Day 314: Paris, Day 4--Musee National Picasso

Our major accomplishment of the day was going to the Picasso Museum, on the other side of the city. We noticed that several stations on Line 1 of the Metro were closed due to the Tour de France. However, this worked to our benefit, because the subway did not stop at those lines. I was still struggling a bit to figure out Le Metro; by mistake, I submitted yesterday's ticket in the second entrance gate, but one guy was kind enough to swipe his card on my behalf. (People in the subway have so far been very nice here and willing to help out.) The Metro was quite crowded, but not QUITE as bad as Shanghai. Not yet, anyway...

Once we got off at our stop (Saint-Paul, interestingly enough), we had to walk about eight minutes to get there. The museum is at a hotel called the Hotel Sale. Today was the final day of an exhibition on Guernica. Sadly, they did not have the original painting (I asked...it's still in Spain), but it was interesting to learn a lot of background and context on the painting itself: we got to see a lot of sketches on it as well as his paintings that inspired it as well. This part of the exhibition was on floor 0--the ground floor--but then we decided to be weird and go to the basement--doing things a bit out of order. I wasn't too impressed with the items in the basement. Many of them had to do with the architecture of the museum itself and how it was designed by design students; they also were having a special exhibition on this floor on Diego Giacometti, which didn't interest me much. Oddly enough, while we were milling around on this floor, they asked for our tickets again; I really didn't understand the rationale for this, but I complied. Even though there were signs around saying that the 2nd and 3rd floor exhibitions were closed, we went up anyway. We had much better luck there. We started with the 2nd floor, which was called "Picasso's Picassos," and then went to the 3rd, which was "Pablo Picasso's donation: The Artist's Own Collection." The rooms tended to be organized thematically, such as one room on women, one on children, one on landscapes, one on cubism, one on surrealism, and even one on a play he did the set design for called Parade (1917). They showed a film representation of the play, which was pretty interesting. It's interesting to note that his private collection had some from artists such as Matisse and Gaugin. Once we finished the 2nd and 3rd floors, we decided to finish the one on Guernica. One room showed the progression of Guernica as documented by his inspiration, Dora Maar (I didn't know she was a photographer, and she took a lot of photos of his creating it). Near the end of the exhibit on Guernica, they showed modern representations of the painting by other artists.

Upon leaving, as usual, we went our way through the gift shop, but controlled ourselves: we're sticking mostly to purchasing things like postcards, pens, bookmarks, and magnets for ourselves and others. Then we went back on the Metro--and got there pretty quickly. I do have to say I'm impressed overall by Le Metro, still. We dropped off our stuff at the hotel and then walked about a block to get some subs from Subway--and they actually had ice!!!  And the meal we got--two combos--wasn't bad, and neither was the price (about 18 euros). So we did well with the budget today.

Tomorrow, I think we'll try to go to Notre Dame Cathedral.