THE JONES ARE IMPRESSED: THE MUSÉE D'ORSAY

The Jones at The Musée d'Orsay next to Rhini

Today, The Jones are visiting the Musée d'Orsay. The family is totally impressed by the artistic works which are exposed in this amazing museum, which was a train station in its origins.

The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.

More information: Musée d'Orsay

Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.

Claudia, Eli and Silvia Jones in the Orsay's clock

The museum building was originally a railway station, Gare d'Orsay, constructed for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans and finished in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle to the design of three architects: Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Victor Laloux. 

It was the terminus for the railways of southwestern France until 1939. By 1939 the station's short platforms had become unsuitable for the longer trains that had come to be used for mainline services. After 1939 it was used for suburban services and part of it became a mailing centre during World War II. 

More information: American Friends Musée d'Orsay

It was then used as a set for several films, such as Kafka's The Trial adapted by Orson Welles, and as a haven for the Renaud–Barrault Theatre Company and for auctioneers, while the Hôtel Drouot was being rebuilt.

In 1970, permission was granted to demolish the station but Jacques Duhamel, Minister for Cultural Affairs, ruled against plans to build a new hotel in its stead. The station was put on the supplementary list of Historic Monuments and finally listed in 1978. 

The Grandma sees Van Gogh's La nuit étoilée

The suggestion to turn the station into a museum came from the Directorate of the Museums of France. The idea was to build a museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Centre. The plan was accepted by Georges Pompidou and a study was commissioned in 1974.

In 1978, a competition was organized to design the new museum. ACT Architecture, a team of three young architects (Pierre Colboc, Renaud Bardon and Jean-Paul Philippon), were awarded the contract which involved creating 20,000 square metres of new floorspace on four floors. The construction work was carried out by Bouygues. 

In 1981, the Italian architect Gae Aulenti was chosen to design the interior including the internal arrangement, decoration, furniture and fittings of the museum.

More information: The Culture Trip

Finally in July 1986, the museum was ready to receive its exhibits. It took 6 months to install the 2000 or so paintings, 600 sculptures and other works. The museum officially opened in December 1986 by then-president François Mitterrand.

A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books. 

Francois Mitterrand

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (1864-1901), also known as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the modern, sometimes decadent, affairs of those times.

More information: Toulouse-Lautrec Foundation

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec is among the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period, with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born at the Hôtel du Bosc in Albi, Tarn, in the Midi-Pyrénées and he was a member of an aristocratic family.

Toulouse-Lautrec's parents, the Comte and Comtesse, were first cousins, and he suffered from congenital health conditions sometimes attributed to a family history of inbreeding.

Physically unable to participate in many activities enjoyed by males his age, Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in art. He became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer, and, through his works, recorded many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris.  

More information: Biography

Toulouse-Lautrec contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s. During a stay in Nice, his progress in painting and drawing impressed Princeteau, who persuaded Toulouse-Lautrec's parents to let him return to Paris and study under the acclaimed portrait painter Léon Bonnat.

Toulouse-Lautrec's mother had high ambitions and, with the aim of her son becoming a fashionable and respected painter, used their family's influence to get him into Bonnat's studio. He was drawn to Montmartre, the area of Paris famous for its bohemian lifestyle and the haunt of artists, writers, and philosophers. Studying with Bonnat placed Toulouse-Lautrec in the heart of Montmartre, an area he rarely left over the next 20 years.

Divan Japonais by Henry Toulouse-Lautrec

After Bonnat took a new job, Toulouse-Lautrec moved to the studio of Fernand Cormon in 1882 and studied for a further five years and established the group of friends he kept for the rest of his life. At this time he met Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh.

When the Moulin Rouge cabaret opened, Toulouse-Lautrec was commissioned to produce a series of posters. His mother had left Paris and, though he had a regular income from his family, making posters offered him a living of his own. Other artists looked down on the work, but he ignored them. The cabaret reserved a seat for him and displayed his paintings. 

Among the well-known works that he painted for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian nightclubs are depictions of the singer Yvette Guilbert; the dancer Louise Weber, better known as the outrageous La Goulue, who created the French Can-Can; and the much more subtle dancer Jane Avril.

More information: Smithsonian

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's family were Anglophiles, and though he was not as fluent as he pretended to be, he spoke English well enough.

At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance by Toulouse-Lautrec

He was mocked for his short stature and physical appearance, which led him to drown his sorrows in alcohol. He initially only drank beer and wine, but his tastes expanded into hard liquor, namely absinthe.

In addition to his growing alcoholism, Toulouse-Lautrec also frequented prostitutes. He was fascinated by their lifestyle and the lifestyle of the urban underclass and incorporated those characters into his paintings.

By February 1899, Toulouse-Lautrec's alcoholism began to take its toll and he collapsed due to exhaustion and the effects of alcoholism. His family had him committed to Folie Saint-James, a sanatorium in Neuilly for three months. While he was committed, he drew 39 circus portraits. 

After his release, he returned to the Paris studio for a time and then traveled throughout France. His physical and mental health began to decline rapidly due to alcoholism and syphilis, which he reportedly contracted from Rosa La Rouge, a prostitute who was the subject of several of his paintings.

More information: MET Museum

On 9 September 1901, at the age of 36, he died from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis at his mother's estate, Château Malromé in Saint-André-du-Bois.

I have tried to do what is true and not ideal.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

EUGÈNE H. PAUL GAUGUIN: THE FRENCH AVANT-GARDER

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin

Tina Picotes is in Paris visiting the Orsay Museum. Tina wants to talk about one of the most important painter of the post-Impressionist, Paul Gauguin, who was born on a day like today in 1848.

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848-8 May 1903) was a French post-Impressionist artist. 

Underappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Gauguin's art became popular after his death, partially from the efforts of art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who organized exhibitions of his work late in his career, as well as assisting in organizing two important posthumous exhibitions in Paris. Many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector Sergei Shchukin and other important collections.

More information: Gauguin Gallery

He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. His bold experimentation with color led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art, while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

Vision after the Sermon, 1888

Gauguin's initial artistic guidance was from Pissarro, but the relationship left more of a mark personally than stylistically. 

Gauguin's masters were Giotto, Raphael, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Degas and Cézanne. His own beliefs, and in some cases the psychology behind his work, were also influenced by philosopher Schopenhauer and poet Mallarmé.

Gauguin, like some of his contemporaries such as Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, employed a technique for painting on canvas known as peinture à l'essence. For this, the oil is drained from the paint and the remaining sludge of pigment is mixed with turpentine. He may have used a similar technique in preparing his monotypes, using paper instead of metal, as it would absorb oil giving the final images a matte appearance he desired. 

He also proofed some of his existing drawings with the aid of glass, copying an underneath image onto the glass surface with watercolour or gouache for printing. Gauguin's woodcuts were no less innovative, even to the avant-garde artists responsible for the woodcut revival happening at that time. Instead of incising his blocks with the intent of making a detailed illustration, Gauguin initially chiseled his blocks in a manner similar to wood sculpture, followed by finer tools to create detail and tonality within his bold contours. Many of his tools and techniques were considered experimental. This methodology and use of space ran parallel to his painting of flat, decorative reliefs.

More information: Musée d'Orsay

 

 

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. 

Otherwise, what would become of beauty? 

Paul Gauguin