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spective of Van Gogh's Room at Arles ( La Chambre de van Gogh à Arles, 1889) makes
his tiny rented room look even more cramped.
Van Gogh wavered between happiness and madness, even mutilating his own ear.
He despaired of ever being sane enough to continue painting. His Self-Portrait, St. Rémy
(1889) shows a man engulfed in a confused background of brushstrokes that swirl and
rave,settinginmotionthewavesofthejacket.Butinthemidstofthisripplingseaofmys-
tery floats a still, detached island of a face with probing, questioning, yet wise eyes. Do
his troubled eyes know that only a few months on, he will take a pistol and put a bullet
through his chest? Vincent van Gone.
Nearbyarethepaintingsof Paul Gauguin, whogotthetravelbugearlyinchildhood
and grew up wanting to be a sailor. Instead he became a stockbroker. At the age of 35, he
quit his job, abandoned his family, and traveled to the South Seas in search of the exot-
ic, finally settling in Tahiti. There he found his Garden of Eden. Arearea, or Joyousness
( Joyeusetés, 1892) shows the paradise Gauguin had always envisioned. The style is in-
tentionally“primitive,”collapsingthethree-dimensionallandscapeintoatwo-dimensional
pattern of bright colors.
Pointillism, as illustrated by many paintings in the next rooms, brings Impressionism
to its logical conclusion. Little dabs of pure colors are placed side by side to blend in the
viewer's eye. In works such as The Circus ( Le Cirque, 1891), Georges Seurat used only
red, yellow, blue, and green points of paint to create a mosaic of colors that shimmers at a
distance, capturing the wonder of the dawn of electric light.
The Rest of the Orsay: Theopen-airmezzanineoflevel2islinedwithstatues.Stroll
the mezzanine, enjoying the works of great French sculptors, including Auguste Rodin,
who combined classical solidity with Impressionist surfaces. Look for The Walking Man
( L'Homme Qui Marche , c. 1900). Like this statue, Rodin had one foot in the past, while
theothersteppedintothefuture.Withnomouthorhands,thesubjectspeakswithhisbody.
The rough, “unfinished” surface reflects light in the same way the rough Impressionist
brushworkdoes,makingthestatuecomealive,neverquiteatrestintheviewer'seye.Rod-
in's sculptures capture the groundbreaking spirit of much of the art in the Orsay Museum.
With a stable base of 19th-century stone, he launched art into the 20th century.
▲▲▲ Orangerie Museum (Musée de l'Orangerie)
Step out of the tree-lined, sun-dappled Impressionist painting that is the Tuileries Garden,
and into the Orangerie (oh-rahn-zheh-ree), a little bijou of select works by Claude Monet
and his contemporaries. Start with the museum's claim to fame: Monet's water lilies.
These eight mammoth-scale paintings are displayed exactly as Monet intended
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