The Gates of Enfer

By Andrea Bates

 “The gates of enfer. That’s the gates of hell, right?”
-overheard in the garden at the Rodin Museum, Paris

They say it’s other people’s children,
not wanting what you’ve got, blood
on a white shirt, lost chances you were
too scared to take. And in France?
those who do not speak the language
languish for days in an enfer
of their own making—tongue studded
with syllables it cannot pronounce,
chest heavy as Rodin’s gate, heaving
in its attempt  to ask for a spoon
to savor the sorbet sold at the garden’s
stall. Yes, to try to curl the tongue
around cuiller brings tourists
to their knees, is to abandon all hope,
ye who enter here, is to watch
sorbet melt into a pool of sweet
bitterness in its cup, is to leave it
as an offering, what the dead can
drink, thirst bronzed by the heat
of Rodin’s ironworks, love’s
unrequited vowels of ici, here,
Paolo reaching for Francesca’s hand,
only to grasp the parched air.

Roulé d’aubergine au chèvre

By Andrea Bates

Lettuce dine with fork and thyme, pears flambé
on a plate appear to satisfy the palate, but only if
we first salut the salad. When dining a la carte in Paris,
the entrée is the appetizer, so the appetite
should be as crisp as frisee that chevres the spine.
Chaqun a son gout, a phrase planted on the purple-
egged tongues of aubergines. On top, olive oil drizzled
as gentle as pluie sweetening the cheeks on a stroll
down the Champs-Elysees. A glass of merlot and voila—
the miel is complete—like honey at the table, baked eggplant
stuffed with warm, warm goat cheese on a bed of greens.

MADAME’S CAFÉ OF THE GOURMET HAND

By Andrea Bates

“All the pigeons of Paris are dead. Some have been eaten, which is natural,
but most of them have been condemned to death because they carry messages.”
 –Monday, Jan. 19, 1942, TIME magazine

She is old enough to remember the Occupation,
backyard butchering of pigeon, twist of the neck,
a stuffed pie to feed eight people, tablespoon of meat,
dressing of parsley, and carrots smuggled in
from the countryside. Her mother didn’t tell her
it was pigeon–she would have cried and ruined
the dinner, but decades after the war ended
and her mother was dead, she discovered the recipe alive,
written in her mother’s shaky hand, cached inside
an envelope at the back of a kitchen drawer. A clipping
also of Notre Dame, stained glass rosette removed,
preserved in a secret cellar where prayer would protect
from the MP40, submachine gun, trigger finger of the Nazis.

The bombs these days are laid by pigeons, eighty thousand
strong, waggling throng of grey as if pieces of the Parisian
sky have fallen. She greets them with a plastic bag of seed
and crumbs she’s wiped from dinner tables and abraded
from day old loaves, seasoned with dried parsley
and thyme. Some believe there is no rhyme or reason
to this mission, others do not forgive the blast and drop,
residue of feather, purge of seed consumed. Every bird
is a victory, every bird she tends is one less she must
remember eating. Now, her outstretched palm beckons,
Café of the Gourmet Hand feeding the flock near Notre
Dame, each pigeon perched on the iron rail, awaiting
its turn to receive what she cannot bear to throw away.

Andrea Bates’s first chapbook, Origami Heart, was published in Toadlily Press’s 2010 volume Sightline.

The post Poetry: 3 Poems by Andrea Bates 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.