Musée D'Orsay: Allegro Barbaro: Bela Bartok et la Modernité Hongroise

I decided I would sign up again for an annual membership to Musée D'Orsay.  Unfortunately, my permanent card seems to have been lost in the mail.  I arrived early to see if I could sort things out and still have plenty of time to enjoy the exhibit.  The museum opens at 9:30, but when I lined up at 9:20 the guard ushered me into the building.  I managed to talk to someone about my missing card, which they were sure would arrive soon (It hasn't).  The point of all this is that I was the very first and only person in the Allegro Barbaro exhibit.  It was wonderful to walk though the exhibit all by myself.  There was Bartok music playing and I liked many of the the bright Hungarian fauvistes' paintings.  It was quite a privilege to have the show all to myself.  

Photos are no longer allowed inside the Musée D'Orsay.

 The birth of a Hungarian modernity 

(from Musée D'Orsay website)

Anonymous Béla Bartók at home© Budapest, Archives Bartók

The title of the exhibition, Allegro barbaro, is a tribute to the piano score written by the young Béla Bartók in 1911. It aims to revive, one hundred years on, the rich dialogue that existed between the arts in Hungary on the eve of the 20th century.
Music and painting resonated with the same spirit of renewal at that time. Hungary was committed to embracing European modernity while still expressing its attachment to a culture and an idiom that conveyed its unique character within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Just at the moment when Béla Bartók’s first symphony, Kossuth, had its debut in Budapest in 1904, young Hungarian painters appeared on the national scene. These artists were as “lively and barbarous” as the composer.

 There are great views out the windows of the museum.

 When they redid the museum right before we arrived in Paris, they also redid the café.  It used to be unfashionable and kind of hard to find.  When I visited as a tourist, I liked to go there and gaze though the clock at the view and have deep thoughts.  Now, it is a glitzy café that is right off the Impressionist area, the busy part of the museum.  If you have a chance, go to the restaurant at the museum.  Mémé took us last year and it was lovely.

 The Tuileries across the Seine and Sacre Coeur beyond

The museum was a train station until the platforms were too short for the longer trains.

After I walked through the Hungarian exhibit, I visited the Impressionist area.  It was the quietest I have every found it.  I think many tourists are under the impression that the museum opens at 10:00.  I enjoyed standing in front of the paintings all by myself and not having to crane my neck around a crowd.

 L'Arbre des Voyelle 1999 by Giuseppe Penone in the Tuileries

There are always poems in the metro--Des Lignes & Des Rimes.  Usually, they are pretty random.