I started off at le musée Rodin by entering the building and viewing the temporary exhibit of his Asian-inspired work called Le Rêve japonais. You learn all about how he transitioned his career from artist to sculptor & many of the pieces he collected (vases, etc.) are also on display. There are many drawings & sculptures of a Japanese dancer who assumedly was another one of his muses, Hanako. Interesting, but not all that breathtaking. So, then when you walk outside, you see all of these sculptures on display, some of which I don’t think are works of Rodin. Proceeding onto the beautiful gardens, you get lead to The Thinker – really impressive & beautiful up close. It was such a beautiful day, the sun was shining to the point of it being burning hot (wrong day to wear all black, like I was!). I strolled around admiring all of the huge lifesize bronze sculptures and stood for quite a long time in front of La Porte d’Enfer, as so much is going on in the sculpture. I was amazed at the beauty of how everything was set up & drank in the sun drenched day. I noticed the café under the trees that everyone talks about, but I had my packed lunch in my bag & didn’t bother checking out prices. I chose a bench in the shade & decided to give myself one hour to eat & read. Meanwhile, after feeling very itchy on the neck, I realized I was being bitten by something (supposed to be no mosquitoes in Paris, according to Shawn!), so I moved over to near the fountain.
I knew that there was still more to see, so I figured out you had to go into the big building across the way called Hotel Biron. As luck would have it, there was a tour just starting off in the first room, so I jumped on it, not caring if I was supposed to be there or not! I learned all about Rodin’s first sculpture – a woman’s face with a big hat, made of clay which was not an accepted material for where he was entering, but all he could afford. To his dismay, the back of it all crumbled & it was unusable. Beside it is the marble head of his first real sculpture, The Man With the Crooked Nose, which the tour guide explained that he had used a man with this imperfection as a model as he could not afford to pay professional models. Rodin wanted to keep a memory of his first work & redid it in marble years later. I learned about Le Baiser. This statue is inspired by Danté’s Inferno (the couple is Paolo and his sister-in-law Francessca), and was originally part of Le Porte d’enfer as well, but was replaced by another couple on the door. Their lips were intentionally not supposed to touch as the intention was to depict them as being interrupted that and they met their demise without their lips ever having touched (and killed by her husband Giovanni!). He first did the model in clay, then much larger in marble. In the model, the couples bodies are not touching anywhere, but they are in the marble statue, due to the nature of the materials (with clay, you are adding material, with marble, you are taking away). To have the man’s arm suspended above the woman’s leg in marble wouldn’t work, as the weight of the arm would just cause it to fall off!
I also learned that Rodin studied under Carrieur-Belleuse and that since all works had to be signed by the ‘master’ of the workshop, he resented not being able to sign his own work for years.The guide then took us outside to look at Le Porte d’Enfer – flanked by sculptures of Adam & Eve. By this time the sun was beating down & I felt like I was going to pass out at one point! (my pic below is severely overexposed, I know, even after trying to fix it!). She gave us a detailed explanation of this sculpture that was commissioned by a Paris art museum. In the bottom right hand side of the recessed part is a crouched figure with a woman on his shoulders – meant to represent the artist himself & his muse. The tour ended here (which was about half way through the exhibit rooms), so I continued through and found the room dedicated to Camille Claudel’s sculptures. She was one of his students who became his assistant, model, confidante, muse and mistress. Her work is beautiful and looks almost exactly like his, but with cleaner lines. She was committed by her brother apparently – Shawn mentioned that creative woman were often treated like they were crazy (similar to witches), so maybe this was the real reason behind her being detained for her last 30 yrs.
I finished all of the exhibits & was very sleepy. I still had about an hour left before I had to leave to meet Shawn at the Louvre and before closing, so I lay down on a bench (in the sun!) and rested up with a little catnap!
I waited for Shawn in the area we decided on, as you exit the metro underground, right where you enter the lobby of the Louvre, where the inverted pyramid is, but it turns out he was waiting for me by the entrance on the street level outside where the pyramid is! When I finally realized the possible misunderstanding & found him, it was too late to go in! We decided to head out to the La Villette area, where we had wanted to go the night before. We had many restaurants to chose from & after much consideration, we chose a franco-italian one (that may have been the name of it, we don’t remember!). We both chose a seafood pizza, with mussels, calamari & shrimp on it. We were splurging a little (as my coworker that I had replaced on vacation the previous gift had offered us a meal as a thank you!), so we ordered escargots to share as an appetizer and a bottle of red wine (we chose one that wasn’t French for a change!). We were served delicious olives as an appetizer with the customary baguette. We were given little clamps and picks, so we assumed they’d be for the snails & we were excited, never having tried snails in their shells before. Visions of Julia Roberts and the snail flying out of her clamp (‘slippery little suckers!’) came to mind, but when we started eating them, we noticed they slid right out of their shells with the help of the pick easily. They were in a parsley/garlic butter that was divine – what a treat! The pizzas turned out to be huge – we could have easily shared one & could have, but Shawn decided last minute right before ordering to get the same as me rather than what he’d planned! So, I took the other half home for my museum lunch the next day!
After dinner, we strolled around – this was supposed to be 1 of the districts that la plage is supposed to be set up along the Seine, complete with real beach sand, but we couldn’t find it, so we just fooled around with the camera & did a mini-photo shoot to end of the nite.
We look superimposed!
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