Art Shock: Louvre 'Dull', Claims Tourist (updated)

Mon 19th September: Day 25

So anyway, I decided to stay in Paris - I'm sure there's more to this city than meets the eye and dammit, I'm determined to find it. Besides which, if I left today I'd only get a day and a half in Berlin, which isn't really enough time to do any city justice, let alone that one!

The big problem so far with Paris, I think, has been a combination of several factors:

• The language barrier (makes me wish I'd paid attention in French classes back in high school!).
• Travelling alone.
• Hitting that four week slightly-homesick patch which I'm sure other travellers will be familiar with.
• And the fact that in most of the other cities I've explored on this trip I've been able to dig beneath the tourist surface and find a more authentic aspect of the city to enjoy. I haven't really been able to do that here, and I couldn't really do it in Barcelona either, in retrospect. See point one.

So, Paris hasn't been the highlight of the trip by any means, although that said, my god this is a grand, monumental and beautiful city.

Anyway, on with the blog.

Because all the places I wanted to go today were closed, I went to the Louvre. Amazingly beautiful buildings, and fantastic collection of art. Frankly though, I found it all a little dull.

Don't get me wrong: I loved the Greek and Roman sculptures, the amazing buildings which house the collection, and the frustratingly only-labelled-in-French medieval Louvre section (I especially got a kick out of exploring the foundations of the old moat and donjon which once stood on the site), but the bulk of the Louvre's collection spans a period that historically and artistically doesn't resonate with me.

My interest in art and history drops off after about 1500, and doesn't pick up again until the advent of Modernism in the late 1800's - which is why I loved the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

So quite frankly, as much as I could admire various 16th-19th century Louvre masterpieces from a technical perspective, I only stayed at the gallery for a couple of hours. Yeah, yeah, blasphemy, sacreligious, an insult to great art etc. Yawn. Over it.

On top of which I think the Mona Lisa is over-rated. If anyone but Leonardo had painted it I'm sure there wouldn't be half the fuss made over it...

So, after walking out on/of the Louvre, I grabbed a quick lunch at a Japanese cafe and went back to the hostel for a few hours sleep (lousy night's sleep last night - kept waking up every half hour - a familiar symptom of my first night in a new bed). Woke up at 5pm and headed back onto the Metro.

Have just spent a lovely afternoon simply wandering around: first along the bank of the Seine, then around the Marais district (very gay, but also very charming). Having discovered a netcafe that has - shock horror - English keyboards! - I am taking the opportunity to update my blog before I go look for dinner.

It's 8pm on Monday night. I haven't cracked Paris yet but I can feel its shell moving in my hands...

I still miss Amsterdam though - there was a certain calm tranquility to that city which I loved, although admittedly the joints I was smoking while I was there helped conjure that particular atmosphere. There was also a Russian boy whose name I never learned, who I'd hoped to catch up with again. Ah well....

Tuesday 20th September

My last full day in Paris was extremely pleasent. I began with a trip to the superb Musee d'Orsay, a gallery specialising in 19th Century art situated on the banks of the Seine, in a building that was once a grand hotel and train station built in 1900 for the World Fair. Like the building housing the Tate Modern in London, it's been superbly transformed into a gallery, but retains many of its original key architectural features (such as the great clockface through which visitors can look out over the river).

There are far too many amazing works in the Musee D'Orsay to list, and I spent hours here (luckily making an early start) soaking in the colours, the techniques, the gradual breakdown of form which heralded the advent of modernism... There are beautiful works by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: Manet, Monet, Sisley, Cezanne. There are painting by Van Gogh, Whistler, Degas, Redon; delicate pastel drawings, Pointilist works of miraculous intricacy; so much marvellous and magnificent art...

Among the works that I adored were:

• Claude Monet's Carrieres-Saint-Denis
• Toulouse-Latrec's La femme au boa noir
• Van Gogh's La Salle de danse a Arles
• Cezanne's Baigneurs

There was an exhibition of beautiful Art Nouveau furniture and designs by the likes of William Morris and Co, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright on display, and one particular painting that I was delighed to see, and to which I returned again before I left: Henri Fantin-Latour's 1872 work Un coin de table.

While not entirely remarkable in its own right, this was a work I'd seen reproduced many times, so it was wonderful to actually behold it. Why do I like it so? Click on the above link, and you'll see two figures seated to the left of the painting: the poet Paul Verlaine and the prodigious, monstrous enfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud.

Sated on great art, next I ventured underground: first onto the metro, and then down into what was probably my Parisian highlight: the catacombs!

Over 300 km of tunnels, originally excavated as limstone quarries (some dating as far back as Roman times) lie beneath Paris. In 1786 these tunnels were converted into ossuaries for the hastily buried bodies that lay rotting in cemetaries such as Cimetiere des Innocents. Today only a small section of the catacombs are open to visitors, but it's a spectacularly sepuchural visit, and one I highly recommend. You can take a virtual tour here, should you feel so inclined...

Carefully stacked piles of skulls and bones line the cool subterranean hallways: revolutionaries, aristocrats and peasents united in death. An estimated five to six million skeletons lie reinterred in this vast ossuary, but even they take up only a portion of the vaults and tunnels beneath Paris, the existence of which must be carefully considered today whenever construction works begin...

Thereafter, my head full of thoughts of mortality, I made my way back to the Marais district, with the intention of grabbing a late lunch and then spending an hour at the Pompidou Centre, which I'd discovered quite by accident yesterday, and where a Dada exhibition was showing.

I didn't make it in the end, because I dropped into an Irish-themed pub for one pint, and ended up staying for several hours thanks to the very friendly company of Rory Ryan, a very tall young Irish carpenter from Ballinasloe in County Gallway who like myself was on holidays in Paris. We got very drunk together, at which point his older brother (a Paris resident) turned up, and the three of us went out to dinner. I dodn't really remember the rest of the night I'm afraid but judging by my hangover on Wednesday morning, it must have been a good one!

***

So that was Paris, and indeed, that was basically Europe. On the Wednesday morning I tottered out of bed feeling extremely ordinary, checked out of my backpackers and made my way to Gard l'Est station, from which I caught a train to Frankurt in Germany: beautiful scenery along the way mind you, which made me regret missing out on Berlin even more. Then I caught a 10.30pm flight out of Frankfurt bound for Dubai, then home.

I'm already thinking my next European trip for 2006. This being my first overseas trip, I deliberately jumped from city to city and country to country, squeezing as much as I could into one month. My aim was always to spend enough time in each city that I could get a bit of a feel for it and gain an impression of the culture, so that I could work out where I wanted to come back to on my next trip, when I could explore places in greater depth.

At the moment I'm thinking that my next trip is going to be to Ireland for a few weeks, as I really want to see more of that country, especially its wilder west coast, and probably another week or so in the UK countryside. After that, regional France is looking good for 2007, and perhaps some more of Spain...and then there's always South America, which has always looked attractive.

Dammit, I think I've caught the travel bug!