There is a lot of Salon stuff on the ground floor, which holds only so much of my interest. It’s all very noble and symbolic, but the horrors of the 20th Century make half-naked military heroes seem like bad satire.
Let’s be blunt here. It’s a museum devoted to (mostly French) art from about 1848 until about 1914. You don’t have to be a journalist with a beret and a glass of Chablis to know what that means. I came to see the Impressionists and their ilk. Okay?
It’s a truly beautiful building inside, although getting to Level 5 where said Impressionists, Neo-impressionists and other members of the great new art meant more stairs than I cared to count. There are lots of escalators, but they were all going down. I felt like I was in an Escher drawing.
It was worth every small obstacle, of course. We could argue for hours on the merits of the individual painters, and even debate their political stances given they were sandwiched between two great revolutions. There’s no point. Compressed into a gallery no bigger than a couple of dance floors, the works on show are just too damned lovely to demean with any sort of polemic. Look, absorb, smile, commune, celebrate and perhaps weep. The highest achievements of humanity pumped straight into your senses.
There were many highlights. Here’s one - Berthe Morisot’s Dans les blés. That’s the very same Berthe that Manet painted in some of his best portraits, by the way.
