For those of you who lived with me or saw me often last semester, you know I was probably stressed out 99.9% of the time. With two stat classes and two Econ classes I was in over my head over 110% of the time. So in effect of last semester, it is been my goal thus far to make sure I am enjoying my experience, academic and cultural in Paris...and to my surprise, I have found that my classes seem to actually be helping me with that goal for a change.
Just for a little backstory on why I decided to take four art history classes this semester I will tell you about one of my fondest memories of fall semester at UVA. Shelby needed to go to the National Gallery of Art for a modern art class and I needed to apply for my French Visa at the embassy in Washington so we decided to make a day trip out of it and split the cost for gas. So after a rather frightening experience at the French embassy, Shelby and I made our way to the Mall on that beautiful November day. We spent the entire afternoon in the National Gallery just wandering through the modern art section of the museum, eating the best salads of our lives in the cafeteria, and spending at least a half hour deciphering the following painting:
It's called Theory of Boundries....can you figure it out? Me and Shelb finally did and it was surprisingly one of the most rewarding things I had done academically in some time. Read about the artist's meaning of the piece here:
Over this past week with the start of semester-long classes, I discovered that four of my five classes have "obligatoire" museum visits...like I need to be forced!! Today we had our first visit with my History of Photography class to the Jeu de Paume to observe the work of Andre Kertesz, a Hungarian photographer who took a large portion of his photographs in Paris and New York City. Here is the view you see when entering the museum which was worth the twenty minute trip on the metro within itself:
We spent over an hour just on our own wondering through the very diverse assortment of pictures of Andre Kertesz. Here were a few of my favorites:
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| Place de la Concorde, 1928 |
Place de la Concorde shows pretty much what you would see if you took two steps outside of the Jeu de Paume 85 years ago.
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| Paris, l'ete un soir d'orage, 1925 |
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| New York, 1972 |
Andre Kertesz was also very famous for taking nude pictures of females and distorting their bodies. This one of the tamer images that we saw in the "distortion" section of the exhibit:
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| Distortion #__ |
We are having a lecture on the exhibit this coming Thursday so I should have some more meaning behind this photograph then!
Hopefully by the end of the semester, I will have visited the majority of the museums in Paris and some of them more than once. I may make it a goal to explore every room of the Louvre while I'm here, still debating that but I will keep you posted!
Bonsoir tout le monde!
"Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d'etre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d'etre, which lives on in itself." --Andre Kertesz
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