Understanding Art In Paris
I’ve always liked going to museums, but in a way where I would stare at a painting with a vague look of interest on my face and then move on to the next one. Even when I found a painting that I liked I would stare at it for a few extra seconds and then move on. A part of me wanted to connect with it, but I was never able to truly feel anything when I looked at art. I never had a real relationship with art until going to Paris.
It wasn’t until we went to the Musee D’Orsay that I began to see art in a different light. When we first got there we did an ekphrasis exercise with Olympia by Manet. I hadn’t done an ekphrasis work since my intro to creative writing class my freshman year and I had forgotten about it. Sitting in front of the painting, I looked up and tried to figure out what Olympia was trying to tell me. At first I just stared, taking her in. I wondered what she wanted or if she was happy. It was interesting to intertwine art with writing, instead of wondering what the artist was thinking it gave me the opportunity to look at it and wonder what the art itself was saying. After writing about Olympia I walked through the museum. Instead of glancing at the paintings I took the time to study them. I liked looking at the paintings with people the most. I would stare at them wondering what they were thinking. One painting I thought was interesting had a woman in the middle being held by a man, they were both standing in front of a man sitting down and in the background where about four other naked women. I stared at the painting for a few minutes before I realized that the painting was depicting a woman being sold to the man. I came back to the painting later and to write something based off the painting. I only managed to write a few paragraphs, but I liked writing about art. Writing in its own way is a form of art and trying my hand at ekphrasis gave me the opportunity to blend the two different forms. It allowed me to look at art from a different perspective and made me want to find a way to relate to art.
The next museum I visited that really intrigued me was the Picasso Museum. I went alone to give myself time to linger on the paintings. Most of his paintings didn’t look like people. They just had eyes and teeth in weird places, but the rest of their bodies looked inhuman. When I first got there, I was really excited to see a whole museum devoted to his paintings, but as I walked through a few rooms I become disappointed. There was one painting that was just lines and it was supposed to be a person. There was a description of how to put the picture together and what the different lines represented, but as hard as I stared at it I couldn’t put the face together. A lot of his paintings felt like that, I would stand a few steps back or tilt my head, but I could never truly tell what he was trying to paint. I became confused and my confusion became annoyance. I just wanted to look at his paintings and understand what he wanted me to see. In one of the rooms there was a quote from him about how he wanted people to feel something when they looked at his paintings. I think that’s the hope of all artists; the hope that when someone looks at their art they’ll feel something, anything. I felt like I had failed by walking through all the rooms without feeling anything beyond confusion. I stopped trying to look for faces and just looked at the art trying to appreciate it. One painting that stood out to me had the outline of a face looking into a room with a figure with multiple eyes. I just stared at it without trying to figure out what was happening. I decided that I liked the painting without trying to understand why I liked it. I went back to the painting with the lines and instead of focusing on what the lines represented, I just appreciated that he was able to look at another person’s face and turn it into lines like it was a math equation. All artists want is for someone to have a reaction to their art. I don’t think you need to understand art to feel something when you look at it.
Visiting the Musee Pompidou made me question what art really is. In one of the rooms there was an art piece of crushed car parts in a block. When I first saw it my first thought was that it was a pile of trash that had mysteriously made its way into the museum, before realizing it was a piece of artwork. I should also mention that Duchamp’s Fountain, the signed urinal that started a similar debate was also located at this museum. Those pieces of artwork made me question what should really count as art, because if anything can be art than does art really exist if it can be something as uninspiring as a urinal. I debated this as I walked through the museum. At first I thought that if something were to count as art then the audience has to feel something while looking at it. I didn’t feel anything while looking at the crushed cars or the urinal so it didn’t count. I felt satisfied with that answer until I came upon a piece of artwork of a giant naked woman. She was carrying bags of babies with hands coming up behind her to grope her breasts. She was womanhood incarnate. The artist was depicting her experience as a woman, she was making a statement about the expectations heaped upon women. It made me wonder if that counted as art, because she was using it to make a statement. As a writer I feel things when I write. I feel connected to the characters that I create and the paths they take. I’ve never painted anything, but I assumed that painters and artists feel something similar when they create. I think part of creation and part of art is the passion that is put into doing so. If you feel nothing while making art then why do it? I didn’t feel anything when looking at Duchamp’s urinal but he might have felt something when making it. He did it to make a statement about art and to make a statement you have to feel some kind of passion about whatever the statement is. I think that passion is what really matters, and that’s what makes it art.
The final museum I visited during my time in Paris was the Dali museum. The only Dali painting I knew was The Persistence of Memory. That painting stood out in my mind because of the dripping clocks. The Dali museum was smaller than any of the other museums we visited on the trip, and it held more of his sculptures than paintings. He even had a sculpture of one of the melting clocks from his paintings and the rest of his sculptures reminded me of Picasso because they both had unique ways of viewing the world. The sculptures that stood out to me where the ones of women. He had a few small sculptures of Venus with drawers coming out of her body. There was a small section of drawings of women, one had snails for breast and another had bugs surrounding her body. As I looked around the museum I noticed that for the most part it was women’s bodies that he was reshaping and disfiguring. There’s nothing wrong with being able to appreciate women’s bodies, but in a way his art kind of dehumanizes them by fusing them with other creatures and in Venus’ case literally objectifying them. For the most part it’s women’s bodies that he feels comfortable with changing. It’s not just Dali that feels like a woman’s body is something that he can objectify. In the Musee D’Orsay Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass is another example of an artist’s focus on a woman’s body. In this painting the nude woman stares at the audience while sitting at a picnic with two clothed men. There is an underlying obsession with women’s bodies in art that borders on voyeurism. Artists, specifically in this case male artists, use women's bodies in their artwork, but they aren’t making a comment or statement on them. They are just using them as a spectacle, just another pretty thing to be looked at. It seems that art is just another place where women’s bodies are not their own and they can be thoughtlessly taken, changed, and controlled.
I enjoyed visiting the museums while in Paris. It allowed me the chance to look at various types of art and form different opinions. Even though I’ll never truly understand them I grew to like Picasso’s paintings and I liked that I was able to see some of his lesser known paintings. I also really enjoyed the ekphrastic writing we did at some of the museums and it's something I think I’ll do again in the future. Throughout the different museums I couldn’t help but notice the unnecessary use of nude women in artwork. Even though it did annoy me, it made me more interested in art as a whole, specifically finding art made by female artist.
It wasn’t until we went to the Musee D’Orsay that I began to see art in a different light. When we first got there we did an ekphrasis exercise with Olympia by Manet. I hadn’t done an ekphrasis work since my intro to creative writing class my freshman year and I had forgotten about it. Sitting in front of the painting, I looked up and tried to figure out what Olympia was trying to tell me. At first I just stared, taking her in. I wondered what she wanted or if she was happy. It was interesting to intertwine art with writing, instead of wondering what the artist was thinking it gave me the opportunity to look at it and wonder what the art itself was saying. After writing about Olympia I walked through the museum. Instead of glancing at the paintings I took the time to study them. I liked looking at the paintings with people the most. I would stare at them wondering what they were thinking. One painting I thought was interesting had a woman in the middle being held by a man, they were both standing in front of a man sitting down and in the background where about four other naked women. I stared at the painting for a few minutes before I realized that the painting was depicting a woman being sold to the man. I came back to the painting later and to write something based off the painting. I only managed to write a few paragraphs, but I liked writing about art. Writing in its own way is a form of art and trying my hand at ekphrasis gave me the opportunity to blend the two different forms. It allowed me to look at art from a different perspective and made me want to find a way to relate to art.
The next museum I visited that really intrigued me was the Picasso Museum. I went alone to give myself time to linger on the paintings. Most of his paintings didn’t look like people. They just had eyes and teeth in weird places, but the rest of their bodies looked inhuman. When I first got there, I was really excited to see a whole museum devoted to his paintings, but as I walked through a few rooms I become disappointed. There was one painting that was just lines and it was supposed to be a person. There was a description of how to put the picture together and what the different lines represented, but as hard as I stared at it I couldn’t put the face together. A lot of his paintings felt like that, I would stand a few steps back or tilt my head, but I could never truly tell what he was trying to paint. I became confused and my confusion became annoyance. I just wanted to look at his paintings and understand what he wanted me to see. In one of the rooms there was a quote from him about how he wanted people to feel something when they looked at his paintings. I think that’s the hope of all artists; the hope that when someone looks at their art they’ll feel something, anything. I felt like I had failed by walking through all the rooms without feeling anything beyond confusion. I stopped trying to look for faces and just looked at the art trying to appreciate it. One painting that stood out to me had the outline of a face looking into a room with a figure with multiple eyes. I just stared at it without trying to figure out what was happening. I decided that I liked the painting without trying to understand why I liked it. I went back to the painting with the lines and instead of focusing on what the lines represented, I just appreciated that he was able to look at another person’s face and turn it into lines like it was a math equation. All artists want is for someone to have a reaction to their art. I don’t think you need to understand art to feel something when you look at it.
Visiting the Musee Pompidou made me question what art really is. In one of the rooms there was an art piece of crushed car parts in a block. When I first saw it my first thought was that it was a pile of trash that had mysteriously made its way into the museum, before realizing it was a piece of artwork. I should also mention that Duchamp’s Fountain, the signed urinal that started a similar debate was also located at this museum. Those pieces of artwork made me question what should really count as art, because if anything can be art than does art really exist if it can be something as uninspiring as a urinal. I debated this as I walked through the museum. At first I thought that if something were to count as art then the audience has to feel something while looking at it. I didn’t feel anything while looking at the crushed cars or the urinal so it didn’t count. I felt satisfied with that answer until I came upon a piece of artwork of a giant naked woman. She was carrying bags of babies with hands coming up behind her to grope her breasts. She was womanhood incarnate. The artist was depicting her experience as a woman, she was making a statement about the expectations heaped upon women. It made me wonder if that counted as art, because she was using it to make a statement. As a writer I feel things when I write. I feel connected to the characters that I create and the paths they take. I’ve never painted anything, but I assumed that painters and artists feel something similar when they create. I think part of creation and part of art is the passion that is put into doing so. If you feel nothing while making art then why do it? I didn’t feel anything when looking at Duchamp’s urinal but he might have felt something when making it. He did it to make a statement about art and to make a statement you have to feel some kind of passion about whatever the statement is. I think that passion is what really matters, and that’s what makes it art.
The final museum I visited during my time in Paris was the Dali museum. The only Dali painting I knew was The Persistence of Memory. That painting stood out in my mind because of the dripping clocks. The Dali museum was smaller than any of the other museums we visited on the trip, and it held more of his sculptures than paintings. He even had a sculpture of one of the melting clocks from his paintings and the rest of his sculptures reminded me of Picasso because they both had unique ways of viewing the world. The sculptures that stood out to me where the ones of women. He had a few small sculptures of Venus with drawers coming out of her body. There was a small section of drawings of women, one had snails for breast and another had bugs surrounding her body. As I looked around the museum I noticed that for the most part it was women’s bodies that he was reshaping and disfiguring. There’s nothing wrong with being able to appreciate women’s bodies, but in a way his art kind of dehumanizes them by fusing them with other creatures and in Venus’ case literally objectifying them. For the most part it’s women’s bodies that he feels comfortable with changing. It’s not just Dali that feels like a woman’s body is something that he can objectify. In the Musee D’Orsay Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass is another example of an artist’s focus on a woman’s body. In this painting the nude woman stares at the audience while sitting at a picnic with two clothed men. There is an underlying obsession with women’s bodies in art that borders on voyeurism. Artists, specifically in this case male artists, use women's bodies in their artwork, but they aren’t making a comment or statement on them. They are just using them as a spectacle, just another pretty thing to be looked at. It seems that art is just another place where women’s bodies are not their own and they can be thoughtlessly taken, changed, and controlled.
I enjoyed visiting the museums while in Paris. It allowed me the chance to look at various types of art and form different opinions. Even though I’ll never truly understand them I grew to like Picasso’s paintings and I liked that I was able to see some of his lesser known paintings. I also really enjoyed the ekphrastic writing we did at some of the museums and it's something I think I’ll do again in the future. Throughout the different museums I couldn’t help but notice the unnecessary use of nude women in artwork. Even though it did annoy me, it made me more interested in art as a whole, specifically finding art made by female artist.