#musee cantini

[evalcea]

L'Entrée du port de Marseille

Paul Signac

oil on canvas, 1911

Musée d'Orsay (responsible organization) and Musée Cantini (place of conservation)

[eakdoeseurope]

Adding to the general sense of mental illness, the Louis Pons exhibit at the Musee Cantini included a bunch of hilariously "depressed French artist" quotes from him. Some of my favorites:

[eakdoeseurope]

First day in Marseille, part 1

My hotel room in Marseille is absurdly nice compared to my hotel room in Montpellier, which is to say it's clean, has enough room to walk five paces, and the bed doesn't have a permanent person-shaped divot in the center of it. There's a minifridge! And a safe! And I'm not worried about catching a disease from the duvet! And my window looks out on a street instead of a pigeon-infested airshaft! Truly I am spoiled.

Anyway, after having the free hotel breakfast(!) I headed to my first stop, the Musee Cantini. It's a modern art museum with some nice impressionist and abstract work by lesser-known artists (at least, lesser-known by me).

They had a way of lighting the paintings with spotlights that made them seem to glow; it was really striking.

The museum's special exhibit was on Louis Pons, a French (no surprise there) artist I'd never heard of. His main thing seemed to be these incredibly detailed ink drawings, which were very striking and also looked kind of like the work of someone slowly going mad.

He also made some assemblages. I liked this one because it didn't involve any creepy baby dolls or human remains:

Human remains, you ask? Yes, there was a really horrifying piece that involved a motorcycle dredged from a river and a literal ancient Peruvian mummified corpse. It was honestly pretty captivating, in an awful way. But/and I couldn't stop thinking about how unethical it was to display the remains of an unknown person from an indigenous culture like that. No NAGPRA in Europe, I guess.