Musée d'Orsay day

Another hard day on the old feetaroonies. Given that the weather didn't look too promising, we decided to save Versailles for tomorrow, and instead caught the Metro over to the Musée d'Orsay - an art gallery built under the canopy of an old train station.

There was a long queue to get in (we ate most of our lunch while waiting) but there seemed to be plenty of room inside. The gallery has a symmetrical lay-out, built over three open-plan levels (with even more mini-levels here and there, such as a lookout over the whole gallery!).

The galleries are laid out according to movements - pre-Impressionist, Impressionist, and post-Impressionist (are we clear as to their speciality yet?) with smaller niche galleries for Symbolism, Orintalism etc.

Name-dropping once more, we saw works by Rodin, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Matisse, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Sisley (alas, not Aran), Degas, Millet, Pissaro, Klimt and Munch (only one picture). There were also design exhibits with pencil drawings by Mucha (art nouveau) and Frank Lloyd Wright (so long).

All this, and I found an original black and white edition of King Ottokar's Sceptre (a Tintin book) - plus the original "Le chat blanc" by Pierre Bonnard!

We didn't spend as long here as in the Louvre, but 4 hours is still pretty heroic.

In the evening, while Anna read Stephen King, I went to the Arts et Metiers (science and technology museum) - where parts of Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum is set. The museum was open late, and was pretty much empty - so it was quite haunting. Funnily enough, this is how it is described in the novel, as one of the protagonists hides overnight at the museum. I took a timer photo of myself by Foucault's pendulum - the movemen of which proves the rotation of the earth.

NB: I seemed to have missed the next day! Basically, we were going to head out to Versailles, but left it too late. Instead we went to the Modern Art Museum, and name-checked a bunch of other important artists that we missed at the Pompidoue. For example, Matisse, Picasso, de Chirico, Picabia, Dealuney, Braque, Breton, Ernst, Masson, Jean Arp, Klee etc...

NZ WATCH: We found an installation artwork with phone books from all around the world. We looked up our families in the 1998 Auckland phone books! In Paris! Weird!