The Louvre

The Louvre A more-or-less forced march of four hours let me survey most, but not all, of the Louvre’s paintings on display and made me wonder how I had seen so much more on previous visits. I don’t know a better strategy, but there must be one. I started with the Flemish and Dutch schools […]

Paris Museums

The Musee du Quai Branly – what a hodgepodge! In a stab at the ‘new museum,’ galleries have been eliminated, and the visitor is expected to flow through continents, like some Nile-Amazon combination. Then, what impresses is not quality, but quantity. Instead of one great Kota reliquary figure, we find eleven lined up in a […]

Musee d’Orsay

We saw the light and dark of European 19th century art at the Musee d’Orsay: the world’s leading collection of Impressionism in the 5th floor permanent galleries and a special exhibition on the ground floor of “Dark Romanticism,” called, infelicitously from Poe, “The Angel of the Odd.” The latter featured art “that used terrifying and […]