Musee Rodin and Musee d'Orsay

Today we went to the Musee Rodin, and the Musee d’Orsay. Both museums I enjoyed a lot more than other ones that we had previously been to. While I thought I liked the Lourve, I realized that my favorite was the Musee d’Orsay. The Louvre was amazing and the work that is within it is great, but I found myself extremely distracted by the number of tour groups and tourists that were there.  I thought that the Musee Rodin was beautiful, but I have a really hard time connecting with sculpture. I can appreciate how beautifully something is sculpted out of marble, or how seamlessly lines are blended into such a rigid material, but I felt the biggest connection at the Musee d’Orsay.  I was able to breathe a lot better-the ceilings felt more open, there was a ton more light, and it was significantly more modern. The architecture within this museum was unbelievable. I have never been so entranced by the architecture within the building, since Notre Dame. Even now, I still find both on a similar caliber of amazement, but they are two completely different styles and approaches to organizing a building. I am so disappointed that you were unable to take photographs throughout the museum because there is no way that my drawing of the main entrance can translate to what it feels like to actually be there.

The blend of modern architecture along with the old, pre-existing structures that already existed when the museum was a train station was extremely interesting to me. I also think that the fact that the building had history behind it too made it feel that much more sacred. I loved that this old building was being revamped with new exhibitions, bright colored walls, and a different layout.

While I spent a good amount of time looking at the actual building itself, I found myself most attracted to three particular exhibits. The neo-impressionism exhibit, the Impressionism around 1880, and the most exciting and unexpected was the photography exhibition that went on directly in front of the Rodin’s work, called the “Confusion of Genres”. While I’m not normally extremely excited to be in front of paintings, these three exhibits had me completely entranced. Some of my favorite pieces I sketched below:

I have plans on going back later to spend even more time with them. But, I felt the most connected to the photography show. I have so much to say about it--the first being how shocked I was to see photography within this museum. I wasn’t expecting or anticipating seeing any photographs, but coming across dozens of beautiful, alternative-process photographs was just unbelievable.  The show itself was about the nude woman within painting.  There were two daguerreotypes being displayed, along with this drop dead gorgeous gum-bichromate print that had a reverse vignette that seamlessly blended into the background with a nude woman, her back faced towards us, her back stretched into an extremely elegant pose. The second photographs I was attracted to were the Daguerreotypes done by Douglas Belloc. There was a pair of two, small oval daguerreotypes matted with 6 inches of black They were extremely precious and they had a materiality about them that made you want to pick them up and rock them in order to see the negative/positive more clearly. The thing that I was most interested in resided in the gallery statement, where the museum said:

“Whereas in painting and in sculpture the genre of the nude aimed to glorify the beauty of the human body or use its forms allegorically, a photograph of a nude confirmed its existence there and then of an individual model and revealed her anatomy in all its crude reality…allowing us to glimpse at unattractive legs, coarse ankles and knees, poorly concealed calluses.”

I love the fact that within this exhibit, photographers were showing the human form in all of its glory-flaw and all. The fact that they were rendered in alternative processes make them that much more unique and precious—the tones that are created in the cyanotypes, the daguerreotypes, and the aristotypes is unobtainable by any digital process today. I also found it interesting, that within tbeen in their historical collection, but never shown before. I find the fact that there were Stieglitz and Stiechen photographs hiding in the basement of the museum absolutely crazy. Why were they down there for so long? What prompted the exhibition? I was under the impression that photography was still struggling to be recognized as an art form, which to me is extremely disappointing and upsetting. But to see this show, gave me some hope that there will always be a place for photography within the art world.