Tragedy!

Another day and what shall we do? I'll tell you soon enough, but let's just say there was one more museum we wanted to visit--can you tell?






Yes, it's finally time to visit Pablo Picasso. The museum was arranged in chronological order and so the changes in his style were very obvious. His paintings from his early days were fairly normal. The first change comes when a close friend
of his dies when they are only in their early twenties. This is called his "Blue" days. He paints his friend's face and does a self-portrait, both with blue backgrounds and under-tones. Later he experiments with many different styles. It is very easy to see a Monet-type impressionist style portrait (sorry no picture). He experimented with collages--some made with pieces of wallpaper, others made out of wood. He has many sculptures-some bronze, some plaster.


His life seemed to be one of constant change as well. He seemed to fall in love with each one of his models. He had many marriages and many affairs. It was during this period of experimentation that he started his venture into cube-ism.

At first he seemed to use a African mask style of face with almond-shaped eyes, like the first one up above. From there he evolves his cubist syle for which he is most known. At first a very gentle "distortion", but then more and more, a very distorted portrait. He became instantly famous. Some of his artsy friends hated it, but the world loved it. His work evolved then from the cubist style to a very distorted style, showing figures with both sides of a face or with arms or legs greatly distorted.

One of our favorites was a kind of sketch-like painting that shows the Sacre Coeur church up on the hill. (We've been there the last couple of days). Picasso lived there for quite some time. Can you recognize the church dome?


Well, it was all very interesting, but then tragedy struck! We left the museum and had walked back a long way to the Metro stop when we stopped to plan out our next move. Maridee said to get out the book (Rick Steve's Paris) and let's see where we're going. "Uh-oh--I thought you had the book". We checked everywhere (in the backpack) and we didn't have it. Maridee was missing her reading glasses as well and we know she had them both in the museum. So back we go. Maridee checked in the bathroom and then with the lost and found department. Someone had turned in her glasses--but no book. Ooooooh. We lost our travel bible! All we can say is that it's a good thing we are all done with the museums and we only have a few days left in Paris! I think we have read every page and probably marked up every page in that book. We actually use it less and less now that we are feeling comfortable traveling around. We have another book that has all of the maps of Paris and we depend on it to navigate the Metro system. C'est la vie!

Tonight is some other festival. These Parisians seem be partying hard and long now that the tourist season is over (and its not so hot outside). Today's party is called Nuit Blanche (white night or sleepless night). There are events going on all over town. But one of the traditions is to light up Concorde Place with blue lights. All of the statues, the fountains, the obelisk--all blue. It was pretty nice. Of course every hour on the hour, the Eiffel Tower lights up too.
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