Visiting Old Friends

Written, 10-27-2010

After reading about them for years and seeing the occasional photo, we finally saw them face-to-face 12 years ago in Paris, France.

Back then, we made a point to visit the Musée d’Orsay, the museum best known for its extensive collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces (the largest in the world) by such painters such as Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Basically, we melted in front of the group. All those images took our breath away.

Recently, when we heard that the Musée d’Orsay was under repair and that their impressionist and post-impressionist collections would be traveling the world we checked to see if we could rendezvous and see our friends again. Imagine our surprise when we learned that the de Young Museum in nearby San Francisco would be the only museum in North America to host both parts of the traveling exhibitions.

On July 10th we visited the first part:

Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay puts forth nearly 100 works by the famous masters who called France their home during the mid-19th century and from whose midst arose one of the most original and recognizable of all artistic styles, Impressionism.

This exhibition began with paintings by naturalist artists such as Bougereau and Courbet, and presents American expatriate James McNeil Whistler’s Arrangement in Gray and Black, known to many as “Whistler’s Mother.” Early work by Manet, Monet, Renoir and Sisley were on view, as well as a selection of Degas’ paintings that depict images of the ballet, the racetrack and life in “la Belle Époque.”

This past Saturday, October 23rd we visited the second part:

The second of two exhibitions from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay follows on the heels of the first with a selection of the most famous late-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir, as well as works representing the individualist styles of the early modern masters, including Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

It is here where the Orsay’s collection shines brightest with masterpieces such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhone, a haunting Portrait of the Artist, and Bedroom at Arles. The exhibition included a superior collection of paintings from the Pont-Aven school, including Gauguin’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with The Yellow Christ. The exhibition concludes with the Orsay’s spectacular collection of pointillist paintings, represented by the masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.

Standing in line to enter the exhibits, then bumping and nudging past other viewers it became fun imagining that the paintings could recognize and remember us from a dozen years ago.

We made our apologies for not visiting them again in Paris but in the past 12 years we had been busy visiting many other paintings and museums in Prague, Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Salzburg, Venice, Rome, Montreal, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Miami, San Diego, Washington DC, and Hong Kong.

We did brighten their day though by telling them that they still took our breaths away, that they traveled well, and that we hoped to see them again on another lazy afternoon in Paris.