Les Arts Decoratifs

I made a mental note today to beware of pride – I got a “très bien” from my French teacher this morning. I thought I’d share a couple of brief videos from my commute, to demonstrate why I prefer the bus.

Discovered a new sandwich place around the corner from L’Institut and – even more importantly – discovered their olive and bacon focaccia. After handing on the remnants to a hungry Jen and sending her and Kenny off to Sèvres-Babylone on a minor pilgrimage, Meg, Tina and I set forth on the bus to meet Alissa at Les Arts Decoratifs, the design museum in the northwesterly arm of the Louvre. The reason for our visit was a much anticipated exhibition on the colour red, “Aussi rouge que possible,” a subject very dear to me and to Alissa.

We found the bus stop, checked the map, verified the direction of travel and awaited our autobus. Said bus arrived, and we boarded, warm with the certainty of our swift arrival. The driver didn’t quite seem to empathise with those for whom an emergency stop might be somewhat inconvenient, for example, those of us standing and clinging to poles. Most people just merged with theirs unfortunately, but, thanks to my piano-honed death grip, I swung wild-eyed around the pole, wrenching my already painful knees in the process, and skilfully avoided hitting my head on the plexiglass partition. My hands held on as the backlash came. I slid down around the pole again and crashed into the other side of the plexiglass. Oops. Initially, I attributed the pain to my knees, but soon discovered that my shoulders, elbows and even wrists had borne the brunt.

To add figurative insult to literal injury, it came to my attention shortly thereafter that the stops were not ones I recognised. In fact, the first stop I did recognise was Denfert Rochereau, and I knew that was in Montparnasse, which is in the fourteenth, some way south of where we started. I ushered us off the bus at this stop and we looked for another to catch a bus going back – of course, since this bus had stopped at the bus stop we definitely needed, who was to say that this bus would be any better? A few miles later, we boarded the correct bus and made it to the Louvre, albeit with a few Marilyn Monroe moments over the metro grates. See, this is why I wasn’t wearing a skirt in the city.

Our first port of call was, of course, the red exhibition. I was disappointed that the text on the boards was really interesting but, vocab-wise, just beyond my total comprehension. France is as bad as – or worse than – the UK in not providing museum texts in other languages. To relax us, the woman attending the upper level obviously thought we were suspicious (the only people in the gallery) and tried to follow us the whole way along. Despite this, and though it was small, I enjoyed the exhibition which covered the natural origins of red – we sacrifice the cochineal beetle again – resonances in art, and every kind of design, as long as it involved red. This encompassed mediaeval tapestry, the London bus, beautiful red-draped chairs from this decade and, um, Elmo.

In fact, the museum as a whole was enjoyable, if slightly on the thin side as go actual exhibits, with the key problem being our complete inability to find our way around. And it wasn’t us. I had to get in lifts to even find out what floor I was on, there were no signs beyond (conflicting) lists of each floor’s contents and every level was dominated by huge areas of dead space with at least seven interconnecting doors across it. Bizarre. So it was one of the worst presented museums I’ve been in, which was a shame as its topic and collection were interesting.

I didn’t want to get too deep into the older stuff in case I never made it out, so I left Meg in the middle ages and made a beeline for the art nouveau. Via the toy gallery.

Naturally. I’m not all that into French stuff, compared to the Glasgow School or the Secessionists and Jugendstil, as it seems to me to be one level of abstraction below the others. There are more literal flowers and tree trunks in the Belgian and French art nouveau, compared to stalks and contours elsewhere. They did, however, have a Guimard bedroom suite which made me happy. As I ogled, Tina and Alissa caught up with me. How did they know where to find me?

The museum had collections of Art Deco and several small floors (in the attic) of furniture design arranged by decade of the 20^th century. We were sad not to be allowed to touch things, but they provided a single room with a few chairs that could be sat on.

Once we were done with the looking and the sitting, the next challenge was to find the exit. The museum, as I have said, is not well signposted, and none of the lifts go to all the levels, so this was far more difficult than it should have been. The final blow came when we found the only exit from our section and it funnelled us out onto the street a couple of hundred metres from the shop. To get to the shop we had to re-enter the museum through the main entrance (security checking our bags again). Something went wrong here.

Problems aside, it was an interesting museum and I liked the redness. There was also a great view over the Tuileries from the upper levels.

To finish off the day, I watched this delightful sunset from our kitchen.