The Picasso Museum

I had a bit of a museum experience the other day, visiting three museums in one day, they were all free, but the best one was definitely the Picasso museum. There was quite a lot of stuff there, and the house where it is housed was interesting too. They had modified the original rooms to give it more of a Picasso feel, with windows in strange places and little rooms off by themselves. Picasso's stuff is certainly strange and I'm not sure I like it all that much. What was good, or at least very powerful, was another exhibit they had on at the same time. It was a collection of photos from places like Rwanda and Bosnia, they were good photos, well shot, though the subject matter was pretty painful. I found the juxtaposition a bit strange between the photos of mutilated people and dead bodies in the same room as Picasso's stuff, which I find a bit whimsical. I think the photos detracted from the picasso stuff, as after seeing them you weren't really in the mood for picasso's fantasy view of things.

I did like Picasso's sculptures though, particularly his women's heads. After a while of seeing his strange abstract stuff it was also nice to see paintings he had done which show that yes he was actually a really talented painter, he just decided to go in a different direction from the standard methods of painting.


The first sculpture is one of Picasso's women's heads and the second is his Pregnant Woman, which I liked, I suppose this is what pregnant women looked like to Picasso.

I also visited the Musee Cognacq-Jay, around the corner from the Picasso museum. This was a strange museum, it was just a whole stack of stuff put together in an old hotel. Apparently the collector, Ernest Cognacq, appreciated little of his collection, but collected merely for the status of it. He also apparently told everyone that he had never visited the Louvre. I don't have any photos from this musee, it was all just stuff which was alright, but not great, not deserving of a photo.

The final museum I visited that day was the Musee Carnavalet, which is actually the museum of Paris' history, so it has art and artefacts from the Roman times, right through to the present. The best bit of this museum was definitely the Roman stuff which was off in what seemed to be an old stable. The only photo I took from this museum was this random peacock room though. It was obviously some famous Parisian's which they have recreated in this museum, I don't know who's though.