Picasso and Caillebotte

 Pierre and I are checking out what our retirement will look like.  We are spending our days together and this week we manage to see two different exhibits.  We went to Cité de la Céramique and saw Picasso Céramiste et la Méditerranée.  Unfortunately, you can't take photos inside.  The Sèvres museum has an impressive collection that explains the history of ceramics in France and around the world.  This Picasso exhibit focuses on his partnership with Madoura, a French pottery workshop.

 Our visit to the museum in Barcelona changed my mind about Picasso.  I had never been too impressed by what I had seen.  I realized that I just hadn't seen very much.  Seeing so much of his work organized in chronological order really made me appreciate how talented he was; the scope and variety of his work is very impressive.  The pottery is very clever and playful.

 

 There are new posters in the metro to encourage people to remember their manners.   

We took the commuter rail out to Yerres, a suburb about twenty minutes from Paris. There is a  Gustave Caillebotte show that focuses on the paintings he made while on his family's estate in Yerres.  Caillebotte was an Impressionist and he had money.  He was a  patron to many of the other Impressionists.  He bought many of their paintings while they were struggling and ended up with a huge collection.  He died young at 45 and he wanted to give his collection to France.  Renoir was his executor.  France did not want his collection.  They finally took about half of it.  The collection included many of the most famous impressionist paintings.   In the twenties, after the collection had been offered to France three different times, France realized the value of the collection and tried to accept the rest of it.  It was too late.

 Caillebotte's own work ranges from very realistic to looking more like the other Impressionists.  www.gustavcaillebotte.org/ has photos of all of his work.  The house and estate have been turned into a park, so you could often see where he must have painted certain paintings. 

 There were many poems displayed along the river.

This pagoda on the estate is perched upon a hill that hides an ice house that is buried into the hillside.  I really enjoyed the exhibit and Yerres is a short train ride from Paris and seems like a world away.