Art history is among my greatest interests and ever since I began cultivating that interest, the Louvre remained the great art museum I had yet to visit.

Throughout the years, I became increasingly aware of the content of the Louvre’s rich collections until my geographical proximity and stylistic interests made my continuing failure to visit frankly ridiculous.

Now that I have finally made that pilgrimage I must confess that, of all the art gallery experiences I have had to date, this was certainly the least enjoyable.

The Louvre is France’s biggest attraction and counts more visitors per year than any other art museum in the world. This popularity is, I am forced to reflect, precisely the problem.

For when I think of the world’s most visited art museum in the world’s most visited city, the Louvre experience is less an exercise in art appreciation and more a rite of passage. Pilgrimage indeed.

Art should remain for everyone: it is the expression of humanity communicating with itself. Yet I wonder how many of those bored kids and Chinese tour groups are really here to absorb the art, how many of them are actually tuning in.

This is a morning like any other: there’s a big scrum surrounding La Joconde (the famous Mona Lisa). Signage has guided the paying customers here, all the way from the entrance. The flow of traffic suggests that for many of them, the enigmatic smile was their first stop.

And in the jostle of elbows and knees, perhaps less than half are looking at Leonardo’s painting behind its thick protective screen. Many of them are taking photos of it, or more precisely, taking of photos of themselves in front of it.

Posing for the camera, they have turned their backs on the masterpiece.

Manuscript illustrations

The hordes were mercifully less interested in the extraordinary collection of medieval paintings and an agreeably low-lit temporary exhibition of manuscript illustrations featuring works by Jean Fouquet and other masters.

I count myself fortunate to have enjoyed this small but very complete experience and indeed we had planned the timing of our visit to include it.

It’s difficult to describe the deep and enduring appeal of Pink Martini, a group of highly literate musicians performing a decidedly popular repertoire with absolute sincerity.

The band hails from Portland, Oregon – a city with more than its fair share of oddballs – but it could claim to be from everywhere, with songs in languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

The Pink Martini sound is rich, mature and accomplished, yet somehow kitsch and even fetishistic.

It’s a curiosity shop of old brasileiro records mixed in amongst recordings of forgotten music hall revues and Japanese softcore soundtracks. It’s Chopin dancing the tango with Doris Day.

There really is something for everyone. And it’s all heart-on-your-sleeve stuff. This is probably what first attracted me to Pink Martini. I’d be listening to a brassy, rather loungecore take on a tempestuous Italian love affair and all of a sudden my eyes would fill up at the sheer candour of it. Pink Martini defies you to be cynical, while reminding you that it’s probably far more worldly and grown-up than you.

With singer China Forbes out on long-term sick leave, the band has recruited a reality-TV rock singer. And of course such an unpredictable move is classic Pink Martini: the brash, imposing Storm Large applies her own considerable vocal capabilities to the material while maintaining just a soupçon of vulnerability.

At the time of our visit, a massive undertaking to clean the seven hundred year old stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle’s Upper Chapel was halfway complete.

In the bright sunlight of an uncharacteristically hot October afternoon in Paris, the contrast between the southern, newly-cleaned façade and the northern façade still to be processed was nothing less than extraordinary.

The glasswork of that southern façade shows Sainte-Chapelle, if you will, in a new light; as it must have looked when inaugurated in 1248, a chapel purpose-built by Louis IX to house some of the most important Christian relics.

François I ruled for thirty two years and during that time the character of Europe changed dramatically. His impact on the Loire region was also dramatic, as a result of both his presence in the area and his own projects.

The vast and rather baffling Château de Chambord was intended as a mere hunting lodge, an early example of a castle built for grandeur and pleasure rather than for defence.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Chambord for me was the roofscape. Consider the north façade. Below the roofline, Chambord appears symmetrical, solid and even formal. Contrast that with the roof and we see instead a riot of chimneys, towers, arches and windows. Taken together, the harmony of the whole is nevertheless striking.

Show as slideshow

Château de Chambord

Perhaps the definitive residential château, the vast Chambord complex is both magnificent and preposterous.

We took a few days off at Easter to visit a portion of the Val de Loire. Not for nothing is this region called the Garden of France. What few parts of the landscape are not given over to rich agri- and viniculture are either covered by lazy green rivers or grand châteaux.

The colours of spring were particularly vibrant during an unseasonably hot weekend. Even if the gardens we visited had not yet reached their full flowering potential, they were always full of activity.

l expected everything to be busier than it was. Only an hour or two south of Paris, the Loire is also a great place to graze on the fruits of other people’s labour.

The wines here are fresh and fizzy. At Azay-le-Rideau we tucked into a couple of bottles from my near-namesake Domaine Paget: a deep-fruited Touraine and a vintage Côt if I recall correctly (with a fuzzy head).

Too many folk at Chenonceau though. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Brits, Poles and Americans. No choice but to join them, filing through the corridors and gawping at all the wallpaper and fancy drapes. Also increasing evidence of the new scourge of tourism: the Chinese. Loud, ignorant and dreadfully dressed. Time and money will no doubt refine them.

Couple of Japanese kids in full bridal array outside. Posing for a photographer in the garden of Diane de Poitiers. Impossible to tell if they were really getting hitched or just modelling. No sign of any perspiration in the broiling afternoon sun: very professional.

In Amboise we walked in the footsteps of the aged Leonardo da Vinci at Clos Lucé. We watched the faces of kids light up as they discovered his novel contraptions for destroying things.

Over in Blois, I decided just once to eat a locally-produced andouillette. Just to get the t-shirt, so to speak. It was despicably rich but it went surprisingly well with the Gamay we ordered. A week later, I can still taste it now…

Show as slideshow

Val de Loire

Not for nothing is the Val de Loire called the 'Garden of France'. Blooming flowers, lush pastures, rich vineyards and lazy old rivers.

Dating from around 1536, the château at Villandry is the last notable example of the Renaissance period to be built beside the Loire. Just over two centuries later, it passed from its original owners the Le Breton family to the Count of Castellane who drastically modernised the buildings.

The Castellanes kept the château only 35 years before selling it on in 1789 to a coffee baron named Chénais who had been ruined by the Haitian Revolution. Chénais’ luck never improved and he was forced to sell to a profiteer named Ouvrard who failed to pay off the sum required. Napoleon I stepped in for the debtor but gave Villandry to his brother Joseph who himself sold it on to the newly-ennobled Hainguerlot family in the early nineteenth century.

Show as slideshow

Château de Villandry

The Carvallo family quite literally spent a fortune on this château, restoring both buildings and the amazing gardens to splendour.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Villandry was not in ideal condition. Joachim Carvallo, the doctor who bought it in 1906, wrote: “When I came to settle at Villandry and looked closely at the château and the estate, I was terrified by the crushing burden I had taken on.”

Villandry was to be a labour of love for Carvallo and his wife Ann. Together they restored the château to its original Renaissance state, carefully reversing all the later development done by the Castellanes and others. From the parc à l’anglaise they refashioned richly expansive herb and flower gardens à la française in keeping with the restoration work.

Villandry has been a designated historical monument since 1934 and the gardens are also protected on a national register. Though it receives close to half a million visitors every year, the château retains a peaceful, intimate atmosphere. In good weather, walking in the gardens with the fragrance of the herbs in the air is a genuine pleasure.

Recently, I visited Paris. The main reason for this visit was to attend the Mondrian / De Stijl exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This article provides some biographical information and artistic discussion, mainly on Mondrian himself.

Piet Mondrian was born in Amersfoort near Utrecht and raised in a strict Protestant family. He appears to have led a strongly self-possessed, almost ascetic life, beginning his career as a teacher before devoting himself full-time to painting.

Early years

Mondrian’s early work contains references to various artistic movements of the time, notably impressionism and cubism. Some of his experiments were brief: the brighter, complementary colours associated with fauvism appear in only a few works, whilst a muted palette dominates the later part of his representational period.

Not long after his move to Paris in 1911, Mondrian’s paintings seemed literally to disintegrate. His subtle economy of colour and shade grew narrower and flatter, while his furrowed fields and dense networks of tree branches morphed into grids. Mondrian progressed toward ever more basic, spiritual expressions of balance and harmony.

The theory behind this process of refinement, purification and reliance on instinct came to be known as neoplasticism and Mondrian expounded it through the essays he published in De Stijl, the epoymous journal of a movement of which Mondrian was a founding member.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Unexpected opportunities

During a visit home, the outbreak of war and the neutrality of the Netherlands effectively marooned Mondrian in his native country. Thus seeking an opportunity to maintain the trajectory of his artistic development, Mondrian joined an artists’ colony where he first encountered the painters Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg.

Van der Leck’s current approach, in which he limited his palette to primary colours, was incorporated as yet another step on Mondrian’s path to increased abstraction. Meanwhile van Doesburg, ten years the junior of Mondrian, was an energetic and enthusiastic colleague, the very embodiment of the twice-bright candle.

If Mondrian’s theoretical and philosophical studies formed the basis of De Stijl’s ideological dialogue, much of the movement’s momentum and proliferation came from van Doesburg, who drew in new contributors from the fields of spatial design.

After the war Mondrian returned to Paris, leaving behind his fellow De Stijl members. Van Doesburg did not remain long in the Netherlands, decamping to the Bauhaus at Weimar – where his presence and influence would be considerable – and developing increasingly international connections. De Stijl would later lean further towards the spatial design aspects of van Doesburg’s later contemporaries, in particular through the activities of Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud.

The harmony of the grid

With the key periods of Mondrian’s artistic development having their mise-en-scène in his adopted city, it is perhaps surprising that Paris has never before mounted a proper retrospective on Mondrian’s career.

Nevertheless, it will be remembered that the twentieth century was characterised by mechanisation with internationalisation as its corollary. The New World equalled and then surpassed the economic hegemony of Europe and, reflecting this redistribution of wealth, art collections were scattered across the world. To bring together the oeuvre of Mondrian in Paris, given his status as a prominent artist of that century, is a considerable feat.

And Mondrian’s reputation was sealed with the advent of the 1920s. Having once more settled in Paris, he now focused intensely on his own work, arriving at the period of his career for which he is best known. The extent of abstraction in his paintings reached its peak between 1921 and about 1927, when he sought out ever more minimalist, instinctive expressions of harmony on canvas. It was in the middle of this same period that Mondrian definitively broke with De Stijl, accelerating the pursuit of his own development.

The fruits of Mondrian’s labours at this time consist of his famous combinations of thick black lines and red, blue, yellow and occasionally black rectangles on a field of white or sometimes bluish grey.

Viewing a Mondrian work from this period can be a profound experience. If we take the elements required to achieve an instinctive visual balance and we pare them down to the absolute minimum required to represent the effect to ourselves, a Mondrian work might be the result. Moreover, given the artist’s ongoing quest for the expression of harmony, the detection of some hint of the Oriental in the work is not unexpected.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lines and the colours are harmonious in terms of both positive and negative space, resonating as mutually exclusive elements yet effectively combined as a whole proposition, when together they achieve a delicate balance.

In this way, Mondrian still engages with the age-old idea concern of artistic composition. What separates him from others is that he has successfully reduced the harmonious composition to its most basic ingredients. It is both an achievement and a preoccupation that artists would continue to develop and investigate throughout the twentieth century.

In a state of constant experimentation, Mondrian now even applied his aesthetic of harmony to his living and working space. Contemporary photographs show the artist’s sparse yet bright decoration, with a selection of works hanging from the walls that chart the progression from his early career right up to his present. Happily, the curators of the Paris exhibition reconstructed the artist’s space within the exhibition space, which gave a clear impression of Mondrian’s environment.

Final departures

The De Stijl movement could no longer survive without the central figure of van Doesburg who died in 1931, though the principles lived on, longest of all in the field of architecture where Oud and Rietveld received important post-war commissions and whose ideas influenced others including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Mondrian meanwhile had left Paris by 1938 and after a two-year sojourn in London, he moved to New York where he would live and work until his death. It was in New York that Mondrian’s approach to art appears significantly to have altered, indeed to have loosened up.

I confess that I tend to view this final period of his rather sentimentally. Certainly, anecdotal evidence suggests that Mondrian was much taken with the energy of the great Gotham – doubtless including finding much in common with its grid system – and with jazz records, of which he was a noted admirer and which he liked to play from a gramophone he had installed in his studio.

Now the black lines proliferate, then change colour and are even partly obscured by bits of coloured tape. Just before the end of his life, Mondrian had begun in fact to use the walls of his living space as a kind of experimental canvas.

Lasting influences

The influence of Mondrian and De Stijl has been profound, far outgrowing the period of activity, and notable in cultural expressions including fashion, typography, computer programming and several generations of designers, including myself.

Probably my first encounter with Mondrian and De Stijl came through cycling. There was of course Bernard Tapie’s La Vie Claire cycling team, but the French cycling equipment company Look had adapted a “De Stijl” treatment of primary colours for its logo and I owned a pair of Look cycling shoes. My favourite cycling team was Panasonic-Sportlife, whose kit used the same colours minus the white background.

Much later, I found a Mondrianesque reductivist approach useful to my work in information design. Alloying Mondrian’s sense of instinctual harmony to a fairly rigorous self-interrogatory process that developed out of my attendance at a usability course in 2005, I learned to develop and test my decisionmaking in visual design and information architecture.

I haven’t been here since I was twelve on a school exchange. The Meunier family from Arras looked after me as a shy, terrified kid from Yorkshire for a week or so.

During that time, I actually came to Paris twice: once with the family in their planet-sized Citroën CX to visit the Palais de la découverte and the other with my class to see the sights, many of which I would repeat this weekend!

L’arrivée

Impenetrable fog over the flat plains of the great Nord. Watery greens and browns and somewhere beyond that fog, the old coalpits and battlegrounds, criss-crossed by a web of shaky cobbled roads.

Arrow straight like the Romans down to the banlieues stewing in shades of grey on this early Saturday morning, the colours of Le Corbusier and the Fourth Republic. Block on block passing us by until we reach the Paris we think we want to see.

Le matin de Paris

Now the Métro, wider than London and older than Brussels. Still early but the people are starting to appear albeit underground. Les Halles will stay a ghost town for an hour or so yet. Rain falling steadily until then, while empty streets come to terms with the previous night and a freezing wind off the Seine, only a block away now.

Gutters full of dirty water, soggy flyers and clumps of shredded tobacco. Trees embarassed and naked as if caught out by an empty cab rank in the early hours. The terrasses of bars struggle on without their neon make-up and a chic black backdrop, stacks of stained chairs out front like bad teeth.

Lurking behind massed ranks of mixed-use buildings and set in ample space is the Centre Pompidou, an edifice of eccentric gauche on the rive droite, looking like a practical joke that works. Opening at the fashionably late hour of eleven, for now it stands mute and slightly preposterous until finally justified by long queues.

We take shelter in a café while the streets cough into life. The café interior makes vague provincial references and when not serving customers, the owner does the accounts with strong coffee and a biro. Other shopkeepers pick up their coffees, sometimes making furtive, with or without milk phone calls to colleagues elsewhere. Their own customers will have to wait until this caffeine conspiracy unravels and the new day is finally stamped, validated and worth living.

We’re the aliens here, the only sitters in a steady tide of takeaways. A hapless break from the norm. A coloured moment in a rail crash of Saturday mornings.

Comme chez soi

Later lost in St Germain with the rain mocking our feeble scarves and hats until our hotel comes along and scoops us off the street with a smirk. Checking in with a nervous hotel manager who calls the lift and the lift doesn’t come. We take the stairs and he follows on behind to seek out his lost lift, which has absconded to the top floor.

Then the access card for our room doesn’t work. We collar the manager moments later. He’s recovered the lift but, quite inexplicably, he’s taking the stairs back down to reception. He eyes the useless card doubtfully. He sympathises. He’s as confused about his hotel as we are. This is what makes him successful.

The delay had me noticing things we’re not supposed to notice in hotels. On the wall outside our room, there’s a Mutual Security Agency Pictorial Map of North America Showing Principal Resources, Features and Products.

Synthetic rubber, Charleston and the home of Booker T. Washington. Sugar beets in Sheridan. Molybdenum in Grand Mesa. Lava beds, Pocatillo and the Shoeshone Falls.

Nice room with a bureau for writing. However, the toiletries are white-label and the little bottles of Evian are three euros a go. The hotel information folder contains hotel stationery and a couple of postcards featuring classic views of Paris and an inset photo of a better hotel room than ours.

Help us to Save the Earth. Our common areas are equipped with low energy bulb. Our staff are sensitised to reduce energy loss. Being a part of it is easy if you act for eco-friendly. Thank you.

No, thank you.

Our room is decorated with prints of illustrative engravings whose original context was long since lost. And Sleeper in the Valley, a poem by Rimbaud printed in a nice font, doubtless chosen for its frequent references to lush grass, babbling streams and other reposeful themes. The “sleeper” in question is a soldier who, rather than asleep, actually turns out to be dead with “two red holes in his side”.

Le Panthéon

Then from the rain emerged Paris. We passed Saint Sulpice, famous for its miraculous namesake and a mention in the Da Vinci Code, then on through the Jardins du Luxembourg with their fantastic tennis courts. We headed for the Panthéon, a French equivalent of Agrippa’s extraordinary Roman edifice, where the grateful nation honours its most distinguished men. And Marie Curie.

J’s here on a pilgrimmage to visit the final resting place of Résistance hero Jean Moulin. Moulin’s ashes are interred in a chamber that also includes the remains of Jean Monnet, a forefather of the European Union.

I imagine a sort of intermingling among the great spirits in the crypt here. Braille reading quietly while Zola, Hugo, Voltaire and Rousseau argue over literary ideals. Soufflot takes time – an eternity indeed – to examine his own handiwork that in life he never saw finished. Sadi Carnot, Jaurès and Moulin all now at peace. Everything to the gentle beat of Gambetta’s heart. The heart of a nation, with many empty chambers waiting patiently to embrace the future greatness of France.

La proménade

Downhill on Rue Saint Jacques, the grand old Sorbonne and then the banks of the Seine, where the river parts around the Ile de la Cité and Notre-Dame de Paris, whose nave is almost dark even in daytime.

Alongside the Seine as far as the Tuileries, dodging the heavy Sunday traffic of runners and rollerbladers. Exercise, like everything else in their lives, taken at speed.

At Trocadéro, a severe, staring man stands in traffic minding a fancy car outside Le Wilson. His stance that of a footballer facing down a freekick or a simply a man awaiting fruition astride a urinal. Opposite Le Wilson, they’re chanting for democracy in the Middle East.

More or less like they do in Brussels, except instead of demanding an end to European ambivalence, today they’re demanding an stop to European interference. All is a confusion of voices, flags and camera phones.

Democracy translated into repeated slogans. Democracy represented as touchpad gestures.

Non-plussed Africans hawk their little plastic tours Eiffel against the backdrop of the big iron one, silently demanding an end to Arab protesters intruding on their patch.

But this is Paris and Paris decides what goes.

Show as slideshow

Paris

A cold and rainy February weekend in Paris, a city I last visited when I was 12 years old!

Barjac is a patchwork of narrow streets and unexpected squares, long shadows and the langorous, whispery silences of endless afternoons.

With peace comes expansion and Barjac has long since outgrown the natural advantage of its hilltop position. Newer houses spread out along new roads, welling up like fresh water from the fountain basin of the town square, before petering out in the dusty plains beyond.

Barjac’s community mixes ever fewer suspicious locals and ever more leathery expats. Colourful posters in shop windows advertise events that always seem to take place after you’ve left. In the windows themselves are the fruits of artisanal activities, priced high enough that few visitors will trouble the windchimes hanging from the door.

The French spoken in Barjac sounds like French spoken underwater. You can count on one hand the people who look like people who live here, yet the town has two driving schools.

Last year, while passing through Roussillon I imagined that tourism was tolerated as a necessary evil, that when Summer was over life could start again like Spring postponed.

Here in Barjac, some of those who arrived as tourists have never left, to judge from the names on letterboxes. The distant march of the hammer and drill is getting louder. And to keep this town breathing, yet more tourism will be needed.

New life is being breathed into Barjac, but some may be uncomfortable with the form it’s taking.

Show as slideshow

Barjac

A small, medieval town on the northern edge of the Gard, not yet completely swamped by tourists.

This wasn’t our first visit to the Pont du Gard, one of the world’s finest remaining examples of Roman engineering. We came here during a short holiday in 2007 in similar, baking temperatures. Finding ourselves at a loose end and in the area, I wanted to come back and get a few more photos.

The aqueduct was built in the middle of the first century AD to swell the hard-pressed wells of Nemausus (Nîmes). The stone blocks of which it consists are sometimes huge and so accurately cut as to negate the use of mortar.

At the time of writing and unlike most other UNESCO World Heritage Sites, here there’s a cost. You’re actually paying for the facilities rather than the Pont du Gard, but at €15 per vehicle per day, a flying visit offers less value than taking along a picnic.

Show as slideshow

Pont du Gard

One of the world's finest remaining examples of Roman engineering.