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RICK'S BIG TRIP page 11 The agony and the
ecstasy, let me tell you about it. Most of the sculptures here were all about
just how very darn extremely dramatic you could make a piece of stone appear.
This one’s a little unusual – It’s a crocodile fight! See the bold savage,
alone with a flimsy stick and great courage, take on the beast of the Nile!
See the woman grab the helpless babies all at once, inches away from the
beast’s mighty jaws! See the additional woman tumble suggestively and stark
nakedly, helpless to the jungle floor – oh Man! How we value your valiant
bravery! That pretty much sums up
the d’Orsay sculpture theme, certainly covers Rodin and most of the museum. |
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But I
found this one a little special. Someone else must’ve thought it was special
too, because there are about a dozen renditions of this same sculpture all
over the museum. It’s “La Danse” by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, created for the
entrance to Paris’s grand old Opera (which, by the way, was incredibly grand
for something that was neither a church, nor a palace). It’s one of many
images of youngsters dancing – but one of the few in which they actually seem
to be having lots of fun. Hats off to M. Carpeaux. Let the games
begin. |
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Shall I tell
you all of the lovely details and fine points of intrigue that I came across
at in these wonderful collections of art? Really extraordinary collections
from a number of impressionists, including my favorite, Vincent van Gogh. But
before we leave the museum, I just wanted to make one point. We’ve all seen
these paintings all of our lives, in books and prints, so that you feel like
you’ve seen the work; you know what it looks like. And with a lot of
paintings, that’s true: when you see the actual work it’s nothing new – it
looks like it did in the book. But some
paintings – the ones really worth seeing – show and entirely different
character in person. The ones that really use the nature of paint itself can
never be reproduced in print, because print just ain’t paint. The colors are
not pure pigments, as the paints are – they are mixed approximations of dots,
inevitably darker and duller than the original…and that sometimes just
doesn’t show what the artist was working with! So, here
you see a familiar portrait of Van Gogh, (actually it’s a detai,l the full
picture has more background, shoulders, etcetera.) You get a general feeling
of this intense character you’ve heard about – yes, intense indeed. But when
you see this portrait in person…(next page) |
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