Giverny, Monet’s house just outside Paris, is another Impressionist-lovers’ pilgrimage spot. Personally, I was disappointed by my visit there. True, the house has a strong period feel, and Monet’s collection of Japanese prints was gorgeous. And yes, walking around the lily pond, it was easy to imagine him daubing paint on to his huge canvases in the tranquil dampness, but my overall impression (no pun intended) was, ‘OK, cute house, but where are the Monets?’ I’d always assumed that they’d all been sold off and re-hung on the walls of every major art gallery in the world. In fact, though, all the paintings that Monet kept for himself at Giverny were donated to a small museum on the western edge of Paris, which now houses the biggest collection of the artist’s work in the world. This is the Musée Marmottan (or Marmottan-Monet as it calls itself in an attempt to draw attention to its star resident), in the 16th arrondissement. And the Musée doesn’t stop at Monet—there are also wonderful paintings by Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir and my own favourite Impressionist, Berthe Morisot.
The pictures are housed in a small château that was once the hunting lodge of the Duc de Valmy, one of Napoleon’s generals. When it was built in the early nineteenth century, it was way out in the forest, but the huge 16th arrondissement has caught up with it, and the lodge is now a few minutes’ stroll from the métro station at Muette. After a period in the possession of the Marmottan family, who were politicians and art collectors, it was turned into a museum in 1934, apparently in an inheritance-tax deal. Since then, other collectors have followed the Marmottan family’s example and donated their art to the museum, which is now eclectic and yet wonderfully focused.
A new exhibition area has been built to house the Monets, which include some of the old man’s most famous works. I was astonished to stroll around the museum one weekday afternoon, almost untroubled by other visitors, and come face-to-face with the very painting that started the whole Impressionist movement—Impression: Soleil Levant. It’s still a startling picture, with its bright-orange blob of sun that looks as if Marilyn Monroe had tried some lipstick, decided it was too bright and stubbed it out on the canvas. It’s not surprising that the realism-addicted critics laughed. In its day, it was as daring as Lady Chatterley having sex with a servant. It just wasn’t done.
And this is far from being the only masterpiece in the collection. There are some decidedly insulting views of London in the fog as well as plenty of lilies, a Japanese bridge and one of the painter’s trademark haystacks. In the main house, there is also a small but wonderful Berthe Morisot room that feels like a family lounge decorated with priceless paintings, and a Napoleon room (Paul Marmottan was a collector of Napoleonic memorabilia) housing pictures from early in Boney’s reign at the turn of the nineteenth century. These include a portrait of the legendary Josephine—a sultry, fiery-eyed beauty in a thrustingly low-cut dress, to whom no one in their right mind would say ‘not tonight’.
All in all, even a northern Parisian like myself, for whom an excursion into the depths of the 16th arrondissement is something akin to crossing the Gobi Desert, can feel that a trip to the Musée Marmottan is worthwhile. It was totally crowd-free, except for one coachload of schoolkids who stuck together like a shoal of wide-eyed mackerel and were therefore easy to avoid. And I probably got there and back in no longer than it would have taken me to queue up at the Musée d’Orsay and get squashed into mackerel pâté.
Owning a piece of Parisian art history
Today, if you feel like buying a signed work of art by a famous Parisian like Arp, you can do so for around a thousand euros. It’s not exactly cheap, but this seems a relatively small price to pay when you see the ludicrous sums spent on signed prints by people like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. And even if you don’t have thousands to spend, there are still some excellent ways of taking home a piece of genuine Parisian art history.
The rue de Seine in the 6th arrondissement begins at the river that inspired its name and, after a meandering start, heads straight for the boulevard Saint-Germain. All along the street, there are small art galleries. Admittedly, some of what they sell is (to my taste, anyway) horrifically ugly. In one shop window, I recently saw a five-foot-tall bronze bull that looked as though it had been in a head-on collision with a train. Mostly, though, these galleries deal in tasteful and often very affordable pictures. The dealers inside can look a little snooty, but as Edina Monsoon pointed out in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, they’re only shopworkers, so there’s no need to be scared off. And they’re usually very courteous—after all, it’s not as if they sell dozens of pictures a day, and they have central-Paris rents to cover.
I went to the rue de Seine to hunt for affordable Parisian art, and began in a gallery that was running an exhibition by one of the best-known French contemporary artists, Ben. He’s not a Parisian (he’s from Nice) but he has a very Parisian wit. He’s known for writing
