So, today was Musee d’Orsay (hopefully I didn’t f that up too much), L’Atlier de Joel Robuchon for lunch, and then Saint-Chappelle. Of the three, I was most impressed by Saint-Chappelle.

Orsay: lots of stuff, largely impenetrable. I enjoyed a reasonable number of the pieces, both painting and sculpture, but it wasn’t until I was on what felt like somewhat “familiar” territory that I really could appreciate what it all meant. Familiar being Van Gogh, in this particular case. One thing I found, which isn’t a *new* conclusion, is that I really don’t understand what impressionism is about. That is, if I had to guess, I’d say that impressionism, based on nothing but what I’m pulling out of my butt, is a move away from photorealism, towards painting techniques that substitute some sort of abstraction in the representation to communicate how an artist feels about a subject. I have no idea whether that’s the “textbook” definition, to be sure. But basically, as we moved through the museum, and transitioned from older works to newer ones, I found I had a very hard time telling the difference between certain types of impressionism, and bad technique.

Here’s where I’m going to get tripped up, because I don’t know who speciically belongs to which schools, or what’s considered what, so take this all with a grain of salt. When I look at something like a Renoir, there’s a softness, and an… airy sort of haze to some of his portraits that feel ethereal – the focus is on very specific details, and because other things have some detail abstracted, the viewer gets a sense of what is and is not important – the “feel” of the painting is intact, even though the details are not, yet there is enough detail for a viewer to understand the painting as a whole.

Monet seems to have pulled even further away from reality, and uses the color, as well as the brushwork, to create a sense of visual emotion that surpasses photorealism – the specific painting that sticks out in my mind is a bluish silhouette of Parliament against a pinkish sky.

Still, none of this really “came together” for me, until Van Gogh. There were two specific Van Gogh self-portraits on display – one with a maybe yellow-green background, with very distinct blue streaks on his face, and one with a blue swirly background. Like how I use the technical terms? Bleah. Still, the “best” painting for me was the blue swirly self-portrait. In that, the mix of realism, with such expressiveness in the brushstrokes, and the stylized, almost symbolic patterning in the background is so evocative that it felt like the culmination of what all the works I’d seen previously had been hinting at was possible. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, I don’t know. What I do know is that two rooms later, there was a Cezanne that to me just looked unfinished, and a pair of crowd scenes by, I believe Toulouse-Latrec that I literally couldn’t distinguish from the drawings of someone who has no idea how to draw or paint.

I suppose that’s the common complaint about modern art, but there you go.

L’Atlier: Ei-Nyung had the menu, so I’ll let her describe that. The basic structure for those who might not be familiar with the style of restaurant (as I was not), is that it’s essentially a bar, somewhat like a sushi bar, and there are a number of different small plate dishes, as well as some “larger” dishes, that are more geared towards being a main course.

Since Ei-Nyung had splurged on the menu, which ran E98, even at lunch, I figured I’d go for something… cheaper. still not cheap, mind you, as it ended up running about $56 for the dishes I had, but what are you gonna do? It’s like, #25 in the world, right? I had L’Aubergine, or as we yanks know it, the eggplant. The dish consisted of a sprig of thyme, perched atop a stack of grilled zucchini, grilled eggplant, a slice of grilled tomato, and a slice of fresh mozzarella. There was, I believe, a comma-shaped dollop of basil sauce at the base. That is, I believe it was basil – it definitely was there. The little stack of vegetables and cheese was absolutely spectacular. Something about the seasoning, and the grilling of the components was spot-on, and the balance of flavors was just perfect.

Next up was a quail dish. There was a small, licorice-y salad of greens, a multi-ingredient mashed potato side, and the quail – split up into two leg pieces (leg & thigh), and two breast pieces, which looked like they were stuffed with some of the innards from the bird. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what the bird was stuffed with, but that’s what it seemed like. I figured I’d get the quail becuase a.) I couldn’t read the vast majority of the menu, and at that point, we’d asked so many questions, I didn’t want to press much further, and b.) we’d recently had quail at Chez Panisse, so I figured why not compare? As it turns out, the quail had been the weak point in the dinner at Chez Panisse, and the quail at L’Atlier was far superior. Crispy skin, done to perfection, not dry or greasy in the least, and in a small amount of perfectly seasoned jus. A piece of the breast meat, with the stuffing, a leaf or two from the salad, and the potato fit on a fork nicely, and all the flavors complemented each other perfectly, with the bitter brightness of the greens offsetting the richness of the meat & potato.

For dessert, I had L’Orange. Yeah – this was an odd thing. Good, but odd – and more challenging than uniformly “delicious,” I think – perhaps a more sophisticated palette would find it uniformly enjoyable, but to me, it was far more academically “neat” than out-and-out to-die-for-delicious. Still, a totally unique experience, and worth every moment. Basically, the dish consisted of a canape of orange sherbet set atop slices of mandarin orange (the slices were cut, not peeeled), which sat in a pool of orange juice. On top was what appeared to be a very thin, pressed piece of the caramelized rind. I was wrong about the rind – though it looked as though that must have been what it was, it was a very thin layer of orange-flavored sugar – though that doesn’t really describe it accurately, because it was far more savory than sweet. It was like they had pulled all the savory components of the flavor of an orange, isolated them from the sweetness, and then turned that into a thin layer of completely un-sweet sugar.

Very strange. Even weirder was that the orange sherbet had a strong clove (and possibly nutmeg) flavor that again accentuated the savory aspect of the orange. This had more of a hint of sweetness than the “rind,” and was a little more accessible. Turns out that the orange slices were also sitting in what appeared to be a second orange sherbet, which was even sweeter, but again, was paired with some sort of spice that accentuated something different. I can’t even really describe it, except that it tasted like a halfway point between the clove/orange sherbet and what you’d normally expect. The orange itself was exactly what I’d have expected, as was the orange juice, but in comparison/contrast/complementing the other flavors, what you ended up with was that each mouthful felt like a different perspective.

I always think that it’s weird on the Japanese Iron Chef when you’d get someone saying something ridiculous like this, but basically, it was as though you’d put an orange on a pedestal in a darkened room, shone a spotlight on it, and taken a variety of pictures from different angles. Each mouthful was like eating one of those pictures – each slightly different, with a slightly different take on the flavor. Maybe it’s like you got a bunch of impressionists all painting the same orange, and then you’ve eaten all their paintings and gotten a bunch of different perspectives on the same subject matter. (Ei-Nyung suggested that something like that (a variety of impressionists painting the same subject) would be really illuminating in a museum like the Orsay.)

Anyway – I really enjoyed L’Atlier, but I do confess that I wasn’t prepared to really sit down and confront that kind of food for lunch. It was basically more than I could really “understand” outside of dinner. Dinner ended up being far more pedestrian – we got some gnocchi, lardon, tomatoes, and an eggplant sauce, and cooked it all up at the apartment. Delicious, and way, way cheaper.

Sainte-Chappelle: whoa. For all the idiotic panhandling they’ve set up at the Notre Dame, S-C was done right. The information stuff, and the “shop” and what have you were downstairs, in the much less impressive but still cool lower area, and the upstairs was left relatively untouched. And holy crap, it’s astonishing. Too much, perhaps. While the interior of the building is relatively straightforward, and the sculptures of the apostles were neat, it all pales in comparison to the stained glass. Yeah, this is useless without pictures, as I’m at a loss to describe it to anyone who hasn’t seen it already. It’s very “noisy” and frankly, though it’s appearently quite narrative, the stories are very, very hard to make out because the space between the narrative panels is taken up by repetitive colored patterns, and the visual density of it all makes it completely and totally overwhelming.

Still, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, frankly, and astonishing that apparently, 2/3rds of the stained glass is original. Yeah, Notre Dame’s gigantic, and on the exterior, far more elaborate, but if that took 200 years to build, it must have been a Herculean effort to put up S-C in a mere six years. Wow. We have 4 day museum passes – I’m hoping that we get a really bright day, so we can go back and check it out in its full glory. It was a little dim by the time we got to the place, and cloudy, so it wasn’t as intense as it probably might have been.

Anyway – after all that, we came back to the apartment, and sat around. I’m definitely getting trip fatigue, and can walk less and less each passing day. I miss my dog, and my house, and my friends. Still having a ball, but yeah, whoo – tiring.