Day 6- Paris

The entrance to the Louvre is an experience on its own. The long wait in line enhances the excitement as you get closer to the three glass pyramids. Once inside, a staircase leads you down into the museum where you can lose yourself for hours.

However, the line sometimes – or most of the time- is simply not worth it. We were let in via a little secret entrance. Near the Carrousel du Louvre, in Rue de Rivoli, there is an alternate entrance to the museum. While it is not as grand as the main entrance, the pyramids get old after an hour in line staring at them.

We were led down a flight of stairs as well and into a corridor of bistros, gift shops and jewellery stores. For a moment you forget every step is taking you closer to one of the largest museums in the world, and then from afar you see the inverse glass pyramid. The natural light, which wasn’t very strong on that cloudy day, illuminates the room where you are officially inside the Louvre.

It is impossible to see the Louvre in just one day and if you happen to do so by some double dog dare you couldn’t refuse, you would not enjoy it. Egyptian antiquities, Greek and Roman art, paintings by Michelangelo, Raphaelle and Da Vinci; the choices are endless and stumbling through them can easily overwhelm you.

As a person who has lost her temperament before by overstaying my visit, believing going through the museum at random was the best way, I now give the complete opposite advice. Make a list beforehand of the pieces you most wish to see. It is best to see five great masterpieces than seeing twenty and feeling numb and bored all the way through.

La Gioconda

The first in many people’s list is Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. A permanent piece in the Louvre, La Gioconda is located in the Denon Wing, a quick right from the main hall to Room 6. Before you see her, the crowd of people with their cameras will let you know you have arrived at the right place.

The search for Mona Lisa causes one to ignore every other painting until finding it.  Standing in front of Da Vinci’s great work I expected to feel a sense of wonder, a wonder caused by finally gazing at the mysterious woman who stares right back.  Yet standing in the middle of a frenzied crowd destroys the experience. The disappointment overwhelms any other sensation I expected to feel. She is smaller than you’d think, even smaller against the large empty wall behind her and is encased in a protective glass to shield her from the constant flash of cameras.

A single rope and two security guards set the five feet boundary between the Renaissance painting and the people extending their arms looking for the best angle to catch a quick picture.

Was she beautiful? Was she as intriguing as all history teachers described her? I couldn’t tell. My view was constantly interrupted by someone’s camera or iPad. It took great effort to squeeze between the crowd to make it to the front and once there, if it took more than thirty seconds to get a good glimpse of Mona Lisa, a collection of multilingual complaints let me know my time was up.

It is hard to appreciate what is in front of you when you are watching it through a viewfinder and the angst to take Mona Lisa home with you, the now or never, is easily contagious. The experience, however, has been tarnished by this desperation to bring back evidence of a wonderful trip to Europe.­

Venus de Milo

Venus never disappoints me. In fact, finding her was the complete opposite than finding Mona Lisa and unlike Mona Lisa, she is bigger than I would have thought. She stands in the middle of a room with tall ceilings and while people might be surrounding her, the view is never compromised.

I often wonder if people would love Venus de Milo if she had her arms. Maybe she would look like any other Greek statue. But it is her lack of arms which makes her interesting, a reminder of the passage of time and the fragments of the past that give a broken glimpse of it.

Perhaps her intrigue is the product of propaganda throughout the centuries. The Goddess with no arms. Yet, the feeling upon seeing her is relief. Ah. I found you, just like I imagined.

Psyche and Cupid

My aunt insisted on finding her favorite piece. She didn’t know where it was but she would recognize it immediately. She was talking about Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

I had never seen it before but I quickly understood why it was her favorite.

Only just awakened by her lover’s kiss, Psyche reaches up to Cupid as he cradles her. Their faces, so close, show great emotion and intimacy. Their bodies are barely touching but the language between them is tender. They are oblivious to anything around them. In that waking moment, the mythological lovers regard each other and relish being together once again.

It is not up to me to tell you to visit Palace Louvre because you are in Paris and if you didn’t go, then you definitely didn’t visit Paris. Go because there is something inside those walls you want to see before you die. Do it because you want to remember that moment in detail years later when you have wine with your travel friends and smile about it. Go because you will feel something when you see what you want to see, something so great you won’t need a camera to remember it. Go because nobody told you to go.

In the Mind of Dalí: Surrealism in Florida

I fell in love with Salvador Dalí the way one would fall in love with the basket case from high school. Anytime you see them, or any reference to them, you can’t help but think “What a weirdo” and dismiss it. But with every exposure, and a pinch more of maturity each day, you see something you didn’t see before, and curiosity sparks. You find the method to what seemed pure madness, and after time you realize, “I get it. I totally get it.”

I began accepting my crush for Dalí when I visited his museum in Montmatre in Paris. Surrounded by the various sculptures of his melting clock, a series of drawings illustrating stories of the Bible and his immortal muse, Gala, something finally clicked. 

So when I was told one of the biggest Dalí collections was in St. Petersburg, only a few hours away from Miami, two words were immediately uttered. Road trip.

The journey began with the sunrise and coffee to go. It was long and straight –oh so straight- shot across the peninsula, a dull road momentarily livened by the sight of gators in the canals skirting the Everglades. But later, rather than sooner, we were cruising down Boulevard Dalí by the bay, and to the left we were greeted by this enormous metal square building with a glass dome emanating from the top of it, spilling over the front.

The Dalí Museum, the home of more than 96 of his pieces, couldn’t have represented him better with such an exterior. The unconventional glass bubble called the “enigma” erupts out of the confinements of the conventional rectangular building is the combination of the ration with the fantastical. I was already beyond intrigued.

The entrance forces you to pass straight through the gift shop, as opposed to leaving it as a small treat to the very end, and towards Café Gala that serves the best Spanish treats along with piping hot coffee. To the right, next to a helical staircase, a man leads you to the elevator which takes you to the third floor, where gallery begins.

“What happened with the second floor?” I joked. But he just smiled and wished us a lovely visit.

The third floor, the lovely view from inside the "enigma" and the end of  the staircase.

Passing the mysterious second floor, I arrived at the third floor, the glass bubble revealing a blue sky and the top of the spiral staircase which now looked like a double helix, possibly symbolizing the DNA molecule and Dali’s obsession with it. 

Aside from my interest in this man, I was eager to visit this museum because many years ago, it wasn’t one of the biggest collection of a surrealist artist but the devoted interest of a couple. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse began collecting paintings of Dalí, who later became their friend. As the years passed, the collection grew and could no longer keep it in their house. Many museums were interested, like MOMA , but they wanted to dismantle the collection and take a few pieces. No one wanted such a large collection of one artist. The Morses thought that wasn’t good enough. And so, St. Petersburg became the home of Surrealism.

The tours gather to the right every 30 minutes, in front of a painting called Daddy Longlegs of the Evening- Hope! The first one the Morses bought. 

 

Daddy Longlegs of the Evening- Hope! by Salvador Dali

The painting is striking and melting objects predominate- a war plane and a soft cello being played by the gelatinous looking self portrait of Dalí, seen various times in his other pieces. There is also a child with wings covering his eyes from the horrors unfolding, like the rotting horse shooting out of a cannon and the plane oozing to the ground. 

The guide explained this is the first piece Dalí painted in the United States in 1943, after the artist and his wife moved seeking refuge from World War II.

And this piece, so full of war elements and history, is only the introduction.

The visitors were tickled by the slow exposure to his smaller paintings and drawings but the awe becomes tangible when they stop completely, for minutes on end, to stare at his grand masterpieces that go all the way up to the ceilings. 

The first one to be seen is Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln. 

Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln

The self-explanatory title immediately captured the interest of the group because the first and only thing you see in the painting is a naked woman, Gala, facing away towards a sunset. She is surrounded by cubes of different colors that don’t form a particular figure. But if you stand back twenty meters, as the title suggests, turn around and see the painting through a mirror a mirror, you see a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln. 

The trick is so clever, I didn’t mind standing there smiling, facing away from the painting you are admiring, looking quite ridiculous to all the newcomers who have no idea what is going on. Like I knew a secret they didn’t. At least for a few minutes.

But after you have admired it from afar, you get close again and see all kinds of things you hadn’t notice before. Like the Mediterranean sunset Gala is admiring, which is really an image of Christ ascending, as if seen from above. And at the bottom left corner, there is Gala again facing away, next to a tiny portrait of Lincoln.  It is only when prying, little by little understanding all he has hidden in one painting, all the themes running through it, that you begin to grasp the brilliance behind what appeared to be random madness.

By now, I was submerged in the symbolism and the feelings each painting pulled out of me. I was always feel loneliness when I see any surrealist work. The lack of human interaction, the vast empty sceneries, makes me feel incredibly alone. But with Dalí, I always sense of acceptance for this solitude, like the sceneries are not a plane of sadness but the ample rooms of his mind that carry all the trinkets of his imagination. His scared, abstract place that only he can visit and whomever he invites in. He invites me to have such a place for myself.

If I had to pick which painting I stared at the longest, for pure fascination or deepening confusion, it would have to be The Hallucinogenic Toreador. 

 

The Hallucinogenic Toreador

The central figure is Venus de Milo, the image constantly repeated larger and larger across the canvas. The green in her skirt becomes the Toreador’s tie and around her stomach and bosom, the bullfighter’s chin and lips are formed. The shadows of the next Venus contour his face and her red skirt is really his cape hung over his shoulder. Other elements swarm the canvas, like an army of flies, Gala’s presence and even the bull. Initially, the grand piece seems scattered and senseless, but the way  his mind covers what you may see from afar and just a few feet away from it, the question left as to what the relation between Venus and the bullfighter is a love story or a tragedy, has stayed with me.

When people refuse to understand Dalí, I find it near impossible to come up with an argument that will end their confusion. I don’t think anybody ended up loving him because of a well thought out list of reasons to endure viewing his creations. At some point, without really looking for it or even being aware of it, that small intrigue for his melting clocks or his long legged elephants, will simply click into an understanding that can’t be shared, only felt. And you will be hooked with knowing more of how his mind worked and how you could have so easily dismissed as weird something so rich and complex.

My relationship with Dalí was never love at first sight. But it will be a love that will last a lifetime.

I couldn't resist the gift shop [or the coffee].