Art that sweeps away the dust from the soul

Inside the one of the Orangerie's Monet rooms

Commeth the hour, commeth the artist. Saturday dawned in Paris with the expectation of solid rain, but it proved to be reluctant to pitch it down as forecast.

The Other Half went off to hunt for a jacket in one of Paris’s great department stores, while I went to see a woman about a watch on the Ile St Louis.

Grande Nature morte, Picasso

Meeting up again later, we decided to take the opportunity afforded by the continuing dry weather to head down toward the Tuileries, taking a stroll down the Rue du Rivoli.

When we were most of the way there, the rain decided to fall. Fortunately, we were near to the road and to a rather smart-looking eatery with an unsmart name – The Welcome Café.

Since lunch was required, we sat down under the colonnade to wait out the shower with food.

Paul Guillaume by Modigliani

And very pleasant it was too, with both of us opting for an omelette with girolles, which came garnished with chervil, flat leaf parsley and chives, and was washed down with a glass of Chardonnay from the south west of the country.

For all that the establishment was clearly catering largely for a tourist clientele, the kitchen did not make the error of turning the lightly-beaten egg into something solid and dry, but had clearly cooked it for only a minute at the most.

Mrs David would have approved. I most certainly did.

And so to the Musée de l’Orangerie.

Originally built in 1852 to shelter the garden’s orange trees, it later metamorphosed into a temporary display space, before being assigned to house Monet’s eight monumental Nymphéas canvases in 1922, following the suggestion of the artist’s friend, Georges Clémenceau. It opened to the public in 1927.

Paul Guillaume by Derain

In the basement, the gallery houses the Paul Guillaume colllection of late 19th century and early 20th century paintings.

It’s an extraordinary collection by the dealer, including a large number of Renoirs – this was the point at which The Other Half decided we’d seen more of his works than you “could throw a chocolate box at” – plus plenty of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and others.

Of the ‘others”, this was when at which I concluded that Andre Derain really is overrated – a dilettante, hopping from style to style to style.

Two canvases of harlequins seem to illustrate the point – he simply couldn't make up his mind what he was seeking.

The Matisse works are not his best – being from the ‘awkward’ Nice period, which left his disciples angry and bewildered, as he tried to find his way to the next stage in his artistic journey – but they’re still worth seeing (obviously).

Three Sisters (1917), Matisse

And much the same can be said of the Picasso works there, although a Blue Period couple hugging was well worth seeing, as was a still life, Grande Nature morte (1916-17) that was genuinely Cubist.

There was a sprinkling of Modiglianis – my favourite being a 1915 portrait of Guillaume himself, which knocked one of the same subject by Derain, from 1920, into a cocked hat.

The Other Half was particularly fascinated to discover works by Chaïm Soutine, whose work helped to build the bridge between traditional approaches and expressionist ones.

Le Village (1923) gives an idea of how Soutine viewed the chaos of the modern world, but his portraits are equally interesting, including Le Garçon d’étage (1925).

There are also a number of works by Maurice Utrillo – one of the few famous painters of Montmartre who was actually born there (and died there too).

Le Village, Soutine

We particularly liked La Maison Bernot (1924).

So much for the basement – and well worth the price of admission on its own.

But the two vast, oval rooms that house those Monet canvases, painted in an attempt to find something that would soothe people’s spirits after WWI, are in a different league again.

As I’ve noted previously, I was never particularly ‘in to’ Monet, but these extraordinary canvases made me think again.

Perhaps my lack of interest in them previously was because I’d only seen some of the smaller waterlily paintings in the National Gallery, where the rooms tend to be crowded and you don’t easily get the chance to spend time with the works.

Le Garçon d'étage, Soutine

The Orangerie concentrates the mind.

As you enter the first room, a notice asks you politely to “enjoy quietly”.

And that is precisely what is needed, and the staff enforce it – particularly welcome when a family behind us at one stage decided to start a row about whether they were going back to their hotel or not.

Benches allow you to sit and contemplate the works, and the light and the colour make it easy to get lost in them as they take on a life of their own.

There is something extraordinarily ‘spiritual’ about these works: time spent with them seems to produce something akin to a religious experience.

And it is entirely true to say that their beauty has a soothing quality.

La Maison Bernot, Utrillo

Generally, people are quiet, although an element of disruption can still occur around you. I found it useful to try to ‘play’ Debussy’s Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune to myself in my mental concert hall, and it certainly helped to clear the mind.

Monet died before the Orangerie opened for the first time to display these works.

But these career-ending and defining works, inspired by his garden at Giverny and executed as he struggled with cataracts, go well beyond being simple decoration.

Nymphéas detail, Monet

In the summer of 1931, Amédée Ozenfant, the French Cubist painter, writer and co-founder, with Le Corbusier, of the Purist movement, noted in his journal:

“Monet devoted his last years to the poetic series of the Nymphéas ... I found myself taking off my hat.

“When an experience provokes such a decisive reflex, there is no doubt about it; the work is a strong and elevated one.

“In spite of this apparent superficiality, Monet, like Matisse, attained results as elevated as certain severe works.

“The chapel-like presentation, the submarine light, contribute to this strong impression: but, all the same, Monet had something to do with it.”

Or to put it another way, they also put me in mind of Picasso’s comment, that “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”.

My view of Monet is changed beyond recognition.

Modern art in its pomp, I do like

Les Quatre Races, Ozenfant

Another day, another gallery. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, since we took a day off on the Thursday, heading for the Jardin des Plantes to amble among flower beds and the menagerie (I saw a baby vulture!), enjoy a decent lunch and, frankly, get absolutely toasted in the glorious sunshine.

But with rain promised for the Friday, we had planned for the Pompidou, which was a mere 10 minutes away on foot from the garret.

There was no need to fret about queues: a relatively short one disappeared quickly within minutes of the centre opening its doors at 11am, while we sat opposite supping coffees at a café.

Europe, de la Serna

On our previous visit, we’d seen an exhibition on architect Richard Rodgers, who had co-designed the Pompidou itself, and had also taken in some of the most modern exhibits.

Now to be quite frank, I have little memory of what we saw of the latter – other than a Jackson Pollock – because my feet were in the process of murdering me.

So this time, I was determined to see the key collection covering the 70 years of the 20th century.

Thus we headed to the top of the building to find ourselves at the start of a walk into artistic modernity.

It begins with two works by artists previously unknown to me.

First, straight ahead as you enter, is Les Quatre Races, a vast piece by Amédée Ozenfant from 1928, which uses highly simplified human forms and interesting, architectural textures to create an optimistic view of a post-WWI future.

Girl With a Black Cat, Matisse

The architectural aspect is not surprising when you read that Ozenfant was, with Le Corbusier, a co-founder of the Purist movement.

However, we then find Ismaël de la Serna’s Europe – painted in around 1935, as Spain was on the cusp of the civil war – and this is something altogether less hopeful: a view of a continent being handed, once again, to death.

It’s a disturbing canvas, brilliantly executed.

Beyond that, one of the next things to see was a Matisse canvas – Girl With a Black Cat (1910), which was posed by his daughter, Marguerite, and had been in a private collection until last year.

And through a door next to it was an entire room – albeit a small one – full of nothing but works by Matisse, including Portrait of Auguste Pellerin II (1916-17) and Portrait de Greta Prozor (1916).

Femme nue couché, Picasso

Beyond that was a larger room, hung on one long wall with a couple of dozen paintings, like the rooms of early 20th-century Parisian collectors such as the Steins.

High up were a couple of works by artists who were very clearly trying to emulate Matisse and, in effect, reproduce the likes of Luxe, Calme et Volupté and others.

The colours merely managed to look garish – providing an excellent illustration of just how good Matisse really was.

We avoided the one tour party that was breezing through and then enjoyed another Matisse.

Still Life With Arums & Mirror, de Lempicka

Luxe I, which was painted in 1907, provided an opportunity to appreciate what I’d learned when reading Hilary Spurling’s excellent Matisse biography.

In this case, the hills in the background are those marking the south of Collioure, while it was painted in the hills above the village, beyond the railway line, because the rather religious inhabitants would not have been impressed by nude models.

Moving through initial rooms, the art gradually abstracted, while The Other Half got vaguely excited by a replica of the Tatlin Tower.

And since the museum was so generally quiet, it was with great pleasure that we able to sit down and contemplate Picasso’s Femme nue couchée (1936) without interruption for some time.

Perhaps I’m wrong or simply linking the blue of the Blue Period rather too greatly with Picasso’s entire oeuvre, but the green background seemed to lend the work a very different tone to many of those I’ve seen.

The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, Dix

Since you cannot go wrong with a spot of Art Deco, I also enjoyed seeing works by Tamara de Lempicka, and while the portrait style might be familiar, It was nice to see Still Life with Arums and Mirror (1938), which showed the style in a less-familiar way.

We also found Otto Dix’s iconic and absolutely wonderful Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden from 1926, which seems to so utterly represent the Weimar period that it’s no surprise that it was recreated fleetingly in the opening titles of the 1972 film of Cabaret.

Henry Valensi’s Symphonie verte from 1935 and Symphonie vitale from 1952 are both non-figurative canvases that I took to instantly, simply because he makes the colours work so well.

These were works that further increase the question in my own mind of just what constitutes ‘art’, and I see no reason why decorative works are not, in some minds, considered as highly as figurative.

Symphonie Verte, Valensi

We found a Max Beckmann – an artist we’d first really encountered at a Tate Modern exhibition some years ago – and Édouard Pignon, whose paintings we’d discovered at the Museum of Modern Art in Collioure, just last summer.

If there was a disappointment, it was that we didn't see any of the Centre’s works by Léopold Survage – but you can't have everything.

In another gallery, we came across an industrial scene by Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881-1949), a French fashion illustrator and society portraitist.

View of Pont-Aven, de Monvel

His View of Pont-Aven (1928) is hardly an obvious fit with that sort of portfolio, but it is a striking image that made me think of Metropolis. It has an interesting perspective and use of angles that creates movement in an apparently deserted – dehumanised – industrial landscape.

In the same room were two canvases by Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994), an American painter whose work focused particularly on landscapes during the Dust Bowl, with an ecological message at its core.

Drought Survivors from 1936 has a naive style that completely belies its theme, with signs of man-made life dead or rusting as the man-made ecological disaster rolls in.

Petrol in the Dunes (1944) may not have the same immediately haunting impact, but it’s still a striking and impressive work with the same underlying ethos.

Drought Survivors, Hogue

The entire floor has been recast in recent years under a heading of ‘multiple modernities’, which seeks to explore modern art from across the world and also by there: there is, for instance, a room dedicated to anti-fascist art.

Tarsila do Amaral – usually known simply as Tarsila – is considered one of the most important figures in Brazilian art.

Her A cuca (1924) is another deceptively naïve work, but stays in the mind – and is certainly shown off particularly well in a snakeskin frame that was made especially for it at the time.

A cuca, Tarsila

The way in which the works have been organised does create surprises.

It was more than a tad unexpected to round one corner and find yet another Matisse – this time, Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925-26), which presented an opportunity to look at how the artist incorporated his love of decorative fabrics into his own works.

Brought up in a weaving area of northern France, Matisse later collected and carried around with him snippets of fabric that he had spotted and liked.

The final corridor, which takes you back to where you started, brings with it several pleasures – not least, Picasso’s Woman in a Turkish Turban (1955) and Giorgio di Chirico’s Il Ritornante (1918), which has all the typical strangeness of that painter’s metaphysical works.

Il Ritornante, de Chirico

Unfortunately, the light from the windows makes it difficult to really see one of Dalí’s myriad masturbation paintings. Perhaps that was a deliberate little joke on the subject matter?

And to finish, a pair of Chagall’s, one of which, Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1918) showed him ‘riding’ on the shoulders of his wife as way of showing how she made him feel.

We were delighted to be able to ‘get’ it without looking at the labels, on the basis of what we’d discovered at last year’s Liverpool Tate exhibition.

The Pompidou serves up a wonderful walk through the first 70 years of the 20th century – and three hours had been whiled away so easily and pleasantly.

And it also leaves the visitor with plenty to think about.

Portrait With a Glass of Wine, Chagall

To talk of ‘modern art’ is, really, such a dreadfully clumsy way of indiscriminately lumping together myriad different styles and approaches to myriad different subjects and questions.

That might not be what the Pompidou was attempting specifically to address with its exhibition title of ‘multiple modernities,’ but it is certainly one way of looking at such a wide range of artistic endeavour over almost three quarters of a century.

Picking just a handful of pictures of the works we saw to illustrate this post is evidence of the breath of ‘modern art’ – and that doesn’t even bring us slap bang up to date.

By the time we were ready to conclude our visit, we’d not seen anywhere near all the exhibits, but I had reached a point of recognising a Rothko but feeling no great need to go and examine it in detail. 

But while a stand-alone trip is hardly problematic, a visit to the Pompidou is a perfect way to continue an exploration of the modern that began with some of the art that’s on display in the Musée d’Orsay, given that Manet is seen as the painter who began ‘modern art’.

The gallery that leaves a big impression

Bal du Moulin de la Galette, Renoir

The original gallery plan for our Paris week had been to take in the Musée d’Orsay on the Tuesday and the Pompidou on the Friday – primarily to tally with forecasts for rather damper weather.

But after Tuesday’s thwarted effort to make it inside, we headed back to the Orsay early on Wednesday morning, crossing our fingers and hoping it would be third time lucky.

Having quaffed coffee and croissants at a café opposite, and still ensuring that we were only about fifth and sixth in the queue for our kind of pre-bought tickets, we finally made it beyond the portals – and then spent a very pleasant three hours exploring its treasures.

Evening Prayer in the Sahara, Guillaumet

The Orsay is most famous for it’s world-beating collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works, but there’s far more to it than that.

A beautiful space in a building that was formerly a railway station, an initial stroll through the centre of the ground floor gives you a great sense of context, with a plethora of the sort of rather staid, classically-styled sculpture that was sanctified by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the body that held a vice-like grip on the country’s art.

L'Absinthe, Degas

It provides a valuable background against which to understand the radicalism of the Impressionists and other artists from the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th.

But before we got to the Impressionists came other galleries.

There were two rooms of Second Empire furniture and decorative arts, which were frankly hilarious in their utterly over-the-top quality – not least in the sheer farcicality of representations of Napoleon III as a Ceasar.

But another two rooms contained fascinating works by the Orientalists – an entire movement I had never come across.

The antithesis of present-day demonisation of Muslims and Arabs as a whole, it was fascinating to see how artists had explored and then portrayed the exoticism of the Middle East and North Africa.

Gustave Guillaumet’s Evening Prayer in the Sahara, from 1863, is a fascinating picture with beautiful light.

Olympia, Manet

And Café in Adalia, by Charles Emile de Tournemine (1856) is another really interesting work.

Heading upwards to the top floor for the main course, we were fortunate that, even through the crowds had headed there first, the place wasn’t overwhelmingly full.

There was no lack of things to enjoy among the Impressionists.

For me, these included L’Absinthe by Degas (1875-76), a painting that scandalised in its day, both in France and when shown in England, for its portrayal of characters who could be – and were – damned as  ‘dissolute’.

Les Coquelicots: Environs D'Argenteuil, Monet

Quite differently, although I’m generally not particularly fond of Degas’s ballet paintings, Dance Class at the Opera (1873-76) is a pleasure to behold, while Dancers Climbing the Stairs (1886-90) provides an object lesson in just what a difference a quirky perspective can make.

The Luncheon on the Grass (1862-3) and Olympia (1863) by Manet also both shocked in their day, and while it may seem difficult to comprehend that now, it’s worth remembering particularly that the directness of the women’s gaze was a prime cause of the scandal.

It was a pleasure to see works by Manet again – some of them for the second time – after last year’s exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.

Flood at Port-Marly, Sisley

But on the other hand, I’ve never held much of a candle for Monet. That would change dramatically later in the week, but in the meantime, Les Coquelicots: Environs D’Argenteuil (1873) proved lovely, and Rouen Cathedral paintings provided a greater insight into how he conveyed light.  

And at least I’m getting better at unmuddling by Manets and my Monets.

Mind, by the end of the week, The Other Half was declaring that we’d “seen more Renoir than you could throw a chocolate box at”, and I am bound to think that that was an excellent way to put it.

When I was studying art history for A’level, one of the first Impressionists that I liked was Renoir. But in recent years, I’ve found him far too … well, chocolate boxy.

The Card Players, Cézanne

Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) restored my faith to an extent – the dappling light on the boaters, for instance, is lovely – but Les Baigneuses from 1918-19 reminded me exactly why it’s a long time since he was a personal favourite.

We missed out on the van Goghs and the Gauguins, as those were in a separate exhibition while their usual rooms are being restored.

However, one of the revelations of the visit was discovering Walter Sisley, whose works I was only slightly familiar with.

Yes, Britain really did manage to produce one world-class Impressionist – even if was born in Paris to British parents, and didn’t live very long on this side of the Channel, but let’s sketch over such facts.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté, Matisse

The d’Orsay has 46 Sisleys: I was particularly taken with Flood at Port-Marly from 1876 and Regatta at Molesey (1874).

Although I found myself surprised that Cézanne was included within the general gallery of Impressionists, it was, as always, good to see more of his work, and one of his six versions of The Card Players (1894-95) is wonderful.

And there’s nothing wrong with a Cézanne still life or two either.

But one of the great personal joys of the visit was turning a corner in one of the later, post-Impressionist galleries, to find Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté from 1904, the year before he and Collioure collided in the explosion that gave birth to Fauvism.

Art Nouveau room

With crowds at a minimum, I had time to stand back and admire – and then to get up close to really see the precision of the brush work.

This was the start of his moving away from pointillism and divisionism, and it’s fascinating to see how he set out to capture the light in comparison to how the Impressionists had done so.

One of the things with Matisse is that the colours really shouldn’t work. But you realise on seeing some other artists who tried but couldn’t do the same thing, just how – almost magically – Matisse made them work.

There was plenty more sculpture upstairs – including several by Rodin, together with works by Camille Claudel.

Monument to Cézanne, (1912) Maillol

We were also delighted to find a number of works by Aristide Maillol, the sculptor from Banyuls-sur-Mer, just south of Collioure, whose large bronze figures, classical, yet simplifying the human form, are considered to be a precursor to works by the likes of Henry Moore.

And it would be remiss of me not to mention the absolutely stunning Art Nouveau room.

So, another day, another gallery. How do you follow that?

As it happened, we ambled up to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where we sat and roasted ourselves in fabulous sunshine.

More art would have to wait for the promised rain.