Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou

The other day I was headed to the library at the Pompidou (my new found Boatright Library in Paris) to work on a paper for my (horribly painful) 18th century French lit class when I ran into Emma a girl from a few of my classes on the metro. She too was headed to the center but not for the library but for the museum. Being that it has been on my list of to-do's before leaving Paris, I decided to postpone homework for a while are join her on her tour. 

Our original plan was to do two visiting exhibitions and then the whole permanent collection of modern art that evening but ran out of time. Instead we did the two visiting exhibitions, the first was the work of Yayoi Kusama and the second Edvard Munch.

Before coming to the museum, I had never heard of Yayoi Kusama except for her exhibit at the museum being recommended to me and in the terms of, "you have to go see the crazy Japanese lady's exhibit!" Needless to say it was really incredible, and a little trippy. 

For a little background, Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who has created art in all forms, paintings, sculptures, furniture, photography, films, and street art. Working in mainly Tokyo and New York City she went through different phases, her two most notable are her phallic phase and her dots phase. She was originally inspired for her dots phase based on hallucinations she naturally began to experience when she was a child. Today she is self - institutionalized in an insane asylum near Tokyo where she only leaves to work at her studio. 

  

The following 5 photos are my own - it was technically not allowed to take photos but I managed to sneak a few. The following are professional ones that I found online to better show what was in the exhibit. 

Professional photos

^^ got to walk through both of these rooms ∨∨

the artist herself

Edvard Munch's exhibit was far less impressive than Kusama's, but much would be after that experience. While his work, in my opinion, was nothing all that impressive or special, it was pretty cool to see his most famous piece The Scream. 

To get to the Munch exhibit on the top floor of the museum, we had to take the 4 exterior escalators (have I mentioned that the Centre's building is so cool!). Once at the top Emma and I both realized that the best view of Paris is definitely from the top of the museum. All at once you can see Sacre Coeur to your right, the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe straight ahead and Notre Dame and Ste Chappelle to your left all while seeing some of the most magnificent 18th century architecture of the Marais area.