Glimpses of Parisian Architecture

I was in the tourist zone of Paris 19-21 June and took photos of some buildings I noticed while going about the sightseeing rounds.

Something I like regarding Paris, Prague, Vienna and a few other large European cities is that their central areas have few imposing modernist buildings -- policies are that such structures are relegated to peripheral zones. Your tastes may vary, but I find that modernist building are not very interesting to look at, whereas more traditional architecture often is a visual feast.

The well-kept and well-policed Paris tourist zone extends for a mile or so on either side of the River Seine from near the Eiffel Tower downstream to the vicinity of the Lyon and Austerlitz railroad terminals upstream. The main large modernist structures in that zone are the Tour Montparnasse, Opéra de Paris Bastille and the Centre Pompidou, all a ways away from where four-star tourist attractions are found.

So, "just because," here are some photos I took and didn't even bother to crop or digitally manipulate.

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Rue Grégoire de Tours
Let's start here on the northern segment of the rue. That's my wife impatiently waiting for me to get moving. First, we'll look at the domed building in the background.

117 boulevard Saint-Germain
Did I just say "visual feast?" Well, this segment of a larger building offers a feast of details that don't quite reach rococo levels. Check out that golden shield near the bottom of the image.

Rue Vaugirard et rue Monsieur-le-Prince
Now we're heading up the hill towards the Jardin du Luxembourg. I don't have an address for this building with its whiff of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, but it's on the southeast corner of the intersection.

1 avenue de l'Observatoire
Seen from the Jardin using a telephoto zoom. That interesting dark gray appendage might be a decorative cover for chimneys. In any case, it stands above the rooflines of sourrounding buildings and caught my attention.

Église Saint-Sulpice
The cathedral in Chartres isn't the only large church in France with mis-matched towers. Heading down the hill from the Luxembourg is the Saint-Sulpice, where one tower was rebuilt and the other was left as it was, as is noted here.

Institut de France
Another interesting dome as seen from near the lower end of the rue de Seine.

Musée du Louvre - lobby area under I.M. Pei's pyramid
The Louvre attracts immense crowds during tourist season, so Pei's modern entry area that's mostly buried in one of the palace's courtyards was a necessity. Key is the buried part. Had this complex been at ground level, it would have destroyed the Louvre as an architectural composition. As can be seen in the photo, the interior space has no particular distinction. Moreover, it can be a bit confusing, though not so much as the rest of the Louvre.

Montmartre - steps leading up to the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur
I find the interaction of the stoned planes, the rounded building corner and the stairway interesting.

Gallerie Clairidge, 74 avenue des Champes-Élysées
There is a modern building that can be glimpsed immediately uphill from this very Parisian edifice. Which do you prefer to look at?

Guerlain, 68 avenue des Champs-Élysées
Two door away is Guerlain's building. Beyond is yet another modern one that has more detailing than the modern building in the previous photo. Even so, Guerlain's shames it.

La Tour d'Argent
Finally, back along the Seine is one of Paris' top restaurants, the Tour d'Argent (Silver Tower). As this mentions, the restaurant and building are old, but the top floor with the large windows was added in 1936. I didn't eat here because I can't afford the food and probably wouldn't like it either. Plus, it was closed the day I took the photo.

Steinlen's Cats at the Musée de Montmartre

Paris' Musée de Montmartre is a place worth visiting for those interested in the Parisian art world of, say, 1880-1920 and even into the 1930s. On display October 17th, 2014 to September 13th, 2015 is an exhibit titled "The Spirit of Montmartre and Modern Art, 1875 - 1910" featuring posters, paintings and such for that era and locale.

The museum website exhibitions page link is here, but as of late July 2015 (when this post was being drafted) it consists of a scroll containing present, future and past exhibits with no links to archived items. Therefore, below is the English text for reference in case the web page is changed in the future:

* * * * *
The Exhibition "The Spirit of Montmartre and Modern Art" invites you to discover the radical and anti-establishment philosophy of artists living and/or working in Montmartre at the turn of the XIXth century. Spotlighting the Incohérents, the Hydropathes, Fumisme, the Quat’z’Arts cabaret and the Vache Enragée processions, the exhibition presents the importance of Montmartre as the centre of the Parisian avant-garde. 200 archival items and 150 works of art from the Museum’s collection as well as from public and private collections, document the means of artistic expression of this vibrant period of art: visual puns, satire and caricature -developed often in the ephemeral media of posters-, journal and book illustrations, song sheets and shadow theatre productions. These documents depict Montmartre’s streets, cabarets, café-concerts, circus and theaters, all of which played an important part in the artistic life of the Butte.

"The Spirit of Montmartre and Modern Art, 1875 - 1910" will be displayed in the Hôtel Demarne, as the inaugural exhibition of this new space.

* * * * *
The present post features some photos I took of exhibit items by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923) whose Wikipedia entry is here. It seems that Steinlen really liked cats, and he liked the Montmartre nightspot called Le Chat Noir, as we shall see below.

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The famous Chat Noir poster by Steinlen, 1896. I include this to set the scene for the images below.

Below are the two panels of Chats et lunes ("Cats and Moons," ca. 1885). I don't have background information regarding them.

First panel.

Second panel.

L'Apothéose du chats - 1884
Atop the pyramid of cats in "The Apotheosis of Cats" sits the black cat, le chat noir. This painting was made for the second location of the cabaret on what then was rue Laval.

Museum website image of L'Apothéose du chats. Photos taken by people like me in museums are seldom very good due to lighting conditions, which is why I include this better-controlled version.

Rentrée du soir - 1897
By Steinlen, but not exactly of a cat. The museum translates the title as "Going Home in the Evening."

Suzanne Valadon's (Restored) Studio

The previous post featured photos I took last week in the Musée de Montmartre of a "restoration" of the apartment of artist/model Suzanne Valadon who lived in the main building for a time. This post deals with the "restoration" of her studio.

As previously noted, I put the word restoration in quotation marks because, as this link indicates (scroll down), the project completed last year based on work by Hubert Le Gall contains almost none of Valadon's actual possessions, which presumably have been lost for years. Instead, Gall relied on Valadon's paintings and a few photos to reconstruct the setting as best he could.

Below are some photos taken of Valadon in an atelier setting, though not necessarily in the building at 12 rue Cortot in Paris' XVIII arrondissement. These are followed by a few of my snapshots.

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Suzanne Valadon at her easel.

Studio view: the painting of flowers is also in photos of mine, below.  Her husband, André Utter, also used this studio and some of the paintings might have been his.

Suzanne, her son Maurice Utrillo, and André Utter.

Vadadon, Utter and Utrillo.

Painting of Sacré-Coeur by Utrillo on far wall.

Suzanne Valadon's (Restored) Apartment

I returned from Europe last week bearing pixels of this and that, including photos taken in the Musée de Montmartre of a "restoration" of the apartment of artist/model Suzanne Valadon who lived in the main building for a time.

I put the word restoration in quotation marks because, as this link indicates (scroll down), the project completed last year based on work by Hubert Le Gall contains almost none of Valadon's actual possessions, which presumably have been lost for years. Instead, Gall relied on Valadon's paintings and a few photos to reconstruct the setting as best he could.

Nevertheless, I found it interesting. Some photos I took are below.

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Yr. Obedient Blogger at work.

Self-portrait done in 1883.

Portrait of her son, Maurice Utrillo on wall.

Painting of the nearby Sacré-Coeur by Utrillo in the studio room.

One-Work Artists

The title of this post does not refer to artists who created only one work in their careers. Instead, it has to do with artists who suffer the fate of being known to the general public for one really famous work. Often, the public at large will know of the work of art, yet cannot recall the name of the artist who made it.

I can't make up my mind as to whether or not this is a good thing. Many artists would be perfectly happy to have become famous or to have painted a famous painting. Others might prefer to be known for their career-wide accomplishments. Few, I would think, would rather remain essentially unknown.

Artists known for a number of their works where none looms over the rest include Rembrandt, Velázquez, David, Monet and Picasso, to name but a few.

Below are examples of famous paintings that, in my judgment, tended to overshadow the artist's other works. They are arranged alphabetically by the artist's name.

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September Morn - 1912
By Paul Émile Chabas (1869-1937).

Mona Lisa - ca. 1506
By Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519).

LOVE (print) - 1965
By Robert Indiana (b. 1928).

Washington Crossing the Delaware
By Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868).

Sunday on the Grande Jatte - 1884-86
By Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891).

Portrait of George Washington (unfinished) - 1796
By Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828).

American Gothic - 1930
By Grant Wood (1891-1942).

Sam Francis: A More Structured Pollock

Sam Francis (1923-1994) was a painter and printmaker whose career was largely based in California and to a lesser extent in Japan and Europe. Biographical information can be found here at Wikipedia.

The link (as of mid-May 2015) mentions that "Francis was initially influenced by the work of abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still. He later became loosely associated with a second generation of abstract expressionists, including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, who were increasingly interested in the expressive use of color."

That influence must have been indirect, because Francis apparently did not spend much time in New York City, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism and other modernist abstract painting schools. I suggest that he was also influenced by Jackson Pollock of drip painting fame. A photo (below) shows Francis in his studio with paint pots and canvases covering the floor Pollock-style.

Whereas Francis' paintings often featured drips of paint and running paints, they often didn't have the entire surface covered, as was Pollock's classical case. Segments of paintings were left blank, with the result that the images appeared to have greater structure than the typical Pollock wall-to-wall swirls of drip. The white backgrounds Francis used also served to highlight his selection of colors -- typically bright and cheerful.

I rate Sam Francis as an interesting footnote to an artistic school whose time has long passed and whose goals make far less sense now than they did when new.

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Self-Portrait - 1974

Sam Francis in his studio
Sorry, but I don't have a source for this photo.

unknown title

Untitled watercolor - 1958

Untitled (from Pasadena Box) - 1963

Untitled

Up Close; McClelland Barclay (Again)

I visited the fabulous Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida near the end of April. Besides aircraft, the museum displays aviation-related artwork, including that of McClelland Barclay (1891–1943). As this mentions, Barclay was a highly successful commercial artist who became an active-duty naval officer in 1940, illustrating posters and other war-related work. He died when his ship was sunk in the South Pacific.

Two years ago, I wrote an Up Close post dealing with Barclay. Having the chance to photograph another original of his work, I'm pleased to provide a second Barclay Up Close here.

As is usually the case with this sort of photo, lighting conditions are not ideal; here the main light source strongly shines from above the painting. This has one advantage, namely that the impasto in this painting is better highlighted. Also keep in mind that poster art usually works best where images are simplified, so the example below is more simply done than the advertising image featured in my previous Barclay post.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Here's an establishing view of the poster art.  The aircraft appears to be a trainer (note the flimsy windscreen), yet it isn't painted yellow, as were Navy training planes around 1940.  The ship in the background seems to be a battleship rather than an aircraft carrier.  But Barclay had to adjust reality in order to maximize poster conventions.  A yellow airplane would grossly interfere with the composition and message.  The battleship superstructure is useful for its symbolism of the U.S. Navy.

A detailed view of a pilot who might be a aviation cadet along with a lieutenant wearing pilot's wings on his uniform.