Museum Tour (Musee Orsay / Palais Tokyo)

After receiving my Carte de Sejour I am now a long-term resident of France. One of the privileges included is free access to a lot of museums and other cultural sites. With all the gray days these past weeks, museums have served as good things to do indoors. I even went a little overboard with the museum visiting: Musee Orsay, Orangerie, Louvre, Centre Pompidou, and Palais Tokyo. Most of them do not allow photos, so the photo selection is meager but the collections here are really fantastic.

I went to Orsay (above) and Palais Tokyo (below) both in the same day. Quite different places. Orsay keeps mainly french collections from 1848-1915, while Palais Tokyo displays contemporary art pieces of the sort that I think leaves most people confused. The buildings for both are reused structures which had past lives (Orsay, a train station... the other an international exhibition space which had been partly demolished and abandoned before being repurposed). I found the recreation of both spaces very successful for the types of work they held. Palais Tokyo gets mixed reviews from others (the dark, unfinished basement area feels like the leaky basement of an abandoned parking garage), but not all art belongs or even works in the "neutral" white box gallery environment.