In Paris, It's the Summer of Museums

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 25, 2006

Already one of the world's greatest cities for museums, Paris has added three new masterpieces to pack into this summer's vacation plans.

The Musee du Quai Branly -- the largest museum to open in the city in decades -- offers an exploration of ancient civilizations; the recently renovated Musee de l'Orangerie invites visitors on a visual stroll through Monet's tranquil waterlily ponds; and the improved Petit Palais allows a peek at the lavish lifestyles of Parisians in centuries past.

The settings of each are dramatic, and the exhibits are entrancing enough to wow the most seasoned museum aficionado. Each museum offers a journey through a different era in time. But the themes remain constant -- glimpses of the pleasures and challenges of everyday life as interpreted by artisans, whether they were carving figurines from a tree in a South African jungle or capturing sunlight on canvas on a summer evening near Paris.

Musee du Quai Branly

A decade in the making and the main cultural legacy of President Jacques Chirac, the Musee du Quai Branly opened Friday. It contains one of the world's largest collections of ancient African art, along with large exhibitions of statues, textiles, masks and weapons from the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

If your past experiences with ancient art collections consisted of worn exhibits in a musty setting, toss out all preconceptions. This museum is visually stunning, inside and out.

The museum rambles along the bank of the Seine, its curved glass exterior mimicking the bend in the river. The Eiffel Tower rises just beyond it. The five-story facade of the administrative building is a vertical garden, lushly carpeted with 15,000 plants indigenous to Europe, the United States, China and Japan.

Inside the museum, collections of carved totems and early weapons, masks and statues are juxtaposed with modernistic architecture. The alternating use of darkness and subdued lighting creates the illusion of exploring mysterious caves and forests and stumbling upon the treasures of lost civilizations. It is a museum designed to enthrall adults and youngsters alike.

An exquisitely carved statue from 10th- or 11th-century Mali appears ready to step off its stand and greet visitors with a raised arm. Next to an exhibit of ancient weapons from the Solomon Islands, an attack unfolds in a video reenactment of how ancient peoples may have staged an assault through high grasses. A display of drums from West Africa is accompanied by the rhythmic sounds of the ancient instruments that chiefs used for communication.

The museum has no corridors or hallways. It's easy to become lost among the free-flowing displays of brilliant feathered headdresses from the Amazon or brightly painted masks of cobwebs and clay from Pacific islands. And that's exactly what the designers intended: to give visitors a "sense of disorientation, breaking from the traditional codes governing museums," according to a description of the museum by its curators. "Visitors become explorers."

In the United States, presidents leave papers and notes in libraries named for themselves. In France, presidents leave cultural icons. Francois Mitterrand hired I.M. Pei to design the renovations at the Louvre that resulted in the glass pyramid; Georges Pompidou created the cultural center that bears his name. Chirac, whose hobby is collecting ancient artifacts, commissioned the Quai Branly, which is named for the street on which it is located. Chirac confessed unabashedly last week that he'd love to see the museum named after him.

And just as the museum legacies of previous presidents were controversial when they opened, Quai Branly has stirred political debate over the issue of stripping cultures of their own patrimony and artifacts to create museums in distant cities. Many of the museum's 300,000 artifacts were brought to France from former colonies.

The museum is an easy 15-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower, making it convenient to pair a visit to the city's best-known tourist destination with its newest museum.

Musee du Quai Branly (51 Quai Branly, 7th arrondissement, 011-33-1-56-61-7000, http://www.quaibranly.fr) is open daily, except Mondays, 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and till 10 p.m. on Thursdays. Admission is $10.75. Metro: Iena, Alma-Marceau, Pont de l'Alma, Bir Hakeim.

Musee de l'Orangerie

On the right bank of the Seine, in a corner of the sprawling Tuileries Gardens, the newly renovated Musee de l'Orangerie -- with its massive murals of Monet's ethereal water lilyponds -- is one of the most enchanting art museums in Paris.

The light-filled museum was built in 1852 as a greenhouse for the Tuileries Gardens. Step out of the summer heat and tourist mayhem, cross an interior bridge and enter a magical world of weeping willows and lily pads. Two cavernous oval rooms provide 360-degree panoramas of the views that became Monet's artistic obsession in the later years of his life -- the play of light on his beloved waterlily ponds. Each room contains four murals that stand 6 1/2 feet tall. If they were placed end to end, they would stretch nearly 300 feet.

On one horizon, the water reflects the lavenders and pale blues of a misty sunrise. Turn to the opposite horizon, and the hues intensify into the molten gold of a fiery orb dissolving in a brilliant pool of yellow water. In between, lilies seem to float on clouds and dreamy azure skies reflected in the water.

The museum, which served as a bunkhouse for soldiers on home leave during World War I, reopened in May after six years of work. Construction crews gutted its second floor and opened Monet's murals to natural light from skylights filtered through protective white gauze. The visual effect transports visitors to the ponds and gardens that surround Monet's home and studio in the village of Giverny outside Paris.

Because the murals were too large to move, workers encased them in giant boxes during the painting, drilling and blasting. The newly created galleries beneath the waterlily rooms include a small collection of works by Renoir, C?zanne, Picasso, Matisse and Soutine displayed in wide corridors and brightly painted side rooms.

While young children may not appreciate the subtleties of Monet's play of light and color on ponds, they certainly will be drawn to Andre D?rain's vibrantly colored harlequins and minstrels. In Rousseau's playful painting of a family on an afternoon carriage ride, try challenging your youngster to find the extremely odd little gray dog with his tongue hanging out.

If you haven't bought tickets in advance, the lines are long. But you couldn't ask for a better vista to pass the time. The gold dome of Les Invalides sparkles just across the Seine, the Eiffel Tower pierces the sky in the distance and the elaborate fountains of the Place de la Concorde splash nearby.

Musee de l'Orangerie (Jardin des Tuileries, first arrondissement, 011-33-1-44- 77-8007 ,http://www.musee-orangerie.fr) is open every day except Tuesday from 12:30 to 7 p.m., and until 9 p.m. on Fridays. Group tours are available by reservation only from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Admission is $8.25. Free entry on first Sunday of each month. Metro: Conco rde.

Petit Palais

The ornate Petit Palais reopened six months ago after a five-year renovation to expand its galleries, restore its interior gardens and rejuvenate its massive main-floor open spaces. The museum is a celebration of Parisian life and "a journey through art history from antiquity to 1900," according to its curators.

A subterranean floor of galleries has been added, which allows visitors to see 1,300 of the 45,000 works in the museum collection. Before the renovation, the museum exhibited only 800 items at a time.

But it is the airy, grand spaces of the main floor that make the Petit Palais worth the visit. Artisans have carefully restored its colorful ceiling murals and intricate Italian floor mosaics. The interior garden has been replanted with the same trees used when the museum was built in 1900, and craftsmen searched out the same quarries used by original builders to replace missing sections of stone on its exterior statues.

The gallery is filled with paintings of drunken Bastille Day celebrations of centuries past, magnificient statuary and exquisite porcelain figures, including a clockmaker's fantasy of an ornate clock surrounded by porcelain animals playing musical instruments.

Petit Palais (Avenue Winston Churchill, 8th arrondissement, 011-33-1-53-43-4000, http://www.petitpalais.paris.fr) is open every day except Monday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and until 8 p.m. on Tuesdays. Admission free for permanent collections; tickets required for temporary exhibitions. Metro: Champs-Elysees-Clemenceau, Concorde.

You'll save yourself hours of heat and hassle if you buy tickets ahead of time online, or from any branch of the discount retailer Fnac or Galeries Lafayette in Paris. You sometimes have to pay one or two euros extra, but it's worth the convenience. Night hours are a great time to visit, as the crowds are usually smaller. Children under 18 are admitted free to all museums. Older students with a valid college or school ID are eligible for student rates.

Molly Moore is The Post's Paris bureau chief.