Pompidou Centre
June 21, 2024
On Friday we were free until time to meet for our farewell dinner. There were plans for the youth and young adults and families, and I was invited to join them. I decided to go out on my own, not having to get up so early, too. The bus gave us a ride into town, letting us off near the restaurant where we would be meeting, to help us find it later. I took a picture of the street with my phone, so I could use the GPS later to find my way back.
I bought a day pass for the Métro and rode it to the Pompidou Centre, and spent much of the rest of the day there. (I knew it would have been a little cheaper to buy individual tickets, but in major cities I tend to get a pass for the convenience.) During my previous visit to Paris, the other major museum that I didn't get to was the Rodin Museum, and I thought about going there. But I had visited the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, and had seen many of his works at Stanford and Chapel Hill. We even have one statue in Davidson. The day I was in the right part of Paris to visit it in 1993, was a day it was closed. The Thinker was visiting China at the time, anyway.
I had seen the Pompidou Centre’s exterior, but didn’t have time to venture in right then, so it was my choice for this trip. The guts of the building are on the outside. To access the galleries, you enter a plastic tunnel outside the building and ride escalators to the top floor for the special exhibits.
The landing at the top of the ride gives you panoramic views of Paris.
The special exhibit dealt with comics, pop art, manga, and the like.
After exploring that exhibit extensively, I headed down to see the “fine art.”
Here are a couple of Marc Chagall’s dreamlike paintings.
From Fernand Léger’s "Disk Period" (c. 1919) in which cubist traffic lights figured prominently.
The lighting on this piece rotated between the three primaries.
Usually Mondrian’s works have more color. He deconstructs composition from content, I guess.
This piece was in the Dada section.
View the rotation:
You can see the objects better from the side rather than the flat photo above.
There were groups of children with special planned activities.
After I left the museum, I had a hot dog at a nearby restaurant and headed across the river to the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine that was the original settlement of Paris. I wanted to see what I could of Notre Dame Cathedral.