up several floors in the giant palace. The exhibition begins with some of Picasso's earliest works, which mirror the realist style of the classical masters. Picasso was a child prodigy and had mastered academic painting and drawing by the age of 14, which leaves me none too surprised that he moved on to the loud and outrageous style of cubism and abstract work during his later years. His versions of the classics (often several versions of them) are hung next to several similar paintings of the masters upon which the paintings were based. Co-curator Anne Baldassari described Picasso as a "cannibal" — he ate up works and let them digest. Then he would produce something entirely his own. It was amazing to see how Picasso could take the most boring, realist piece of work and produce a colorful, screaming abstract piece of work with so much more energy and emotion than the original.

This exhibit holds more than 200 works from Picasso, El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Titian, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Delacroix and Manet, entitled in an otherworldly exhibit entitled "Picasso and the Masters", drawn from public and private collections worldwide (so I guess it helped this exhibit that the other Picasso museum was under renovation and could lends all of its works). News articles and reviews describe the ability of bringing so many masterpieces together in one place -- including Goya’s "La Maya Desnuda", which last left Spain in 1930 -- as a "miracle".
The EUR 4.5-million budget for the show, which runs until 2 February 2009, is one of the largest in French history, with almost a fifth used to insure the paintings, together worth an estimated EUR 2 billion. On our bike tour the guides told us there was actually a huge controversy because they couldn't get enough insurance to cover the artworks because there are so many of the greatest works, that they actually devalued the estimates for the paintings so they could be insured!

Although I wasn't allowed to take any pictures inside, I found some photos online which hopefully will give you an idea of what the exhibit was like:



The Original "Rape of the Sabine Women" painting by Nicholas Poussin
One of Picasso's many reproductions of the work.

The walls were also covered with quotes from Picasso about art, God, or life in general. Here is a sampling of them:

"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. "

"Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it? "

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. "

"Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. "

"Bad artists copy. Good artists steal."

"Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions."


After the exhibit, I grabbed some food and headed back to the Rodin Museum for round 2, where I would hopefully get inside. Oddly enough, the other Rodin Museum is located in Philadelphia, across the street from the foot of our large art museum, and I took a field trip there for art class in high school. Unfortunately, the Rodin museum in Paris (where Rodin was from) was not much bigger. I walked through the museum and revisited the surrounding gardens at a leisurely pace and was still out of there within forty minutes. Some highlights from the Rodin Gardens:







Finally I headed to my last tourist destination for the day: The Eiffel Tower. I wanted to see it during the day since I was told it is so different and uniquely beautiful at either time of the day. I arrived and was surprised to see thousands of people running around in spandex everywhere. Apparently my tourism was coinciding with some 10K race, and unfortunately that meant I had to navigate through thousands of sweaty bodies, all while carrying my giant weekends bag and most likely knocking over exhausted athletes and their supportive children. I think I took a picture of the tower every twenty paces, so to avoid giving you a flip book of my field of vision as I walked, I'll show you a few that turned out pretty nice right before my camera died, drawing an end to my documented weekend:





At least the athletes helped take pictures of me on my solo journey to revisit the Eiffel Tower

View from under the center of the tower.


This ended my tour de France. I returned to the center of the old city and walked around through the Latin district, letting myself get lost and found again. I enjoyed an early dinner at another Kebab restaurant and took my time locating a metro and getting back to the airport.

I was definitely surprised by how much I liked Paris. Like most red-blooded Americans, I assumed I would hate Paris and find the people horrible, the food disgusting, and the atmosphere pretentious and uninviting. As much as I tried to dislike France, all of my preconceptions were proved false and Paris has become one of my new favorite cities.