As readers from my earlier blog post would note that I'm not a big fan of museums and old buildings. So this blog post is not a definitive statement on Paris museums at all. It's just that we actually took the time to visit a few that took our fancy and they were worthwhile (to a point).
Musee L'Orangerie
This museum (close to the Louvre) houses an enormous set of paintings by Monet that are a sort of "surround" experience. The paintings curve around you and depict the Lilly pond where Monet lived. As you know from my Musee D'Orsay post, I am a very big fan of Impressionist art so the visit to the L'Orangerie was a big surprise and very worthwhile. If you don't like art or Impressionist art then give it a big miss.
As an added bonus this museum also had exhibitions of the early paintings of Picasso, Monet, Renoir etc i.e. before the Impressionist style became well formed and for Picasso it was before his cubist style (which means for me I could actually understand his paintings)
Musee D'Orsay (update)
Musee Arts Decoratifs
This museum is also close to the Louvre and L'Orangerie. I thought it would be interesting to see how people decorated their homes over the centuries. So in the middle ages furniture and wall hangings were mostly religious in theme and used wood (instead of canvas) and woven fabric (tapestry) to express aspirations and views.
The Renaissance really began in Italy and showed a huge change in subjects and materials. While few folk could create the huge chateau or stately home many could create "stately" furniture and so large, ornate furniture (we'd probably describe it as grotesque, "over-the-top", ridiculous by our current standards). Italy created marquetry, the Germans improved it and the French made it fashionable in the 18th century.
I quite like Art Nouveau and the Toulouse-Lautrec (Belle Époque style) and so I could see in this museum how this style grew out of a reaction to the stuffy, overly-ornate style before it - a bit like children doing anything feasible to annoy their parents.
This museum has some exhibitions on the history of fashion and fabrics. Seeing the various layers of garments that 18th, 19th century women put on was amusing - it must have taken them hours to get ready:
There was a special exhibition of Louis Vuitton products as designed by the LV founder and contrasted with the current artistic director (Mark Jacob). It comes as no surprise that Louis Vuitton was a smart business man and he created the trademark "LV" design that covers all their bags and suitcases so he could patent it and prevent others from copying it - ripping off LV's designs was a big issue in the early days, so long before the Chinese fakes came to market, Louis Vuitton has been protecting its intellectual property vigourously.
Musee Arts and Metiers
Final museum post:
This museum covers the inventiveness of man i.e. the things/machines man has created that make our current world what it is. The museum is housed in what was a abbey/church, so it's quite beautiful inside. If seeing the original thing that Voltaire (essentially a battery - which is also where we get the word Volt from) or Watt (the thing that governed the speed of a steam driven engine - hence its power delivery and where we get the idea of a watt) created, sounds as interesting a watching paint dry, then give this museum a miss.
I was surprised to see how smart the engineers and inventors were during the time of Louis XVI (they did not just invent the guillotine). It is humbling to realise that there were very smart people around hundreds of years ago. If you're a bloke I'd suggest sending your partner shopping while you duck into this place (Jenni came here with me because she's a cool chick and she got a kick out of seeing her mum's sewing machine in the museum).
The first planes and real cars are also here:
If you look carefully at the picture of the plane you'll see a pendulum over a circular table (and few folks looking it) this pendulum was used by Henri Foucault in 1851 to prove that the earth rotated (how smart is that?)
Pompidou Centre
There is a great bar on the top of the Pompidou Centre where you can sit in the late afternoon, drinking champagne and watching the sun go down over the Eiffel Tower.
Why is this comment here (alongside museums) well the Pompidou Centre (apart from looking like it was designed by a guy who normally designs oil refineries) is really a museum dedicated to modern art - boring as bat shit, but the bar is terrific ... here are some of the views from the bar:
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