Paris

Last weekend (well it was when I wrote this intro) I went to Paris to see the special exhibit of Klimt, Schiele, Mosser and Kokoschka at the Grand Palais museum gallery.

I have been wanting to see some of Klimt's work for sometime now and it was the last 2 weeks of this special exhibit. It is one of the major advantages of living in the Netherlands, the proximity to so many other wonderful countries.

Anyway arrived by the fast train on Friday late morning and made our way to our hotel in the Latin Quarter, dropped off our stuff and then decided to head down towards the Grand Palace where the exhibit was being held to see what the lineups would be like and gauge if it was worth waiting for. The weather was crisp and sunny and as we arrived we noticed that that line up was not even a 1/4 of what we expected so we joined and after about 1.5 hours got into the exhibit.

It was wonderful, I knew already much of Klimt's work but to see it in real life, the subtleties and softness of the colours was breathtaking. I also was fairly familiar with Schiele, and was impressed with also his abilities. Having known nothing about either Mosser and Kokoschka it was quite interesting to compare their works to their masters. The exhibit was done in quite an interesting way and provided the viewer to experience several themes of their painting.

What did disappoint was the fact that the exhibit catalogue came only in French, not one other language, and there was not a lot of posters or other merchandise for the Klimt items. But I got to tick off my list one of my favorite artists and also intrigues me to want to go to Vienna and see more of his works.

As we left we decided to go shopping along the Champs de Elysees take some photos of the Arc de Triomphe as it was getting dark and then head back towards the Latin Quarter and look for some food. Which we found in a cute little restaurant with really nice service.

Saturday morning we decided that having not been to the Louvre it was time to go past and see if it was perhaps worth trying to get it, because every other time I have been in Paris I have been put off by the very long line ups. We walked straight in to it's wonderful and open entrancfe hall. I must admit how interesting it was to overhear several Dan Brown refrences from others in the line. Having decided on which wing we would tackle of the Louvre's 35,000,000 works of art we headed towards the Egyptian wing within the Sully wing. It was impressive but in my taste to many fragments, then again considering that I have seen much Egyptian stuff still standing more or less where it was left 3 thousand years ago I guess one could get blase about the whole thing. And after that we decided to go and check out a few Italian masters, as we came into the hall voila, Botticelli and a few paces further Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. All impressive and all to much. I think we might have been in for 2.5 hours and that was more than enough it was time to get out in the sun and cold and explore more Paris.

Walking through the Jardin des Tuileries towards the entrance we then headed into Madeleine and just poked about looking at the things the caught our eye. Eventually we gave up on trying to find something that we wanted to eat and sat down, as it turned out we were sitting across the road from the Grand Palace, exactly where we started from the day before having somehow taken a few to many left turns. Decided to go back to the hotel freshen up and then go out again for food.

On Sunday we did not really have a plan other than perhaps more wandering so we took our bags to the Gard du Nord and wandered to Montmartre for some breakfast and coffee and a hike up a little hill. The View is impressive but in some ways I prefer the Montreal version to the Paris one. After a few more hours we headed back to catch our fast train back to Holland. It was a wonderful weekend of relaxation and culture and exactly what I needed.