Museum tour

As the teachers were on a training on Wednesday afternoon, we had no classes and suddenly I found that I had free time at the time when the museums were open. So I started the museum tour from the studio of Cezanne which consisted more or less from one large room—his studio! Though I did know who Cezanne was before arriving to Aix (and even about his connection with Aix that I read form the travel guide in the train), I do not know much else and so it was a little difficult to me cherish his few surviving personal belongings (a guide told that Cezanne's sister had after her brother's death burnt most of his old furniture, so that some of the furniture is in fact Cezanne's mother's). His paintings were represented as prints, including, of course, the bathing ladies which was painted there. The exhibits included his rucksack, walking stick and four umbrellas.

The next museum on the tour was the nature history museum which are generally oriented at schoolchildren. Apart from the systematic overview of animals and plants which is used to educate visiting schoolchildren, they usually present very interesting local items, so any nature history museum is worth visiting. In Aix this local stuff were dinosaur skeletons and fossilised eggs from the local Mount St-Victoire. Interesting, as were the models of local geological development.

The third museum was the Granet art museum, with metal detector gates at entrance, and much of it housed a temporary exhibition of Kandinsky. A domestic saying We have read about it fits my impressions perfectly.

A series of three halls housed a collection of French 19th-century monumental painting. Curious, and I had not seen such art in such numbers before. 19th century was obviously before photography and photographic wallpaper were invented; and it also was the time when certain areas of the human body were strictly taboo, resulting in depicting a wide range of what later centuries would call medical abnormalities.

The hall below housed an interesting collection of sculptures, many of which were of painted plaster (also 19th c.), this material being rather rare in museum collections by now.

Also on the ground floor there was the 20th century part of the permanent collection, including eight small paintings of Cezanne, a room of Giacometti of which all pieces except one were temporarily on loan elsewhere, and a room of the Cubist art. For a very long time I have not been at an art museum which most rewarding style was Cubism.

The cellar housed an interesting collection of pre-Roman archaeological finds, and thematic selections of paintings in the museum collection (such as Portraits of Children, Portraits of Old People, Ecstasy, or Clothing on Portraits).

Including the three kilometres I walked between the museums, the tour took about two and half hours.