Musee D'Orsay

Today found us back in Paris visiting the Musee D'Orsay. Musee D'Orsay is a museum that is slightly less famous than the big brother Le Louvre across the river, but also slightly less ancient, much easier to navigate, and perhaps even a bit more fun.


The museum itself is an old train station which was almost torn down till someone came up with the idea to plop a bunch of art in it. A good idea, I feel. The station gives it a very open, light feel, and was much easier for our simple square American minds to get around. Plus it was pretty in there. We sat down to take it all in when we first arrived, and here Sawyer is dictating the plan of how we will attack this museum. Down the right is the conservative art, basically just lots of pasty white naked people in paintings and sculptures. On the left side is the radical stuff that fought against the noble french art scene of some century a long time ago. There you can find paintings of people who aren't naked (like the one below), paintings that don't even have people in them, and paintings with some naked people and some not (which I'm told was shocking at the time and considered disgusting, but went to show everyone that their total blatant acceptance of nude paintings was in fact, a little weird).
We enjoyed this museum. There were a lot of impressionist (?) paintings, which I think are the ones that you stand real close to and they look sort of like a jumbled mess of dots and brushstrokes, but from a distance they are really pretty. Not like Magic-Eyes or anything (do kids today even know what those are?), just like paintings that to me seem like they would have been tough to paint up close and get pretty from far. Unless maybe they used really long brush handles. Also in this museum were lots of realism paintings. Unlike the old paintings in the Louvre which always idealized everything and made it real perfect and god-like, these paintings showed life as it is... or was. "The Gleaners" is a famous painting we saw and a prime example as it shows three ladies of the working class in a field gleaning what leftovers they could after the field had been harvested. Look it up. Turns out that beauty can exist in the ugliness of real life.

On our way home, we took a different train than usual to sit back and enjoy the scenery. Here's Sawyer waving at all the new sights. Or at Mommy. One of the two.

And last but not least, this is my blog so I will do with it what I want...