Martin and Monet

Last Monday was my first class with my new professor, Robert Martin. Actually, technically speaking, this was two weeks ago Monday--sorry I'm so behind in writing!

Robert Martin is the cutest man you've ever met. He's British, hilarious, works at the Field Museum, and can't hear worth diddlysquat. We all want him to be our grandpa after class is over. But he's as sharp as a tack. Apparently, he's a leader in the field of primate evolution (not that I know much about it). He apparently helped determine the real definition of a primate. He's been published in Nature a bunch of times, and he is curator of Biological Anthropology at the Field Museum. But he isn't snooty at all.

He lectures much better than Professor Tuttle did, so I'm really enjoying the class. I'll have more to say about him later.

After the first class, I didn't have that much homework. So I was looking online and at my Paris map, trying to decide what to do, when I remembered the Monet exhibit at the Grand Palais. I'd heard that it was so popular, there was a constant line of people trying to get in, and reservations were booked months in advance. I decided to head over there, vowing to stay if the line was less than two hours long.

Well, the line was exactly two hours. But I had a book, no homework, and it was a nice day. So I waited...for two long hours. However, I chatted (in French!) with a cute family in line behind me. Kids are the same no matter what culture they're from. Whenever the line would move forward, the dad would go "Ca avance!" ("It's moving!"), and the kid would say, in French, "It's never going to move, we're going to be here for five hours..." Then, once the day wore on, the younger kid started whispering under his breath in a sing-song voice, "j'ai froid, j'ai froid, j'ai froid" ("I'm cold, I'm cold"). Kids don't change.

The two-hour-long line

This street musician sure had a nice gig

Finally we got in. And the exhibit was pretty incredible. People told me there hasn't been an exhibition like this in 40 years, and I believe them. They've used the Monet collection at the Musee d'Orsay as the backbone of the exhibition, and then they've filled it in with Monets from all over the world (I counted a few from the Art Institute). Every museum has a haystack or a Rouen cathedral, so to have them all together is pretty amazing. You really appreciate his "series" technique. Also, there are some groups of paintings that are never usually shown together. For example, Monet started a huge garden scene with lifesize figures that he never finished. He had to give it to his landlord as collateral, and by the time he got it back it was ruined (in his opinion). Thus he cut it up into three pieces, only two of which have survived. They are at the Musee d'Orsay. But, in this exhibit, they put the huge painting in the same room as all of the smaller paintings he did to practice for it, which are housed in Moscow, Washington D.C., and elsewhere. Thus, you can stand in one room and compare the smaller paintings with the huge one--you'd never be able to do that normally.

The best part was that you could see Monet change over the course of his life. I like his middle years best, when he was painting cliffs off the coast of Normandy. By the end of the exhibit, and the end of Monet's life, he's gone almost blind with cataracts and almost abstract in his painting. One painting in particular is just blobs of paint on a canvas. According to my old art teacher, he had his cataracts fixed and his paintings got clearer, but I didn't see that in this exhibit.  

By the time I reached the end, I didn't know if I'd been in there for one hour or five hours. It was one of the best exhibits I've ever been to--it's certainly one of the highlights of my stay in France.