Visiting museums: The Louvre

When I travel I invariably visit museums, as I did the Louvre the last time I was in Paris. Visiting museums is an ideal tourist activity, especially as I tend to travel off season when the weather is less conducive to outdoor activities.

I am partial to art museums, but I also enjoy national history museums, natural history museums and crafts and technology museums. And I most especially love quirky little museums obsessively dedicated to one person or theme. I like looking at individual things in museums, but I also like considering how the collection as a whole expresses something about the person, place, culture or time that created it.

It puzzles me that not everyone enjoys visiting museums. This got me thinking about what exactly it is about visiting museums that I enjoy. Partly it is because I subscribe to the idea of art as a spiritual project. I don't attend church much anymore, so I have to get my spiritual experiences elsewhere. Gazing at the colours and forms of beautiful paintings can sometimes give me a hint of transcendence that is at the heart of spirituality.

But it goes farther than that - I feel that visiting museums can be like a formal religious experience as well. There are two aspects of religion that I miss - ritual and community - which I now find in museums.

Museums are temples to human ingenuity. You pay your tithe at the ticket office, you enter the sanctuary speaking in hushed tones, you listen to a sermon (if you use those infernal audio guides) or you read the liturgy (the text on the walls), and you circle the temple in a specific direction, experiencing the display in a prescribed way.

Objects in the temple to art

The communal aspect is the most important part. You experience museums with the rest of the people who are there with you, but you also commune with the people who created the objects and all the other people over the ages who have communed with those objects. And, since many of the objects in museums are ritual objects, the religious feeling is only heightened.

Communing with the Easter Islanders

Of course, with many of the older religious objects we have only the sketchiest idea of how they were used in ritual, but I don't think that completely erases their religious impact - if anything, it enhances the sense of sacred mystery. After all, it is the same with religious rituals that are enacted in churches, temples and mosques. They have been passed down over the generations, but their meaning and expression have been modified over time. When I recite the Apostles creed, I feel I am speaking along with my Dutch ancestors and with Christian communities since the 2nd century. It is quite an intense historical experience, even apart from the religious aspect.

Like good anthropologists we assumed this was a
ritual vessel depicting a cult practice. Because what else??

But back to the Louvre. I have visited it many times and have only scratched the surface of their vast collection. I try to attend on free Sundays at the beginning of the month, and visit the less popular sections  (i.e., anywhere away from the Mona Lisa) to avoid the crowds.

Despite its huge size, the Louvre has a rather specialised and frankly conservative collection. It covers the usual 'civilisations': Egypt, Greece, Rome, Near East and Europe. Paintings from after 1848 have been transferred to Musee D'Orsay, and if you want to see anything from Asia you have to visit the Guimet and Cernuschi collections instead. As for the rest of the world, you have to go all the way to the excellent ethnographic museum at Quai Branly.

Or so I thought, until I discovered that the Louvre also has a small collection of art of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. It is tucked away in a rather inaccessible corner, and closed on Wednesdays and Fridays.

It is a lovely little collection of strange and wonderful objects. Since we're not just solemn and serious at museums, while we fulfilled our religious duties we also had some fun drawing completely inappropriate comparisons between the objects on display and things in contemporary life and culture.

I decided this must surely have been the model for the blue alien in the Fifth Element.

And this could easily have been the inspiration for the goblins in the Hobbit.

So, museums are places to go for religious and spiritual sustenance, on top of which they allow you to travel through time, space and the imagination. All while killing a few hours on a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon when all the shops are closed. What's not to love?

Paris flâneur

Wandering Paris

As is my usual practice in Paris, on my latest visit I have been playing the flâneur - or aimless wanderer. In fact, my wanderings are not entirely aimless because I usually have some goal in mind - a park, a monument, a specialty shop of some kind. But I set out with only the vaguest directions and try to find my goal by following my nose.

This is how I discovered a great little bagel shop wandering in the neighbourhood of Luxembourg gardens - Bagels and Brownies on 12 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I often find real gems when I’m lost in Paris.

And such was the case the other day. I had stopped by Kookai Stock on rue Reaumur to check out the sales (slim pickings), and was heading in the general direction of Les Halles. You can tell when you are getting near les Halles because the streets become pedestrianised and the shops get more touristy and tatty.

I popped into one of the passages radiating off rue St Denis (always explore the passages, they are treasure troves).

Passage du Grand Cerf

Within I discovered, quite serendipitously, a new yarn shop! Well, not entirely new - the proprietor told me she had been there for three years. But new for me. It is called Lil Weasel, and as the name suggests, it is a cute little pocket shop, stuffed with crafty goodness. They carry the usual French (Fonty) and British (Debbie Bliss), and some less easy to find American yarn as well (Cascade, Spud & Chloë and Blue Sky Alpaca). And also Lotus yarns from China, bringing us affordable cashmere.

I was quite restrained, and only came away with a pompom maker and a skein of pale blue Cascade baby alpaca chunky.

Then, just around the corner I passed the Frog and Rosbif, an English pub & micro-brewery that I thought deserved a try a bit later. I know you are supposed to eat French food in Paris, but I get plenty of that in Oxford - I’d rather go for the unusual.

The purpose of all this wandering was now almost in sight - La Droguerie on rue du Jour, of course! I’ve discussed La Droguerie before because I always fit in a visit whenever I’m in Paris. But this was the first time I was going to do the full service - buy yarn and a pattern together.

La Droguerie makes you buy their yarn to accompany their patterns, and you have to wait in line for someone to come help you chose yarn for your pattern. When I first entered there was a bit of a fracas over who was next in line. Lots of shouting about how they really need to institute a number system, and how one wouldn’t expect such behavior at La Droguerie. After which the injured party stomped off in a huff without any yarn.

I made sure to find out where the end of the line was. Fortunately there were only two people in front of me so I only waited about half an hour for service. It was well worth the wait - my helper convinced me to match some mustard alpaca with a pale caramel mohair. I would have never thought to put those colours together, but they create a lovely honey mustard effect.

I'm going to knit cape capuche, a short circular cape with a garter stitch cowlneck.

The pattern is included in the book Petites Pièces et Petits Plus Signé. Now I'll be free to use any yarn I like with La Droguerie patterns. Not that I won't take the opportunity to stock up on more of their lovely yarn when I'm next in Paris.