Field trip!

Today I went with Calvin's class to the city's modern art museum. No, not the national museum of modern art (a/k/a, the Pompidou center, that ridiculous alien Habitrail dropped on the Beaubourg neighborhood. The much less known city's museum, or properly le Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, which occupies part of a decrepit and alarmingly fascist building left over from the fifth and last world's fair in Paris, the same one that gave us the excruciatingly bad Palais de Chaillot at Trocadero. I actually like a fair bit of the modern art I've seen but I haven't found a museum of it I like. Anyhoo, I rant.

Wait a sec, I'm not done! What a fun one that 1937 World's Fair must've been, eh? As the ExpoMuseum site says, "it is remember (sic) mostly for the contrasting pavillions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which literally 'faced off' in front of the Eiffel Tower."  Gee, sounds like fun for the whole family.  If that didn't float you, the art highlight was Picasso's Guernica, showing the atrocities of the Spanish civil war.

Well then, back to fun for the whole class!  I met them at school around 12:30, and the kids had just finished lunch and were heading outside to burn off steam for 15 minutes.  They returned and my group of five kids joined the other four parents (moms), teacher, and 20 other kids to troop to the bus stop around the corner.  I'm thinking the other passengers noticed we were there, eh?  After a slow walk up the hill from the bus stop to the museum, and a crazy maze of directions trying to find the bathrooms for the kids, and then waiting 15 minutes with the kids being shushed by museum guards, the docent finally showed up.  I recognized her french accent as American, and from speaking to her briefly learned that she spent a year at the Smithsonian American Art museum a couple of years back.  Too bad I couldn't remember the name of the woman we knew from there - Duncan's mom?

The docent showed the kids two major works - La fée electrique by Raoul Dufy, and something else by someone else.  (Fine liberal arts education coming through here!)  It's easy to describe the first, an enormous panorama of the history of electricity (!) painted for the 1937 fair.  It's hard to picture, though, since it's 10 meters (33 feet) high and 60 meters (200 feet) long, wrapped around a mostly oval room.  You'll have to check out the movie.  The second main piece she presented was a geometric abstract, and if you know the artist shout it out!  The kids did little art projects with each, making a colorful fairy inspired by the first, and (you guessed it) a colorful geometric thingy from the second.

Blah blah blah, we made it home fine after a walk in the rain and a wait for the bus.  Thanks to the wait, you get to see a movie of the kids singing in a bus shelter too!

And those and other pics are located here.  Enjoy.