hello! 👋 i'm mélina, an art history phd candidate, here to share thoughts and photos of art/things/places i visit
you can find me on instagram but honestly, i'd rather stay here

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@museumelina
hello! 👋 i'm mélina, an art history phd candidate, here to share thoughts and photos of art/things/places i visit
you can find me on instagram but honestly, i'd rather stay here
Max Leenhardt (1853-1941), Étudiants aux bords du Lez, v. 1890, h/t, Montpellier, Musée Fabre.
July 16, 2025. This afternoon, I was notified that my second year as a doctoral student was validated and got the green light to pursue a third year (i.e. pay the annual fees). It feels like an accomplishment worthy of celebrating because it's a lot of paperwork and then a lot of anxious waiting around in the fear that my dossier won't get approved before summer closure which would mean having to wait until September.
April 6, 2025. Finished decorating our ceramic creations, first ice cream of the season, and a fun little art exhibition. The unplanned trio that really made this the perfect Sunday.
The Swan (1915)
— by Hilma Af Klint
March 19, 2025. Class in the morning. While on campus, I picked up a copy of Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (in French) for museum book club in the evening.
I like the idea of book clubs but I don’t think the French fully understand the concept. This is the second book club I’ve been to, in a museum setting, and it’s the second time that the conversation veered away from the reading material so quickly and somehow never went back to the book for the rest of the hour.
March 7, 2025. Went on a guided visit of the oldest droguier in Europe, held at the Faculté de Pharmacie in Montpellier.
Being the oldest in continuous operation, the collection has seen a variety of conservation practices over the centuries. One of the more recent ideas was to use mercury, a process which has since had to be very careful removed.
A collection within the collection is the series of illustrated plates, painted renditions of various plants, which professors would carry around with them and show to their classes. Because there was a time before PowerPoint and projectors, and it just never occurred to me.
February 20, 2025. Spotted in the wild, on the way to get lunch with a friend.
February 15, 2025. I got my flu shot on Thursday (I know, super late, that's a whole thing) and ended up sick all of yesterday so Le Boyfriend and I didn't do anything. Feeling better today, we went to both of the new contemporary art exhibitions opening this weekend.
February 13, 2025. I have to walk through a very modern segment of town in order to attend a class in one of the former chemistry school buildings from the ‘80s that is just smack dab in the middle, and it’s unsettling to go from these almost cold, very sharp angles to what is dated and pretty mismatch but feels warmer and better rounded.
February 5, 2025. On Wednesdays, I teach a medieval art history course in Nîmes. Afterwards, I have lunch at a café and I usually stay and work for a while. I guess today I wanted to stretch my legs instead so I finished my lunch and took the train back to Montpellier and headed straight for the Musée Fabre for a much-needed wander. I'm quite familiar with this museum but it's always a pleasure coming back, especially since it's been a while. Here are the highlights for the day:
Jean Raoux, La toilette, vers 1720-1730.
Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Pena, Jeune fille du temps de Louis XV, 1850.
Alexandre Cabanel, L'ange déchu, 1847.
February 3, 2025. Sweet little pick up in between walking, walking, walking on the last day of my Mum’s visit.
November 2, 2024. I did not expect to spend most of the day cutting out images of marine wildlife but I have to admit, it was quite enjoyable. And it was a task on my to-do list, prepping for the upcoming workshops while I'm away next week so on top of being relaxing, it was also productive.
I'm not sure that people who aren't in academia know how disruptive the loss of Internet Archive is for us.
I've been working on a big project all week, and suddenly losing access to the dozens of out-of-print and out of date radio astronomy books that my library doesn't have has thrown a massive wrench in the works. A lot of them are pretty hard to pirate, too! Most of what the IA has and does is stuff that most people will never have a reason to seek and nobody has a financial incentive to store, and that's precisely why it's so valuable.
#i was using internet archive for one of my textbooks and then had to actually buy it#like halfeay thru the week too and my quiz on the chapter was due by sunday so i had to hope the shipping got there on time#internet archive is very dear to me anyway but i really did want to shell out for everything (tags via @prok8r)
You're the third or fourth person in the notes who has said something like this, so please let me try to save all of yinz some money!
Though the IA has a lot of textbooks on it, textbooks are not the sort of thing that is usually only on the IA (unless they're, like, the 200-year-old textbooks I'm reading for non-textbook-related reasons). You should be able to find them for free elsewhere.
Let me let you in on a little secret. There are only two kinds of academics: Academics who are too old, independently wealthy, or technologically incompetent to pirate; and academics who pirate. We all do it. Your professor isn't allowed to just send you the whole pdf (and they can get in real trouble for doing it, so if yours did, don't tell anyone). But they do have one. And where did they get it?
The first place to check is always your university library website. Not all textbooks will be there in e-book form, but many will - particularly newer and more expensive books. Some will make you jump through irritating hoops to download it, some won't. Depends on the publisher. Make sure to use the advanced search functions and be thorough!
Second place to check is your physical university library, which has textbooks on hand. Sometimes they will already be checked out, and sometimes they won't let you check them out. But if you're in a pinch and need to do the reading before tomorrow, this is a good place to look.
Third place to check is the Internet Archive, which is sadly not currently available. Leaving this step in, though, since it should be back soon.
The fourth place to check is libgen (dot) is. Don't do this on a university wifi network. It'll probably be too slow to download these massive files, anyway. But libgen has tonnes of stuff, especially textbooks and other non-fiction books.
There have been very few contemporary books I have not been able to find with these methods. If what you're looking for is not contemporary, your net can be wider - google books, wikisource, and project gutenberg have tonnes of public domain stuff.
I would not recommend asking your professor directly about this (because, as I mentioned, they will feel a real temptation to do something illegal and that's not a nice position to put them in) but if you were depending on the IA and it's suddenly not there, they might be sympathetic and give you an individual chapter pdf just one time, which is legal (at least where I am). But try all this other stuff first - nothing bugs a prof like students asking for resources that are definitely there in the library.
René Seyssaud (1867-1952), La rivière la Touloubre en automne, n/d, oil on canvas, Avignon, Musée Calvet.
October 16, 2024. Sitting through an all-day formation, glad that it's online so I can do it from home but kind of wish I could be doing any of my other projects or just out enjoying the chill in the air.
jamie wyeth (1946-), pumpkinhead (self-portrait), 1972, oil on canvas, chadds ford (pennsylvania), brandywine river museum.
is there a work of art that’s any more october than this?
i have loved this portrait ever since laying eyes on it for the first time in 2014, at a retrospective exhibition for the artist hosted at the museum of fine art in boston.
i especially love what jamie wyeth had to say about his self-portrait:
“i sent [the national academy], pumpkinhead and they didn’t want it. They said ‘no, we want a portrait of you’. And I kept saying, ‘well, that is me’.”
It's that time of year again, it's Pumpkinhead season.
Tom Thomson (1877-1917), Opulent October, ca. 1916, oil on canvas, private collection // present at the exhibition Le Canada et l'impressionnisme - nouveaux horizons at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, September 19-October 29, 2020.
October 9, 2024. Working from home today, super behind on my projects, but taking a moment to think about the new chill in the air and looking forward to Autumn properly settling in.
October 4, 2024. Paper marbling workshop with a school group again.