Saturday, January 19, 2019


January 14, 2019       Louis Vuitton Foundation two exhibits: Egon Schiele and Jean-Michel Basquiat
There are two exhibitions at the Louis Vuitton Fdn. by two artists who have paintings on the 1001 list, and each painting is in a private collection.  We obviously like art, and Sue loves architecture.  The Foundation is located in a building designed by Frank Gehry, but I am always hoping that ‘our” paintings will be on loan to the exhibition.  It has not happened yet, but that hasn’t stopped us.  After breakfast at McDonald’s we took the train to the Foundation.  This was the last day for the exhibition.  The lines to get in were even larger than those for Caravaggio.  The upside was that the rooms were larger than the Caravaggio exhibit, but they were still crowded.  The two artists: Egon Schiele and Jean-Michel Basquiat both died very young.  Egon Schiele died at 28 in 1919 in Austria during the Spanish flu Pandemic.  Jean-Michel died in 1988 at 27 in Manhattan of a heroin overdose.  Being a dead artist usually increases the demand and value of their art.  We had seen an exhibition of Schiele’s works on a previous trip, and he has a number of painting of Women Undressing, so we already had checked him off the list. 
The work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is probably something you like or hate.  I’m not sure I like it, but I don’t hate it.  But a Japanese collector liked it enough to pay $ 110,487,500 for one of his paintings that is in this exhibition.  Sue has given me permission to check Jean-Michel’s painting off our list, so our total is up to 697.  I think this gets the number of substitutions for paintings in private collection to about 40.
Our next stop was to visit the Dupuytren Museum.  Baron Guillaume Dupuytren was a physician who identified what is now called Dupuytren’s Contracture.  He was also was esteemed for treating Napoleon’s hemorrhoids.  Irregardless (joke) Sue has Dupuytren’s Contracture.  She had surgery on November 26th to correct the problem.  There are before and after photos in the Louvre photos.  I digress.  We went to the Sorbonne Medical History Museum to ask where the Dupuytren Museum was in the building.  The nice lady told us that museum was closed in 2016.  We looked around the museum, and I took a few photos (with my legs crossed).
After the museum we went back to the hotel.  I then went to the Bibliothèque de Nationale France National Library of France to get our Reader’s Cards so we could access a painting stored at the BnF.  That actually went very well.  On the way home I had to find the place where King Henry IV was assassinated.  I found this site with little trouble.  I know I’m weird, but I really enjoy finding these places where historic events happened.

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