Paris – another day…

A beautiful day in Paris – cool, but with a bright sun which is really unusual for November. Aren’t we lucky? Last night we had a terrific time at the Grand Bistro de Breteuil, the rather ornate restaurant in our neighborhood that we’ve been going to for 10 years. It has a fixed menu for 44 euros (less than $50) for three courses, an aperitif and ½ bottle of wine (per person). This is a pretty good deal in Paris since the food is very good and the wine selection is excellent. We ate, drank, and chatted the evening away. It was a perfect end to an interesting day. We visited the Louis Vuitton Foundation – Frank Gehry museum located on the northern edge of the Bois de Boulogne.

Our good friend Caroline had warned us that the current exhibition, MOMA (NY’s Museum of Modern Art) a 200 year history, was not great.  How could such an exhibition as this be uninteresting? Bad? Boring? But – it was. Caroline was right. Most of the art was not exactly the best of MOMA and the story they tried to tell (the history of the museum) was too long and just lost us along the way.  Maybe the history of an institution is not a good subject for an exhibition such as this.

But the bigger problem is that the Louis Vuitton Foundation is not a museum like the D’Orsay or the Pompidou or the MFA (Boston).   It is an art gallery in a structure that is so overpowering that the art must be extraordinary to compete.

That’s not to say we were sorry we went. We took a new route – bus 92 – which took us directly to Place Charles de Gaulle, at the Arc de Triomphe. From there we hopped on the little electric shuttle the Louis Vuitton Foundation has for getting people back and forth to the museum.   It was a fun and perfect. And of course, we were not sorry to go because we saw this fantastic structure again. Google it to see it from a far.

Always imposing, but really beautiful today in the bright sun, the Arc de Triomphe. The price for the shuttle is 2 euros round trip.  My iphone connection  was bad and I couldn’t get my ticket up to show the driver.   He waved us on anyway (I guess we look honest)

Gehry’s structure looks like a schooner with huge ballooning sails. Go to their web site to see better photos. 

There was some wonderful art to see such as this Klimt and the Jasper Johns painting, Map.    I did like this eye — without lashes — entitled  The False Mirror by Magritte, a surrealist painter from Belgium.  Below, George is checking out part of the the structure which is visible at various point throughout the museum.

The electric shuttle bus from Le Place Charles de Gaulle to the museum.  It holds only about 12 people and is so cute!