Our hotel room with balcony overlooks Gare de l’Est. On the left, we can see a glimpse of the Sacre Coeur in the distance. The trip to Paris from Rotterdam took us only two hours and thirty minutes. The train is no longer called Thalys but Eurostar. Although we travelled first class, it did not stop our fellow passengers from taking noisy children and phones into the compartment.
In Paris we went for a long walk. We started at the nearby Canal St-Martin, which I had never visited before. We passed through a cosy little neighbourhood where even the graffiti was worth admiring. Whether subsidised by the municipality or not, the French capital is home to some excellent street artists. Even decay looks nicer in Paris than elsewhere.
To give this day a real purpose we decided to walk on to Centre Pompidou. To our surprise, we saw no way to enter the building anywhere. Until our eye caught the notice: closed on Tuesdays.
Hotel de Ville was still in all-Olympic atmospheres. In the distance we could see Notre Dame. From one of the windows hung a construction worker as if he were one of the stone devils. It was touching not only to see the cathedral recovered from the 2019 fire but also to join so many people looking at a centuries-old structure than will presumably outlive us all. Since we were not allowed inside we tried at the smaller Sainte Chapelle. Just too late, at 4.45pm the doors closed.
We walked back to Gare de l’Est via Boulevard Sebastopol. We stopped along the way for coffee and cake at Urban Bakery.
The next day we had reserved tickets for Musée d’Orsay. Even so, it was extremely crowded, hot and muggy inside. The museum has a large collection of very famous art by Van Gogh, Monet and Gaugain. It was gratifying to see two paintings by Berthe Morisot as well. She really saw the women she portrayed as people, especially compared to Renoir’s male gaze-derived models displayed next to her.
There were long queues in front of the restaurant, partly because of the photogenic clock overlooking the city. At the end of the corridor, art lovers who had walked on were rewarded with a second clock without compulsory table reservations. As crowded as it was on the fifth floor at the Impressionism-exhibition, it was quiet on the second floor where, nevertheless, fine works by Van Gogh, Monet, Mondrian and Toulouse Lautrec could be admired as a reward for the diehards.
We took a stroll along Boulevard St-Germain. Lots of flashy shops proved that what is expensive does not have to be beautiful. Long queues were waiting in front of café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, where Jan Paul Sartre used to drink his coffee and smoke his pipe. As if those terraces are where you really experience how meaningless life is. Rather, we dived into the adjacent bookshop L’Écume des Pages. Our feet got a rest in the old Église Saint-Germain-de-Prés.
We walked via Rue de Fürsteberg in a neighbourhood with many galleries to book store Shakespeare and Co where there was again a long queue in front of the café. We enjoyed a delicious omelette at neighbouring La Boucherie. Highly recommended.
The French breakfast is absolutely worthwhile. This time I omitted the eggs and went for cheese, coffee and chocolate cake that was fit for the gods. On day three, like all other days, we were squeezed in during the underground rides, even though the metro runs every two minutes.
At the Arc de Triomphe a shuttle bus picked us up to Fondation Louis Vuitton. The exhibition, which had only just started, was entitled ‘Pop Forever’. Starring was American Tom Wesselman (1931 – 2004). His oeuvre was compared over four floors with other Pop Art artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Marjorie Strider. No expense had been spared to transport the sometimes enormous installations to Paris. Among the more modest works by Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton and Kurt Schwitters were also some jewels.
In the 1960s, Tom Winkelmann made innovative installations in which he combined TV screens, domestic objects and painted panels, sometimes incorporating nods to previous artistic expressions. Winkelmann’s later work became more abstract and less interesting. Abstract Pop art just doesn’t work, any more than, say, Pink Floyd.
Mickalene Thomas’ elaborate mixed-media paintings show the power of black femininity. Her portraits in this exhibition reminded me of Andy Warhol’s Drag Queens but they were certainly strong enough themselves. The multicoloured art came into its own in this ultra-modern building in the heart of the Bois de Boulogne. A good reason to step outside the Paris ring road for a change. The view from the rooftop terrace was impressive. Too bad Paris had partially dissolved into fog. The shuttle bus brought us back to the city. Driving towards the Arc de Triomphe was a special experience.
From the Champs-Élysée we walked to le Palais de Tokyo, once the most important modern art museum in Paris. We didn’t quite know what to expect, but the atmosphere here was convivial and we had good coffee and a delicious apple pie. The art was of varying levels: sounds of Mother Earth, an indictment of the oil industry and an empty, pink hall. Most impressive was a 60-metre-long artwork by Malala Andrialavidrazana. For this ‘Figures’, the Madagascan-born and Paris-based artist used maps, banknotes, quotes from the world of art and comics, which she had combined into a large giant collage in which she shed new light on the relationship between knowledge and power.
In the metro station our ticket was refused so we just crawled under the turnstile. We got off at Bastille and walked along the ‘Coulée Verte René-Dumont’. This five-kilometre walkway has been here since 1993 and is in full bloom. We saw it for the first time now. We had dinner at ‘The Place to’, next to our hotel, where we were served very enthusiastically by a girl who apologised the food took a bit longer to arrive due to the crowds.
On 1 November, the flags were flying at Gare Du l’Est because of All Souls’ Day. We had tickets for Centre Pompidou, but still had to wait in front of the gates until 12.15. On floor five we saw an insane collection of art, starting with a wall-filling Joan Mitchell. Then beautiful Matisses, Picassos, Braques, Karel Appels, Kees van Dongens and a few surprises like the original Hergé drawings of Tintin on the Moon. Every now and then I gasped because of so much beauty especially when the sun broke through over the Sacre Coeur.
Again we had coffee at Urban Bakery. We took bus 38 to La Chapelle and from there the metro to Montmartre. Through the House of Vincent van Gogh on Rue Lepic, where a plaque was displayed that Vincent and his brother Theo had lived here. Next to the doorbell was written on the wall ‘Van Gogh: press’.
At the Sacre Coeur, the staff made valiant efforts to make the public behave decently. The nuns sang joyfully and a priest passed between the rows with his monstrance, surrounded by screens of smoke.
We had dinner at Breizh creperie, on the Canal St-Martin, where they serve their own Breizh cola: simply delicious! By the way, the crepe with salmon, cream cheese and salad tasted great as well.
