The Battle of the Louvre

When you are in Paris, you have to go to the Louvre.  So I gathered my courage, because the crowds can be enormous.  So off I went.  (Vera was working on her paper for the conference, and stayed in our hotel room.)   After fighting my way through the security lines, past a shopping mall with a Starbucks and an Apple store, I arrived at the very long lines to buy tickets.  When I finally got in, I had the idea to visit the new Islamic collection installation; but I couldn't find it on the map, so I decided, when in doubt, go find the Vermeers.  But the Dutch and Flemish collections were closed on Thursdays; so somehow I ended up in Napoleon III's apartments, where the excess of glitter and gold could put the Russian Czars to shame:

Underneath a chandelier:

I ended up wandering through endless rooms of excessive numbers of French paintings.

At least I went through a room with a ceiling painted by Braque:

(I must be looking up to avoid looking at the paintings...)


Finally, I got to the Islamic collection, which is housed in a new area created in a courtyard, which looks like this from above:

Under the roof:

The collection proved to be very interesting; no pictures of important people...   I was especially intrigued by these doors, made out of a kind of mosaic of different kinds of wood.  The were done in Egypt in the 14th century:

Later edit: Today, in the paper, it was announced that the Louvre had been shut down for a day, because the people working there were being harassed by the large number of pickpockets who buy their ticket to the Louvre, go in, and do their pickpocketing, and get mad if someone interferes.  

Later, I took the metro to the Marais, and ended up in my favorite Metro station.

I saw a show at a gallery of works by a Chinese artist, who does some kind of photo montages that create a merger between traditional landscape paintings and modern Chinese cities:

Finally, we had dinner with some Romanian friends in an impossibly overdecorated turn of the century restaurant, Brasserie Julien, in the 10th ar.

La Defense, Parc St. Cloud

Yesterday I went to both La Defense and Parc St. Cloud; two examples of French constructions on the grand scale.  La Defense, a forest of skyscrapers on the western edge of Paris, was conceived as a place where there could be high-rise buildings outside of the center of Paris.  It is mostly drab and ugly, but the Grande Arche building, constructed in a direct line connecting to the Arc de Triumphe, is a mesmerizing construction

There are also some very odd things around like this truly large finger, about 100 feet high

From there I took a tram to the Parc St. Cloud.  This park was one of the favorite subjects of the photographer Atget, who created many memorable photographs of the park in the 1920's.
The park was designed by LeNotre on a grand geometric scale; the chateau that went with it was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871.  The park features both long vistas and a number of statues; the statues being frequently in a state of decay.

Vistas and cone-shaped trees:

Before I did all this, I went to the Museé Cernuschi to see an exhibit of art from Shanghai in the period 1840-1920, when artists in Shanghai were confronted by the impact of modern trends in Western Art.  There were a number of fascinating, almost quasi-abstract painted works.   I don't know very much about Chinese art, but even I could see the extent to which the artists were overturning age-old rules of how something should be depicted.  The museum itself is in a beautiful mansion in Paris's 8th Ar., an area I read about in Edmund de Waal's fascinating book, "The Hare with the Amber Eyes", a story about, among other things, a rise and decline of the very wealthy Ephrussi family, who started out in Odessa, and established themselves in both Vienna and Paris in the 1870's.

While I was walking in this area, I heard a car horn honk, and two people in a car started waving at me frantically, as if they were happy to see someone they knew very well.   I had no idea who they were, and I tried to convey this to them, but they continued in their enthusiasm.   Do I have a double in Paris?