Already one of the most famous paintings in the world at the time and the centerpiece of the French art collection for nearly 400 years by then, the theft of the Mona Lisa—known as la Gioconda in Italian and la Joconde in French—was a catalyst to its launch to superstardom as the global icon of art itself.

On August 21, 2011, the 100th anniversary of the theft, Joe Medeiros will screen his 88-minute documentary “The Missing Piece: The Truth About the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa” to a select audience in Philadelphia, PA. (Subsequent to these early screenings, Madeiros changed the name of the documentary to “Mona Lisa is Missing.”)

I caught up with Joe Medeiros for the exclusive interview below as he was preparing for the event.

In the documentary, which I was able to preview, Medeiros carries out a thorough and fascinating investigation into the theft and into the life of the thief.

In piecing together pieces of Peruggia’s life, the documentary explains Peruggia’s arrival in Paris among a wave of Italian workers, tells how he went from a house painter to briefly have a job cutting and cleaning glass at the Louvre, describes in detail how he removed the Mona Lisa from the museum, shows where and how he kept the painting in Paris for over two years, examines his arrest in December 1913 in Florence, including the ensuing psychiatric report and trial, and tells what happened to Peruggia between his release from jail seven months later and his death in 1925.

Far more than a paper and painting trail, which would be absorbing enough, The Missing Piece is also a story about how his descendants view the crime, particularly his 84-year-old daughter Celestina, who never got to know her father directly since he died of a heart attack when she was only two. The filmmaker’s personal search to learn about Peruggia quickly becomes a quest to bring the truth to Celestina as to why, at age 29, her father stole the Mona Lisa. Since Celestina is too old to travel, Medeiros travels to Paris and to Florence with Peruggia’s grandchildren.

Joe Medeiros, a Hollywood television comedy writer by trade, spent 16 years as head writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.  He started out as joke writer from 1988 to 1992 when Leno was guest hosting for Johnny Carson.  He moved to California in 1992 when Leno took over the show. Medeiros became co-head writer in 1993 and sole head writer in 1995, a position he held until May 2009 when Leno left the show for the first time. Though Medeiros never worked for Carson he did write jokes for Bob Hope from 1988 to 1992.

Now 60, Joe Medeiros has been shooting and editing his own short films since the early 1970s. He has also directed and edited the short documentaries Sailing the Star of India, Doors of Florence and Friends of Independence.

The Missing Piece: The Truth About the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa is his first feature-length documentary. Currently in post-production, the film is being screened in Philadelphia on the 100th anniversary of the theft in part because Philadelphia is nearly Medeiros’s hometown—he grew up in nearby Bensalem, PA. His wife Justine has been actively involved in the documentary not simply by tolerating her husband’s passion for the subject over the years but, as the film’s executive producer, by making sure that all the details behind the camera are taken care of, that people get paid, interviews are scheduled, and the crew is organized. They have lived in Los Angeles for the past two decades.

Interview with Joe Medeiros

Gary Lee Kraut: Most people are underwhelmed when they see the original of the Mona Lisa for the first time. When did you first see the painting and what was your impression?

Joe Medeiros: The first time I was at the Louvre was in 1974 when Justine and I were on our honeymoon. The Mona Lisa … well, she wasn’t there. France had loaned her to Japan and the Soviet Union. She was making a tour of Tokyo and Moscow. So I was faced with the same empty space on the wall that visitors to the Louvre saw when she was stolen in 1911.

I saw her for the first time in 1977. A year after I got the idea to write a screenplay about the theft. She was behind bulletproof glass surrounded by crowds. I felt bad for her. She seemed to be a prisoner of her own fame.

GLK: That is the original shown at the Louvre, isn’t it? Are there any conspiracy theories that claim it’s a fake?

JM: It is the original as far as I know. I am not a believer in conspiracy theories.

GLK: How did you get interested in the theft of the Mona Lisa?

JM: It all began in 1976 when I read a sentence in a book about Leonardo da Vinci. On a page about the Mona Lisa, it said that ‘On August 21, 1911, an Italian workman named Vincenzo Peruggia stole the painting to take to Italy.’ I was immediately hooked. As a recent film school graduate from Temple University in Philadelphia, I thought this story would make a great feature film. So I did months of research into the details of the theft reading the newspaper accounts of the day and any book I could find about the crime.

GLK: You’re film thoroughly examines the various steps of the theft. Can you give us an overview of how it happened?

JM: The painting disappeared on a Monday when the museum was closed. The theft wasn’t discovered until the next day because the Louvre guards assumed the masterpiece was with the museum photographer. There was a worldwide search that turned up more false leads than actual clues. Even Pablo Picasso was questioned for unknowingly having stolen statues from the Louvre in his possession.

All the time, Peruggia was living with the painting in a room in Paris about two miles from the Louvre. He had worked a short time at the museum for a subcontractor who was helping to cover 1600 masterpieces with glass. Peruggia was one of five workers entrusted with cutting and cleaning the glass.

As Peruggia worked, he became familiar with all the Italian art and wondered why it was in a French museum. One day as he was paging through a book, he read that Napoleon had looted Italy’s art treasures when he conquered that country and brought them back to Paris. Peruggia believed – wrongly – that all the Italian art in the Louvre was there illegally and he was determined to bring one picture back to its home country. The picture he chose was the Mona Lisa. He took her because she was small and easy to carry.

Peruggia kept the Mona Lisa in his tiny room in Paris and then in December 1913, brought her to an art dealer in Florence Italy claiming to be an Italian patriot. He was quickly arrested and the painting was soon sent back to Paris.

GLK: You said that you originally intended to write about the theft in a screenplay for a feature film. How did that intention develop into an investigative documentary?

JM: In my early research, I found many details about the crime and its investigation, but there was little information on Peruggia the man – who he was, what he thought and why he really stole the painting. So I was unable to write my script because I was unwilling to make up things about Peruggia. I wanted the truth. But he was dead and the Mona Lisa can’t talk, so where could I find it?

Thirty-two years passed, but I still wanted to tell Peruggia’s story. Then one day while Googling his name, I came across a magazine article about his 84-year old daughter Celestina who was living in the town where Peruggia had been born. So I went to see her with the thought that I could make a documentary about her father and that she would have the answers I needed.

She was a kind, charming woman – the type of Italian grandmother I always wanted. Unfortunately, she didn’t know much about her father because he died when she was a toddler. But all her life she wanted to know the truth. We both did. So I set out to find it.

This involved getting access to the original police files and court documents in France and Italy. We also found a critical piece of evidence – the report of the psychiatrist who interviewed Peruggia. With the help of a team of translators, I began to piece together Peruggia’s life story.

GLK: What was the most fascinating part of the research and investigations for you personally?

JM: I was fascinated by the psychiatrist’s report on Peruggia. It was commissioned by Peruggia’s lawyers to help with his defense and was performed by Dr. Paolo Amaldi, a leading Florentine psychiatrist of the day. It gave me quite a bit of information on Peruggia’s life history as well as the events that led up to him stealing the Mona Lisa.

Once I had that we went to the Louvre with Peruggia’s grandson Silvio Peruggia and re-traced the route his grandfather took to steal the painting. And in Paris, we found the apartment where Peruggia kept the painting for nearly 2 ½ years.

We then traveled to Florence with Peruggia’s granddaughter Graziella Peruggia. There we visited the hotel room where he was arrested and the prison where he was held. And in the Florence archives, we found the key to the mystery – the letters he wrote to his parents shortly after he stole the Mona Lisa.

In the letters we found what I think was Peruggia’s true motive for stealing the Mona Lisa. But it wasn’t what his daughter Celestina would want to hear. However I had promised to return to her with the truth and that’s what I had to do.

GLK: Did you discover any clues or facts that hadn’t been revealed before?

JM: From the documents I was able to piece together why I think Peruggia selected Monday, August 21 as the day to steal the Mona Lisa. It was a very deliberate choice. I don’t think that’s been mentioned. Also, how Peruggia got the painting out of the museum. Many people say he stuck it inside his workman’s smock. I show that that’s impossible. I also point out a medical ailment that Peruggia had that may have contributed to his two prior arrests. Also, that the psychiatrist’s diagnosis of Peruggia as ‘mentally deficient’ may have been an intentional exaggeration. Finally, we discover what Peruggia’s true motive might have been.

GLK: Where did Peruggia live in Paris and where did he keep the Mona Lisa for the 27 months before he took it to Florence?

JM: Peruggia lived at 5 rue de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis which is around the corner from where you live, Gary. I know that for his farewell dinner before he left for Italy he ate at a café on avenue Richerand. I wonder if it was the Café Richerand on the corner of Rue Bichat.

He said that he first kept the painting on a table in his room, and his daughter corroborates that. Several months after having the painting, he built a wooden crate with a false bottom to hide the painting in. He kept the trunk in a 6×6-foot closet in his room until he went to Italy.

GLK: There are many theories as to why Vincenzo Peruggia stole the painting and who his accomplices or sponsors were. Can you tell us in a nutshell your thoughts on why he stole the Mona Lisa and who was involved?

JM: I don’t want to reveal exactly why he stole it because that’s in the film. But I believe he stole the painting alone, although he did share information with his close friend Vincenzo Lancellotti who lived on the floor below him on rue de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis.

I can say that I believe Peruggia was convinced the Italian art in the Louvre had been stolen and that he wanted revenge against the French who had mistreated him. Returning the Mona Lisa to Italy was to be his ticket out of France to a better life.

GLK: Do you get in heated arguments with people who hold other theories?

JM: No. It’s hard to get into arguments with people over something that happened 100 years ago. But I do get somewhat miffed when people say that the theft was orchestrated by a mastermind—an Argentinean conman—to sell Mona Lisa forgeries. That “theory” came out of a 1932 magazine article by an American writer named Karl Decker. In our film, we discredit Decker and his story. There was no conman. Peruggia was the mastermind of the crime.

GLK: Whatever became of Peruggia?

JM: After serving 7 months of a 13-½ month sentence, he was released from prison. He joined the Italian army during World War I and became an Austrian prisoner of war. He was held for two years. After the war, there was no work in Italy so he was forced to return to France but went there under his given birth name Pietro Peruggia so that the authorities couldn’t trace him. He worked as a painter and died on October 8, 1925 from a heart attack. It was his 44th birthday. He was buried in France in the Parisian suburb of Saint Maur des Fosses.

GLK: After all your research and your encounters with Peruggia’s descendents, how do you feel about the man himself?

JM: I understand him now. He was a man who was tired of a job that was making him physically ill. He was put down by the French for being a foreigner and he missed his family and his home. For him the theft was a way to a better life. He had good intentions, just a bad way of achieving his goals.

GLK: How do you feel about the Mona Lisa now, compared to your first impressions which you told us earlier?

JM: She’ll always have a special place for me because of what I know about the man who stole her and had her for 2 ½ years. What he did is a part of her history. And what I’m doing in this film is a very small part of that history too. I’m proud to be associated in this very minor way with this great masterpiece. After all, if Peruggia had stolen any other painting, there would be no need to tell this story.

GLK: What are the plans for the documentary after the test screening in New York on August 17 and the screenings in Philadelphia on August 21 and 22?

JM: Once I have audience feedback from those two screenings, we will lock picture and have the final mixing and color correction done. Then we will start entering festivals and looking for an international distributor.

GLK: Are there any plans to show the documentary in Paris?

JM: I would love to show it in Paris as well as in Italy. We are working on possible screenings there in the near future.

“The Missing Piece: The Truth About the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa” by Joe Medeiros. To see a trailer of the film and for further information the film’s official website.

(c) 2011, Gary Lee Kraut.

Comments may be left at the bottom of the page.

Postscript in French by Danièle Thomas-Easton who attended the Aug. 21 screening in Philadelphia. Danièle Thomas-Easton is the Director of France-Philadelphie, which provides consulting for French-American business and cultural projects.

Depuis la récente tentative de destruction d’un Matisse à la National Gallery of Art (par une récidiviste, qui plus est), la question est d’actualité: comment protéger les musées contre le vol, les dégradations ou tout acte de vandalisme? Malheureusement, le problème ne date pas d’aujourd’hui!

Si, en 1998, le vol d’un tableau de Jean-Baptiste Corot, Le chemin de Sèvres, survenu en plein jour dans la Cour Carrée du Louvre, avait provoqué une onde de choc dans le monde des arts (et des directeurs de surveillance des grands musées), que dire de la disparition, le 21 août 1911, de La Joconde? Une peinture sur un panneau de bois de 77 sur 53 centimètres, plus difficile à escamoter que la toile de Corot (24 x 37 cm.)!

Beaucoup d’encre a déjà coulé sur ce crime (presque) parfait. Il faudra en effet plus de deux années pour retrouver le tableau et arrêter le coupable en décembre 1913 à Florence. A l’aube de la première guerre mondiale, ce mystère captivera le monde entier et contribuera certainement à médiatiser l’énigmatique sourire de Mona Lisa. Plus tard, des cinéastes en exploiteront le thème (la comédie de Michel Deville, On a volé la Joconde, par exemple). On s’est peu penché cependant sur la personnalité du voleur, un vitrier italien qui avait travaillé au Louvre, Vincenzo «Leonardo » Peruggia, et sur ses motivations. C’est la lacune, the missing piece, que le réalisateur Joe Medeiros comble dans ce documentaire.

Présenté aux Etats-Unis dès septembre 2011 à l’occasion de plusieurs festivals de films, The Missing Piece apportera enfin à cette énigme de début de siècle une pièce à conviction inédite. Voilà donc le fruit d’un long travail de détective mené pendant trois ans par Joe Medeiros et son épouse Justine, qui leur aura permis, au fil de recherches entre la France et l’Italie, de retracer les pas de Vincenzo et de rencontrer sa fille, Celestina, et ses petits-enfants. C’est à Celestina qui n’a pas connu son père que Joe Medeiros avait promis de découvrir la vérité, toute la vérité sur l’affaire. Chose promise, chose due.

The post Vincenzo Peruggia, the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Surveying an extensive exhibit of commissioned portraits by a single artist, whether that artist is Van Dyck or your Aunt Sally, gives rise to the sense that somewhere between artist and subject there is an agreement: I’ll give myself up to you and you’ll do me justice; you give yourself up to my and I’ll do you justice.

hat contractual nod between artist and subject, with its individual nuances, holds center stage in the portraiture of Antoon Van Dyck (1599-1641) presented here, whether he’s capturing on canvas the bourgeoisie in Antwerp, friends and patricians in Italy, colleagues and aristocrats in Spanish Netherlands, or the royal family and Court of England.

I leave it to art historians and exhibit brochures to explain the evolution of Van Dyck’s talent and craft from his work as assistant to Rubens while in his late teens to his work for the Court of England in his late 30s, from his appreciation of earlier artists to his influence on those to come.

Suffice it to say here that his talent was so precocious that he was able fully hold up his end of the artist-subject contract early on in his career and sign with increasingly high nobility.

Above the stiff ruffs and stylish collar lace of his subjects he consistently fulfills his end of the bargain by providing an air of nobility, even goodness to his subjects. For those who have apparently allowed him access to the inner edge of their public world he has graced their portrait with sympathetic if distant warmth. Though these subjects are nearly strangled by their collars, the viewer senses in them their humanity (perhaps Van Dyck’s as well) shining through with glimmers of irony, intelligence, love, peace, or doubt.

Until those subjects are the Court of England.

Knighted by English King Charles I in 1632, Van Dyck set to work as “Principalle Paynter in Ordinarie” to the English royal family and to the Court. There he produced what are the exhibit’s least pleasant portraits to contemplate because while the artist has kept up his end of the bargain his subjects have not. Rather, they wrote the artist-subject agreement in such a way that seemed to say: artist shall present me as a great man/woman/adolescent; subject will allow a certain access.

Only Charles I seems to be aware that his power can actually have an affect on others. At least he was willing to show the artist, or have the artist depict, the fragile edges of power of the man who would hold his throne by divine right. (Charles I was eventually overthrown and executed.) Or did he simply have an endearing face? In any case, Van Dyck has painted not only a king but a man as well.

However, the artist-subject contract with other members of the Court resulted in works that, at least for those presented here, reveal nothing more than title and entitlement. Apparently Van Dyck was commissioned to depict not men, women, and children but simply well-born aristocrats. Standing before these portraits one is nearly tempted to see in them some kind of romantic pensiveness, but their glassy stares and kitsch getups are merely a pose, one that would be considered ridiculous were their titles not so powerful. (Think AIG executives on a hunting trip in the English countryside.) Sure I’m a jerk, these portraits seem to say, but I’m a part of the great enterprise of English aristocracy. Makes you want to smack them.

Unfortunately, the collection ends with those annoying portraits since Van Dyck died soon after, at age 42, before being able to take advantage of an invitation to come to Paris to work for Louis XIII and Prime Minister Richelieu. Not that the French upper-crust would have accepted any less a display of entitlement in their contracts, but their portraits of the time (e.g. by Philippe de Champagne) show them as being less stiff of the upper lip.

Ending the exhibit with a view of the impassive poses of the Court of England leaves a bad taste in the mouth, so I recommend making an about face before the exit so as to revisit the exhibit in reverse. You can then return to less guarded eyes, including the double portrait shown above. Here, painters and art merchants Lucas and Cornelis de Wael, with whom Van Dyck stayed while in Genoa (1627), may appear as a members of a confident elite, however the distinctiveness and combination of their personalities—the one revealed in cavalier, nearly mocking, wisdom, the other in brisk, intense seduction—shows the depth, fertility, and balance of that artist-subject(s) contract.

Nearby is the most curious contract of all, that between artist as artist and artist as subject: Self-portrait. Though Van Dyck did many during his career this is the only one in the exhibit. Painted when he was 22 or 23 years old, it shows a man impressively young for his accomplishments, surprisingly dandy for his ability, a young man confident that he had the talent and wherewithal to negotiate with the best of them.

Van Dyck Exhibit
Until January 25, 2009.
Open daily 10am-6pm, Mon. until 9:30pm.
10€, includes entrance and audioguide to permanent collection.

Musée Jacquemart-André
158 boulevard Haussmann
75008 Paris
Metro: Miromesnil or St Philippe du Roule
www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com

© 2008, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Van Dyck Portraits at the Jacquemart-André Museum appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Gentler methods of acquisition are now required to enrich Paris museums, and none have contributed more in the past century to developing the city’s extraordinary art culture than bequests and inheritance.

While the three great national museums—the Louvre (Western art until 1850), the Orsay Museum (1848-1914), and the Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Center (20th century)—are enough to keep first-time visitors to Paris busy, a dozen other major collections of art and sculpture, presented in magnificent settings, also claim world-class status and the attention of the return traveler.

Six museums in particular have joined the ranks of Paris’s most noteworthy due mainly to bequests from artists, their heirs or collectors of their work. Each offers a fascinating glimpse of how a private collection can not only enrich a museum but also become the foundation of one. In each of these museums you’ll find yourself drawn beyond the expression and beauty of the artwork and into the lives of the painters and sculptors and/or those of the collectors who honored their work.
(Numbers below follow numbers on map.)

1. Musée Rodin
In 1908, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), the master sculptor of his era, proposed to donate his entire collection to the state if France would accept to maintain as his museum the Hôtel Biron, an 18th-century mansion around the corner from Napoleon’s Tomb at the Invalides. Rodin had been renting a portion of the mansion as a workspace and thought the setting ideal to present his work for posterity. It is indeed.

The ground floor presents some of the defining works of Rodin’s artistic development, including the first major piece that brought him both acclaim and scandal, The Bronze Age (1877). The plaster cast is so life-like that Rodin was accused of having molded it directly on the model. From that point on, his work was dominated by an expressive power in which figures are stripped of anything superfluous, even body parts, in an attempt to express something essential, as in the powerful, headless stride of The Walking Man or various works in which hands alone reveal sentiment or character or yearning.

The second floor provides an insightful look into Rodin’s creative process through his studies for monumental works, such as The Gates of Hell, which ripened from a commission received in 1880 to create a door for a museum of decorative arts into a highly personal project that captivated the sculptor for the rest of his life. The final bronze versions of Rodin’s monumental works, including The Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais, and The Thinker, have been planted in the surrounding garden, which offers one of the most artful and romantic strolls in Paris.

2. Musée Picasso
The curators of the French national collections have long known that in matters of acquisitions where there’s a last will there’s a way, and since 1968 one of those ways is a law authorizing the state to accept, in certain cases, art in lieu of cash to pay an inheritance tax. The law was first used to its full effect in settling the estate of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), thereby creating a windfall that enabled France to constitute a collection of tremendous proportions in one fell swoop.

Housed in a 17th century mansion in the historical Marais quarter, the museum displays a lifetime of Picasso’s artistic creation, from The Barefoot Girl (1895), revealing his precocious talent at the age of 14, to vibrant paintings created when he was 90. Room to room, period to period, theme to theme, one never loses sight of the man behind the work, whether Picasso is exploring material, volume, line, man, woman, or Minotaur.

This collection is so extensive that by the time you’ve reached his later works you may wish that he would have put down his brushes and played with his grandchildren. A final room reveals how Picasso, in his final years, returned to essential themes in his life in paintings such as Seated Old Man, The Kiss, Mother and Child, The Family, and, from the year before his death, The Young Painter.

3. Musée Jacquemart-André
You needn’t crave the sight of 18th-century French art and furnishings, works of the Italian Renaissance, or paintings by Flemish and Dutch masters to enjoy the splendor of the Jacquemart-André Museum, for one doesn’t come here only to see the collection but also to be a guest in the home of Edouard André (1833-1894), heir to a banking fortune, and his wife Nélie Jacquemart-André (1841-1912), whom he met in 1872 when hired to paint his portrait.

The vast reception rooms meld 18th-century refinery with the pomp and splendor indicative of the 1860s, the period when the mansion was designed as a showy society bachelor pad for André in the prestigious Monceau quarter. The home became the couple’s joint project after their marriage in 1881. With a buying budget that surpassed that of the Louvre, no children, nothing so mundane as a job to tie them down, and a knowledgeable passion for the work they set out to collect, the Andrés were among the great collectors of their era. Works by Rembrandt and Van Dyck decorate the library. A monumental staircase rises to a magnificent fresco from Venice by Giambattista Tiepolo (1740s). The tearoom occupying the couple’s dining room allows you to partake in the mansion’s luxuriance as though you’d been invited to one of the Andrés’ fetes.

The audio guide is an excellent touring companion, giving explanations not only about the works themselves but about the couple’s passion for art, their extensive travels and buying expeditions, their fortune, and their marriage. We learn, for instance, that theirs was “a marriage of reason,” though we’re left to assume as we enter their remarkable “ItalianMuseum” displaying works of the Italian Renaissance that the reason had something to do with the complementarity of his passion for Venetian art and her preference for Florentines.

4. Musée Nissim de Camondo
This second great mansion in the Monceau quarter was also built by the heir to a banking fortune, yet it tells a different story, that of Moïse de Camondo and his passion for French decorative arts of the 18th-century.

The audio guide is again indispensable in examining this extraordinary collection of tapestries, paintings, porcelains, wood paneling, and cabinetry, since one not only learns about the decorative works themselves but about the fortune and fate of the de Camondo clan, a Sephardic Jewish family that had been one of the major bankers in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. Two de Camondo brothers settled in Paris in the 1870s, living side by side overlooking Parc Monceau. Their respective sons, Isaac (1851-1911) and Moïse (1860-1935), were the collector generation.

While Isaac gathered Impressionist works that are now mostly in the OrsayMuseum, Moïse hunted down increasingly valuable pieces from the reigns of Louis XV and XVI. No sooner had Moïse inherited his mansion in 1910 then he had it torn down to create this “modern” showcase-home for the collection. From the grand staircase and the great drawing room to the precious porcelain room by way of prized cabinetry such as Marie-Antoinette’s needlework table, the home speaks of family fortune as well as a private fashion for 18th century art and fine craft.

The home also echoes with tragedy, for beyond the luxury lies the extinction of Moïse de Camondo’s family line, revealed in photographs on the upper floor. His only son, the collection’s intended heir (for whom the museum is named), died in air combat during WWI. During WWII, his only daughter, as well as her husband and children, were deported at Auschwitz.

5. Musée Marmottan Monet
Paul Marmatton’s collection of paintings, furniture, and bronzes from the Napoleonic era, presented in his home, would simply make for a pleasing stroll in a luxury quarter on the western edge of the city were it not for subsequent donations that allowed the Marmottan to become a mecca for Monet fans.

In 1957 the museum inherited paintings by Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir from the daughter of an early collector of their works. Among them was Impression, Sunrise (1873), Monet’s seminal painting from which the Impressionist movement drew its name. In 1966, the Marmottan hit pay dirt when, inspired by the previous endowment, Monet’s son Michel bequeath the museum 65 of the artist’s paintings, making this home to the world’s most extensive collection of works by Claude Monet (1840-1926). Subsequent gifts have reinforced the museum’s stature as a major repository for Impressionist works.

While the Napoleonic-era decorative arts shine throughout the museum and while a world-class collection of 15th- and 16th-century illuminations and the works of other Impressionists also vie for attention, the Monet room has become the heart of the museum. What is remarkable in scanning 55 years of artistic quest in a single room is Monet’s relentless and constant desire to transcribe onto canvas the ephemeral impressions of light and reflection, particularly as seen in the large grouping of Water Lilies, a theme that often absorbed Monet during the last three decades years of his life.

6. Musée de l’Orangerie
When one thinks of an artist unwilling to let go of his brush in his 80s one often thinks of Picasso the prolific. But the depth and breadth of Monet’s series of vast Water Lilies painted at that age are a wonder to behold. Placed as though along the contours of a pond in which the spectator stands, the series of eight canvases is presented in natural light in the former orangery or citrus greenhouse of the TuileriesPalace, which is where Monet intended them to be presented.

The Orangerie earns is place in an article about collections, however, because underground it houses the astounding Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collection. A bunker-like setting, partially dug into the garden, provides a surprisingly warm and unobtrusive background against which the examine the humanity expressed in 144 works dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Renoir, Modigliani, Cézanne, Rousseau, Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Soutine).

The works in both sections of the museum can lose their force when the space is overwhelmed by crowds. Better to visit late afternoon during the sunny seasons or after 3 p.m. in winter. When at its least crowded this is this among the most captivating museums in the city.

© 2005, 2006 Gary Lee Kraut

Practical information
1. Musée Rodin
77 rue de Varenne, 7th arr.
Metro Varenne
Open April-Sept. 9:30am-5:45pm, gardens open until 6:45pm. Open Oct.-March 9:30am-4:45pm, gardens open until 5pm. Closed Mon.
Tel. 01 44 18 61 10
www.musee-rodin.fr

2. Musée National Picasso
Hôtel Salé
5 rue de Thorigny, 3rd arr.
Open 9:30am-6pm (until 5:30pm Oct.-March). Closed Tues.
Tel. 01 42 71 25 21
www.musee-picasso.fr

3. Musée Jacquemart-André
158 bd Haussmann, 8th arr.
Metro Miromesnil
Open daily 10am-6pm. Tearoom open 11:45am-5:30pm
Tél. 01 45 62 11 59
www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com

4. Musée Nissim de Camondo
63 rue de Monceau, 8th arr. (D on map)
Metro Villiers or Monceau
Open 10am-5pm. Closed Mon., Tues.
Tel 01 53 89 06 50.
http://www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr/en/

5. Musée Marmottan Monet
2 rue Louis Boilly, 16th arr. (E on map)
Metro La Muette.
Open 10am-6pm. Closed Mon.
Tel 01 44 96 50 33
www.marmottan.com

6. Musée de l’Orangerie
TuileriesGarden, 1st arr. (F on map)
Metro Concorde
Open 9am-12:30pm for groups with reservations, 12:30-7pm (9pm on Fri.) for others. Closed Tues.
www.musee-orangerie.fr

The post Of Artists and Collectors: Six Museums for the Return Traveler appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

On the court of honor’s west side stands the Comédie Française, the national headquarters of classic theater and fine diction. On its east side sits the theater’s patron, the Ministry of Culture. On the south side is the royal palace itself, Cardinal Richelieu’s palace that became royal when, as a child king, Louis XIV and his mother lived here so as to avoid the crushing, plotting crowds in the Louvre. The palace is now home to the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative jurisdiction and advisor to the government on the legality of draft laws and decrees.

To the south side extends the garden. It’s open to passage yet intimate enough to feel confidential, as though everyone but you has gone off to church, to work, to school, or more likely to the Louvre.

But I’ve come here today not to luxuriate in French Classicism but rather to visit that other element that makes the court of honor a microcosm of culture in Paris: the newly restored work by artist Daniel Buren, Les Deux Plateaux (1986).

The Two Plateaus, generally referred to as Buren’s Columns, are a series of black and white columns of different heights that, in the mid-1980s, served as a side dish in an ongoing debate about the role that modernism plays in the city . But urban planners, royalist presidents, culture mavens, and critics of every stripe had and have bigger fish to fry: the Montparnasse Tower, the Pompidou Center, the Pyramid of the Louvre, the Mitterand National Library, the Branly Museum, and the Beaugrenelle Quarter, to mention the most hotly debated urban projects of the past 40 years.

Due to the important role that the French state plays in developments in Paris, the national passion for abstract cultural debates, and the Parisian tendency to cultural possessiveness, no unveiling is complete in Paris until every one of its residents—and a good many of its visitors—has provided an opinion.

The debate over Buren’s Columns already seemed quaint by the time the Pyramid of the Louvre was underway a few years later. I’ve walked by the columns numerous times with visitors, and invariably those visitors make the same comment “What’s this?”

My own “What’s this?” moment came over 20 years ago. It took a few years after that, but Buren’s Columns have grown on me in a way that Pei’s Pyramid, which leaves me indifferent, has not. I see the Columns as an amiable yet off-beat guest at a formal party and the Pyramid as a highly polished guest who’s forever trying to both fit it and stand out.

So what is this?

Prior to Buren’s Columns the Palais Royal’s court of honor was essentially lost space. The intent of offering the space to art (perhaps this is better called archisculpture), was to make the space inviting yet not too comfortable so that it would remain a place of passage, an integrated and inquisitive place of passage.

Buren’s work nonchalantly takes up the stripes of the window awnings and the columns of the court of honor and then goes about filling and ordering its own space. The surrounding buildings, having been acknowledged and questioned, are left to fend for themselves.

Habitual passers-through never fail to slow down and take notice as they pass, as though glimpsing a forgotten game of chess to see if any of the pieces have been moved. Meanwhile, for visitors, Buren’s work gives rise to excitable and restless communication as they shout to or photograph each other from the columns or walk about them as though trying to fathom who put them here.

A metal grid reveals the passage of a stream beneath the plateaus. There are visitors who try to throw coins onto a column that stands in the middle of a streamonly to have their dreams fished out by children with string and magnet.

The restoration work was mainly necessary so as to stabilize the plateaus, so other than being cleaner and shinier now the appearance is much the same as before. If you’ve never been to Paris, by all means come by to take part in the conversation. If you have been here before, come again to see if your opinion has changed. And if you live in Paris, stop by whenever you need a reminder of why you do.

© 2010, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Something Old, Something New: Culture in the Court of Honor appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.