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The Best Museums
Musée du Louvre (34-36 quai du Louvre, 1er; tel. 01-40-20-53-17; www.louvre.fr). The Louvre's exterior is a triumph of French architecture, and its interior shelters an embarrassment of art, one of the greatest treasure troves known to Western civilization. Of the Louvre's more than 300,000 paintings, only a small percentage can be displayed at one time. The museum maintains its staid dignity and timelessness even though thousands of visitors traipse daily through its corridors, looking for the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo. I. M. Pei's controversial Great Pyramid nearly offsets the grandeur of the Cour Carrée, but it has a real functional purpose, as you will soon see.
Musée d'Orsay (1 rue de Bellechasse, 7e; tel. 01-40-49-48-14; www.musee-orsay.fr). The spidery glass-and-iron canopies of an abandoned railway station frame one of Europe's greatest museums of art. Devoted mainly to paintings of the 19th century, d'Orsay contains some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the French Impressionists, along with sculptures and decorative objects whose designs forever changed the way European artists interpreted line, movement, and color. In case you didn't know, d'Orsay is also where Whistler's Mother sits in her rocker.
Centre Pompidou (place Georges-Pompidou, 4e; tel. 01-44-78-12-33; www.centrepompidou.fr). "The most avant-garde building in the world," or so it is known, is a citadel of modern art, with exhibitions drawn from more than 40,000 works. Everything seemingly is here -- from Calder's 1928 Josephine Baker (one of his earliest versions of the mobile) to a re-creation of Brancusi's Jazz Age studio.
Musée Jacquemart-André (158 bd. Haussmann, 8e; tel. 01-45-62-11-59; www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com). The 19th-century town house, with its gilt salons and elegant winding staircase, contains the best small collection of 18th-century decorative art in Paris. The building and its contents were a bequest to the Institut de France by the late Mme Nélie Jacquemart-André, herself an artist of note. To her amazing collection of rare French decorative art, she added a rich trove of painting and sculpture from the Dutch and Flemish schools, as well as paintings and objets d'art from the Italian Renaissance.
Musée National du Moyen Age/Thermes de Cluny (in the Hotel de Cluny, 6 place Paul-Painlevé, 5e; tel. 01-45-62-11-59; www.musee-moyenage.fr). This is an enchantress of a museum, housing some of the most beautiful medieval art still in existence. The museum occupies one of the two Gothic private residences left from Paris in the 15th century. Dark, rough-walled, and evocative, the Cluny is devoted to the church art and castle crafts of the Middle Ages. It is more celebrated for its tapestries -- among them the world-famed series of The Lady and the Unicorn, gracefully displayed in a circular room on the second floor. Downstairs you can visit the ruins of Roman baths, dating from around A.D. 200.
Musée Marmottan-Claude Monet (2 rue Louis-Boilly, 16e; tel. 01-44-96-50-33; www.marmottan.com). On the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, this once rarely visited museum is now one of the most frequented in Paris. It was rescued from obscurity on February 5, 1966, when the museum fell heir to more than 130 paintings, watercolors, pastels, and drawings of Claude Monet, the "father of Impressionism." A gift of Monet's son Michel, the bequest is one of the greatest art acquisitions in France. Had an old widow in Brooklyn suddenly inherited the fortune of a J. P. Morgan, the event would not have been more startling. Exhibited here is the painting, Impression, Sunrise, which named the artistic movement.
Musée Picasso (in the Hotel Salé, 5 rue de Thorigny, 3e; tel. 01-42-71-25-21; www.musee-picasso.fr). Deep in the heart of the Marais, this museum has been hailed in the press as a repository "for Picasso's Picassos." The state acquired the world's greatest collection in lieu of a $50-million inheritance tax: 203 paintings, 158 sculptures, 16 collages, 19 bas-reliefs, 88 ceramics, and more than 1,500 sketches and 1,600 engravings. The work spans 75 years of Picasso's life.
Musée Rodin (in the Hotel Biron, 77 rue de Varenne, 7e; tel. 01-44-18-61-10; www.musee-rodin.fr). Auguste Rodin, the man credited with freeing French sculpture from classicism, once lived at, and had his studio in, this charming 18th-century mansion across from Napoleon's tomb. Today, the house and its garden are filled with his works, a soul-satisfying feast for the Rodin enthusiast. In the cobbled Court of Honor, within the walls as you enter, you'll see The Thinker crouched on his pedestal. The Burghers of Calais are grouped off to the left; and, to the far left, the writhing Gates of Hell can be seen, atop which another Thinker once more meditates. In the almost-too-packed rooms, men and angels emerge from blocks of marble, their hands twisted in supplication, and the nude torso of Balzac rises from a tree.
Note: This information was accurate when it was published, but can change without
notice. Please be sure to confirm all rates and details directly with the companies in question before
planning your trip.
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