This is
obviously the first time I have made a post about the "Palais de Tokyo". It’s a
spectacular building from 1937, near the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower, but the
outside has been in a bad shape, dirty and tagged until rather recently - now finally relatively clean.
The “Palais
de Tokyo” was built for the 1937 “International Exhibition of Arts and Technology”
(I referred to it in some previous posts (see for example here). It was
originally named “Palais des Musées d’Art Moderne”, but derives its present
name from the street along the Seine River, which used to be Avenue de Tokyo (but
now is Avenue de New-York).
The
building has housed a number of establishments, but today one of the wings is
occupied by the “Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris” and the other wing
by a French State site for temporary exhibitions of contemporary art - referred
to as “Palais de Tokyo”.
Difficult
to get a good total view of the “Palais” – distance, trees…
Google
Earth is of a big help.
The reliefs
on the southern facade are by Alfred Janniot (1889-1969). They represent the "Legend of the Earth” and the “Legend of the Sea”. (My photos are of
difficult colours… partly in sun, partly in shadow.)
Four ladies
have been cleaned from tagging, hopefully for a while.
(The stones you see in the pond are supposed to represent traces of the sea that covered Paris some 45 million years ago. It’s a temporary installation by the Brazilian artist Rodrigo Braga.)
As with all
City of Paris museums, there is no entrance fee to the “Musée d’Art Moderne de
la ville de Paris” – except for temporary exhibitions. Apart from the
present Bernard Buffet exposition you can admire art works by Picasso,
Braque, de Vlaminck, Dufy, Marie Laurencin, Bourgeois, Bonnard, Lhote, Gris, Zadkine,
Duchamp, Picabia, Sonja and Robert Delaunay, Léger, Modigliani, de Chirico, van
Dongen, Arp, Utrillo, Valadon, Dérain, Chagall, Soutine, Foujita, Calder,
Giacometti, Man Ray, Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Dubuffet, Soulages, de Staël, Yves
Klein, Tinguely, Buren, Rauschenberg, Vasarely, Haring and many others – for free.
All may not be exhibited at the same time.
Entering the
other wing, the state owned one, means paying an entrance fee. At the moment
there is a very specific (and peculiar) exhibition, “Carte Blanche to Tino
Sehgal”. You will actually go through a number of almost empty white rooms (and one black room) and
meet a number of people of different generations who will talk with you about “progress”
and other philosophical matters – the central focus is supposed to be on “social
interaction”.
You will of course find libraries and bars in both wings (even outside weather permitting).
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