picasso is eh, notre dame is closed

on the last day of the museum pass, we went to the picasso museum. first we tripped around the food market on the rue cler near our hotel -- it wasn't raining, but it was still kinda chilly and windy, so the action wasn't great. nice fruit, though.

anyway, the picasso museum. it's under construction -- like so many things in paris. the outside was all covered in scaffolding. and the little shop was reduced to a rack of postcards and a handful of books. bummer.

so we went inside and tripped around. i have to admit i wasn't especially moved. i loved seeing le chat, and his work is interesting, but ... idk. i found myself mostly clinically interested, like, fascinated by his perceptions/perspective. like, why did he see things this way? some of his portraits had the body parts so jumbled and weird they looked like strange robots or maybe portraits of humans after aliens found them all torn apart and put them back together the best they could w/o a map (i can't remember which sci-fi story that is ... anthony?). deb said that his father was an artist too, who specialized in naturalistic portraits and was a professor. so maybe cubism was a nice rebellion for pablo. i know there's a lot more to it -- thinking about how to render 3-D objects on a 2-D surface and stuff like that. i liked that he seemed to have obsessions -- musical instruments and women in the bath, for two. my favorite things in the museum were a later painting called musician and his takes (here's one) on manet's dejeuner sur l'herbe (aka picnic on the grass, referenced in an earlier post).

so, i fail at appreciating cubism. at least i looked at it all. i noticed that sometimes picasso's paintings were so way-out distorto that it was a good thing he gave them titles -- otherwise i'd have no idea what i was looking at. other things were much more naturalistic, or a mix of the styles, like a cubist-y woman with a face where everything was pretty much in the right place. anyway, it was pretty psychedelic, but not my groove, apparently. the museum also, however, didn't have some of his most famous works, so maybe that was my problem: lack of proper perspective. ahaha.

ok. my feet have developed a new twinge, a bit of a stabbing pain under the second and third right toes. so the walking was a bit encumbered, even though my blisters have become calluses, w00t! still, the weather got semi-nice -- fairly warm, in fact, though still pretty cloudy -- and we hiked off to notre dame. yet we couldn't go in b/c it was closed in preparation for some big-deal mass that was going to be televised. we sat outside for a while, and i took the above picture of the front. i will have to come back when it's sunny anyway -- supposedly the stained glass looks way better in the sunlight. like, duh.