It’s time to get back to Paris – well, at least here on the blog.
Today we’re at the Musée d’Orsay, the museum that houses the art of the Impressionist painters and others circa the late 19th and early 20th century. If you’re hip – or at least if you’re hip like this museum wants you to be, you now call it merely MO. Modern branding at work. (Will, what do you think?)
Technically you aren’t supposed to take photos at the MO, which was suprising, since more and more we’ve found recently that museums are acknowledging that people will have their smart phones with cameras and be compelled to take selfies anywhere. So, rather than constantly try to stop that, museums have just asked for no flash to be used. But not at the MO, where they still employ people to chase down people taking photos with cell phones.
But that wasn’t me. Since technically one can’t take photos inside the MO, I mostly didn’t. I didn’t take any of the art works per se. I did sneak one shot of the interior of the museum’s central walkway. The MO is housed in an old railway station. The one previous time I’d visited this museum years ago, I remember it had a very cavernous open feel to it. But that was at least 15 years ago. Since then, they’ve remodeled, and added the stuff on either side of the aisle, which made it seem more crowded and cluttered to me. Oddly, though, it seemed overall that there were fewer artworks on display in the galleries, for all that it seemed cluttered. Go figure.
Anyway, one huge appeal for me was to take photos of the big clocks that are still functional on the upper levels. These are in open areas; one was in the restaurant where we ate at the museum, actually. So, I figured it was OK to snap some photos of those, as well as shots of and from the balcony next to the restaurant. From the top level of the museum you get a great view of Sacre Coeur and its location on a distant hillside on the edge of the Paris. A great view, with and without the clock. I should note that the day we were there Sacre Coeur was shrouded in gray; what you’re seeing in the photos below is the result of a bit of digital darkroom magic to make it more apparent in the photos that it was in real life.
Enjoy.
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- Interior of the MO
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- Interior clock at the MO (seen from below)
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- Interior clock at the MO from a different angle
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- Exterior-facing clock #1, seen from inside the MO
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- Exterior-facing clock #1 (detail)
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- Figures on an MO balcony
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- View of Sacre Coeur from the MO
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- View of Sacre Coeur from the MO (sepia tone)
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- Exterior-facing clock #2, seen from inside the restaurant
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- Exterior-facing clock #2, seen from inside the restaurant (detail)
So hip–MO! As a Midwesterner, I see Harry Truman’s home state when I read that abbreviation, but I do believe context will make it always easy to distinguish the two!
The clock pictures are gems!
But how is MO pronounced in French? As if it were M’eau? or MOt?
We were at the d’Orsay several years and I took a traditional picture of the clock; but I liked your second picture better than mine. I liked the “filigree” that really showed up in the close-up. And I liked the sensation that the clock was resting on something like a table. There is no end to your creativity!
Thanks for all the comments everybody!
@Dovie – that’s actually a good question, despite the fact that all those words are the same. I mean, I don’t know if they would say “M – O” or pronounce it as one word, not. 😉
@Stan, Chris also has a great photo of that clock from a trip many years ago – it’s a very photogenic clock. 🙂