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Paris: five exhibitions in five days

Working in Paris during my year abroad, I expected to spend most of my free time swanning around art galleries, tumbling through the Louvre with a sketch book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Alas, I ended up frittering most of my weekends away in a drunken haze of bars and questionable Parisian nightclubs. But as I reached my final week in Europe’s capital city of culture, I decided to set myself the ambitious target of visiting five exhibitions in five days. Not a challenge for the faint-hearted – especially when you’re working full-time. But I am proud to say that I survived. And here’s what I thought of them all.

Sunday: ‘Haiti’ exhibition at the Grand Palais (19/11/14-15/02/15)

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Unlike the French, the Brits lack any shared heritage with Haiti. Consequently, we tend to take little interest in Haitian art. This is a pity: over the last two centuries, Haitian artists have come to the fore in the emerging Caribbean art market. I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and found myself at the Grand Palais’ exhibition, celebrating the last two hundred years of Haitian art.

This exhibition had a quirky layout, with different artworks clustered around half a dozen main ‘thematic totem poles’: among them, Spirits explored the relationship between voodoo and Catholicism, Chiefs explored Haitian politics, and Tête-à-tête looked at the art inspired by the 2010 Haitian earthquake. This was a real opportunity to discover some brilliant artists that I wouldn’t have encountered in England, and it would be wonderful to see the likes of Sasha Huber, Pascale Monnin or Maksaens Denis over on our side of the pond.

Monday: ‘Une histoire, art, architecture et design, des annés 80 à aujourd’hui’ exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Centre (02/07/14-07/03/15)

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The Pompidou Centre does a fabulous job of marketing its exhibitions on its website, so I entered this ‘contemporary collection’ with high hopes. I was not disappointed. This vast exposition involved walking through twenty-odd different rooms, with film screenings, a sound lab and a free guided tour that I dipped in and out of every so often. 

As with many modern art exhibitions, some sections left me a bit perplexed. I walked into a room full of retro-looking chairs and wondered whether I hadn’t entered a DFS sale by mistake. But I also got a real sense of the kinds of anxieties that plague today’s artists; in particular, whether their freedom to criticise the commercial world should be compromised by their reliance on corporate sponsors for funding. Artists to watch include Pierre Joseph, Malachi Farrell and Sophie Calle.

Tuesday: ‘Je n’ai rien à te dire sinon que je t’aime’ exhibition at the Musée des Lettres et Manuscripts (16/09/14-15/02/15) 

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I sneakily called in sick in the morning and hurried over to Saint-Germain to catch this exhibition as it was opening. Charting the depiction of love from Plato through to the Twentieth Century, this was definitely a change of pace from the fast-and-furious modern art exhibitions I’d been to earlier in the week. I was particularly taken by Léon Bloy’s ‘lettres d’amour’ to his fiancée – every inch of the page was literally crammed with declarations of his love. Letters from Jean-Paul Sartre, Napoleon, Brigitte Bardot and Mick Jagger were also real highlights, and I was left feeling rather nostalgic for the lost art of letter-writing. 

Wednesday: ‘The Inhabitants’ exhibition at the Fondation Cartier (25/10/14-22/02/15)

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To celebrate 30 years of exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier, Guillermo Kuitca came up with a collaborative artistic project: ‘The Inhabitants‘. In hindsight, I could probably have given it a miss. Student tickets were €7 – a little pricey, considering there were only about a dozen artworks spread over the two exhibitions. After the first floor (which admittedly housed the fun semi-interactive-light-show-esque installation Musings on a Glass Box) we were shepherded downstairs to a pretty unremarkable series of rooms. Two interesting exceptions were a Francis Bacon portrait and Inhabitants (1970), an explosive short film from Artavazd Pelechian.

The ‘main event’ was a side room put together by film director David Lynch: covered from top to bottom in red felt, bedecked with zebra-patterned armchairs, and overshadowed by a female voice rattling through a nonsensical prose poem; an interesting experience by all accounts. Overall, however, it felt a little gimmicky.

Thursday: ‘7 ans de réflexion’ exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay (18/11/14-22/02/15) 

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With my Eurostar booked for 10am on Friday morning, I just about had time to run into the Musée D’Orsay on my final evening in Paris. The ‘7 ans de réflexion’ exhibition was curated to show off the D’Orsay’s most impressive acquisitions since Guy Cogeval was appointed president in 2008. The exhibition’s layout was a bit clinical, but I couldn’t fault its breadth of focus: each room told a completely different story, from Twentieth Century painting in Northern Europe, to architectural sketches, to the continuous overlap between French art and literature. Although I didn’t learn a huge amount about the periods covered, I left with a strong sense of what makes curators tick at the Musée D’Orsay, and the complex acquisition policy for works of art.

So if your workload miraculously clears over the next few weeks and you fancy popping over to Paris for the weekend, I highly recommend paying a visit to the Grand Palais, Pompidou Centre and Musée D’Orsay exhibitions mentioned above. They certainly managed to hold my attention – and that’s saying something.

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