Museum Series: Musée d’Orsay
The Orsay museum has a more traditional architecture and interior design. So it adopts the old-school dark colored walls for displaying paintings.
For some reason I feel like purple walls go well with highly controversial works.
And dark blue walls for the “Galerie des Impressionnistes”. The Orsay museum is probably most well-known for its collection of Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings, as many of the movements’ artists were French and practising around Paris at the time. Even though I’ve been here before on a school trip, it was still exciting to see the works that we kind of grew up with in our secondary school art history classes, which for some reason never managed much to move past Post-impressionism.
This is the same painting that was delivered to an Impressionist exhibition at the National Gallery of Singapore. It exhibits the use of white and mastery over depiction of snow as well as the bluish shadows, all typical of Impressionist practices.
Olympia is a painting I would never forget, because we had it for our first art history exam in secondary school and everyone was discussing what kind of reaction their parents would have when they sign our papers and see this is what we have been learning in art history classes. But apart from that, this painting is important in art history because of the direct female gaze. Never before did a female nude figure in art history look at its viewers with such direct and honest expression, and it was seen as a highly vulgar painting at the time.
And there were these models with highly intricate interiors, which reminded me of the models we’ll be making for our capstone. Now this has set an entirely new standard for me.
We also saw in online reviews that the restaurant at the Orsay museum is one of the most beautiful places in Paris to have lunch, and so we decided to check it out.
It is actually smaller than it looks, as both the light colored walls and the floor to ceiling windows and mirrors helped to create an airier atmosphere. And the food was certainly as intricate as the interior decorations.
