Exhibition Review: Les Orientales

This coming Saturday, 15 May is the Nuit des Musees across Europe, when dozens of museums will stay open late (many until midnight) and offer free admission. There is a list of the Paris museums participating, and special events on, on this website.

I love museums and they are the main reason I like living in cities; I don't know why I never blog about them. I went to tonnes of museums and studied a bit of art history as a teenager, but it wasn't until I was in grad school that the penny dropped and I realised that an exhibit is no different from an academic article or college student essay: an exhibition has a central argument and it structures its evidence to prove that thesis. Some are more successful than others. With that in mind, I'm going to give out grades for exhibitions I review here.

I was very keen to see the 'Les Orientales' exhibit at the Victor Hugo Museum, celebrating the 1829 publication of Hugo's collected poetry on an 'oriental' theme. Housed on the first floor of Hugo's former home, the small exhibition is spread over several rooms and contains a number of works from artists like Delacroix and Gericault, as well as manuscripts and illustrated books from Hugo himself and contemporary writers like Chateaubriand. If you love Delacroix, like I do, then you'll enjoy seeing some of these lesser-known pieces brought together.

But otherwise, I found the exhibition a bit disappointing. It was very strange that the word 'romanticism' never appeared in the exhibit (although it was used once in the programme). Orientalism itself was never probed as a concept, which would have been intriguing as it meant different things over the nineteenth century, and some again different today. One of the final rooms had a series of odalisque portraits that played on the idea of Eastern women in harems. These were great pieces, but they spanned over 50 years, with no contextualisation or reflection on the difference between a portrait of an Algerian woman in 1830 and one in 1885. I also found, ironically, many of the commentaries to be jargon-filled and inaccessible to most general visitors. Plus, the rooms were small and dimly lit and there seemed to be far too many people working there, so that even though there were probably only twenty other people there at the same time as us, we felt that we were constantly bumping into people.

Tickets to Les Orientales cost, if I remember correctly, 7 euro (I can't find the information anywhere on the website!). The rest of the house, being one of the municipal museums, is free. If you happen to be in Place des Vosges it's worth checking out to see the inside of one of the hotel particuliers on the square. But be warned that the museum presumes that you know Hugo's life, family history and artistic oeuvre very well, and contains very little information for the unacquainted. For example, a room full of family items (clothing, letters, etc) is labelled with their names, but never tells you who they are in relation to Hugo. I suppose I can't complain because it's a free museum, but I know how competitive it is to break into museum work and I've got to believe that someone could do a better presentation with the material here.

Maison de Victor Hugo
6, place des Vosges
75004 Paris
Metro: Saint Paul
Open 10am-6pm, Tuesday to Saturday
Free for the permanent exhibition (house)
Les Orientales exhibition runs until 4 July and costs 7 euro (I think)
Grade: B-. Shows potential and has strong evidence, but lacks structure and context. Needs to show critical engagement with theoretical terms. Presentation could be improved.

Julia Child made me write this blog

It's true. She appeared to me in a dream, held a wire whip to my head, and said, "Blog, woman, blog!"

Okay, it wasn't quite like that. But I thought it was time to pay homage to the great dame, now that the film Julie and Julia has been released in the States. The film stars Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as me. Oops. I mean as Julie Powell, the New York woman who blogged about cooking through Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. (My mother went to see the film and said, "I kept looking at Amy Adams and thinking she was you, sweetie!" So once I finish Accidental Parisian: The Novel and sell the film rights, we'll have to give Amy a call. Reese Witherspoon will undoubtedly be disappointed, but that's just life. Romain Duris will play my handsome French hubby).

Anyway... Julia Child really did inspire this blog. Here's the long story. I had been really frustrated and down on myself and on France for my first few months here. MCM and I went to my parents' house in Massachusetts for Christmas and had a great time - we really benefited from the break, the fun, the time with my very warm and exuberant family. We made a great day trip to Boston where we saw the fabulous Tara Donovan show at the ICA, which completely restored my hope in contemporary art (in my book, she is in league with Barbara Hepworth and Anish Kapoor). We then went to a lobster shack on the pier and had chowder, beer and lobster rolls. It was, in total, a wicked awesome day.

Waiting for the train home at South Station, I started browsing the little book stand and made an uncharacteristic splurge on two paperback books - two books which filled two big voids in my brain. I have a huge stack of publishers' catalogues in my office here; how ironic that I found these two most helpful books in my hometown, in a train station of all places. The first was Linda Colley's biography of Elizabeth Marsh, a masterly work of world history that really inspired me and helped me to make the finishing touches on my own book manuscript, with which I had become frustrated in the final edit.

The second was My Life in France, Julia Child's memoir written with her nephew shortly before her death. Here she was arriving in France after World War Two, a newlywed, unable to work, living on a tight budget, not knowing anyone, literally sticking out in the Paris streets as she was a good foot taller than many French women. She even laboured on an intensely-researched book, with the frustration, loneliness and sense of accomplishment that comes with it.

The parallels with my own life here were strong, except that Paris was considerably less cosmopolitan at the time - if I was feeling self-conscious in 2008, how would I have done fifty years earlier? But the point is, Julia embodied what I've come to see as a great quality in American women: enthusiastic determination to succeed, even if that means looking a bit goofy in the process. She threw herself into mastering, not just French cooking, but France itself. She made French friends. She threw fun parties. She got annoyed with French chauvinism.

The book made me decide it was time to pull myself up by my bootstraps, seize the day, and stop feeling sorry for myself. I decided that I would start a blog to vent, chronicle and reflect on what I was experiencing here. It's worked: I'm much happier now than when I started writing. So thank you, Julia Child.

***

In other cooking-related news, my sister D just sent MCM and me our birthday presents: his-and-hers aprons that she made herself! I'm absolutely thrilled because they are the most adorable thing I've ever seen. Here's me modelling my super girly one:



Love it! Unfortunately the photo's a bit dark so you can't see the lovely gathering on the top. You're a genius, D.