Category Archives: This and That

Spider and birds update

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Sorry to have upset a number of commenters ;) with my gigantic spider photo.
I am not all that fond of spiders myself, to say the least.
But one thing I didn’t mention and that you may not know if you’ve never been to Paris and to the Tuileries gardens, is that these gardens are the gardens outside the Louvre. So the buildings you can see in the background are on rue de Rivoli and if you could look beyond the spider, you would see the buildings of Le Louvre, with the Caroussel in the foreground.

A view of the Tuileries gardens (by Claudecf)

Taken in summer, the Tuileries, the Carrousel and Le Louvre

I have no idea if that spider is here to stay or if it’s a temporary exhibition, but believe me it is quite an incongruous sight in those surroundings.

As for the bird poop, years ago, I was walking in Cannes with my husband and suddenly felt something fall on my head, namely bird poop. I had rather longish hair at the time and it took a lot of shampoo to get rid of the horrid stuff. I can still remember my husband’s uncharitable snicker ;)
For those of you who might not understand why a lot of Parisians are not so fond of birds, in spite of their charming songs, here is an example of what they do

Almost smothered with poop

This door ornament is practically covered with poop

April Fools’ Day

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On April 1st in France, people play tricks on their friends, teachers, etc… one of children’s favourite tricks being to hang paper fish onto people’s backs. You can also tell them an unlikely story and shout “Poisson d’avril” at the end, to acknowledge it’s a prank.

A year ago I made this mosaic, composed of fish photos, real or made of stone, taken in Paris or elsewhere, and posted it on flickr on April 1st

Poisson d'avril French style (by Claudecf)

Poisson d’avril ! One man’s fish is another man’s poisson!

The mosaic was created thanks to fd’s Flickr Toys
Thanks to Kay, from Kay’s Thinking Cap who provided me with this great line!

Two exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts

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I had booked from Paris to see the Cranach exhibition which had started quite recently, but booking on-line was not possible for the From Russia exhibition, which attracted crowds.
So when at the Royal Academy of Arts to see the Cranachs, I bought a ticket for the From Russia and saw it on on the following day.

From Russia exhibition poster (by Claudecf)

This exhibition will be a unique opportunity to explore the fascinating exchange that existed between French and Russian art during a crucial period that was witness to upheaval and revolution. All the paintings have been lent by the four principal Russian museums: The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and The State Hermitage Museum and The State Russian Museum in St Petersburg. For the first time, works from these museums have been gathered for a single exhibition.

I found it difficult to follow the links between the paintings, mostly because of my lack of pictural culture. But it was great to see a painting like The Dance by Matisse in the flesh, so to speak ;) or Gauguin‘s Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name was Vairaumati).
My favourites were definitely Chagall‘s Promenade and Nathan Altman‘s Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (honestly, I didn’t even know the name of Altman, before I went to that exhibition).

But I enjoyed the Cranach exhibition much more. Not that I knew more about Cranach than I did about modern painting, but somehow, I found it easier to understand. In fact, I like one-artist retrospectives. One has time to get familiar with the paintings, to see a relationship between them.

Cranach exhibition poster (by Claudecf)

As the exhibition booklet puts it, Cranach…

… was one of the most versatile artists of the Renaissance, court artist to the Saxon electors, a staunch supporter of the Reformation, and a close friend of Martin Luther. During the course of his long career, Cranach created striking portraits and expressive devotional works, propaganda for the Protestant cause, as well as his own brand of erotic female nude and inventive treatments of biblical, mythological and classical subjects.

At one point, I noticed that in practically every painting, except for the portraits, there was someone, be it a human or an animal that was looking straight at you. So I walked through the rooms again to find the watching eye ;)
I found the nudes just lovely, like the Venus shown on the exhibition poster, which apparently was found “too risqué for London Underground“, ;) or Adam and Eve.

The Cranach is on till the end of June, but From Russia stops middle of April.