336 hours in Paris

A search for simpler forms: Toulouse-Lautrec's "La Danse au Moulin Rouge" at the Musee D'Orsay. A hundred and thirty years ago, the highest point in Paris was well on its way to becoming the world's most important art hub. Van Gogh lived at 10 Rue Cortot in the 1880s. So did Gaugin (but not at the same time). Picasso arrived in the fall of 1900, during the World's Fair. They wore Lenny Kravitz scarves and big coats with paintbrushes poking out of their pockets, something we can say with certainty because they painted portraits of one another. In the hillside's steep streets of mud, they lived with tightrope walkers, acrobats and dancing girls and ate at the glorified soup kitchens at Montmartre's pinnacle, around the Place du Tertre. Climbing the hill was not as easy as it is today ― it was too steep for horse-drawn carriages, and the funiculaire would not be built until 1901. It was a slum, really. Today's French government, which tosses ar...

"Les Femmes d'Alger" by Eugene Delacroix, 1834. My first reaction to the photo-phobes of the world is always one of disappointment. I am not capturing your soul in this box, nor am I spying for the police. I am a tourist ―  dans la rue!  no less ― and this is what tourists do. You are wrong and I am right. Nevertheless, I have been hissed at in Cairo, scolded in Portugal and detained by the police in Beirut all for the crime of briefly letting light stream through a camera lens in public. There is a retronymic quality to these complaints. Before the first camera phones were released 15 years ago, people took pictures with non-phone cameras. Now that everyone takes photos with their phones (in an act that can be carried out more discreetly than ever), the non-phone camera user makes himself almost an ostentatious target. I have come to terms with this reality. I would have thrown this picture away, bub. But you make me publish it. See how that works? Today...

School's out: West entrance to Luxembourg Gardens. Every time I visit Paris, an overwhelming sense of nostalgia pulls me to the western edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, the single basketball hoop there and the unassuming Rue de Fleurus just steps away. In 1974, my siblings and I roamed the city unchaperoned, like young wolves. Most mornings we emerged from the Rennes metro stop on Boulevard Raspail and walked to our language school, a Chinese Deer Brand basketball tucked under my arm. Aside from some electric-car charging stations, the Rue de Fleurus is unchanged. It is still filled with antique-book sellers and cafes, and the ecole where I learned to say "Marco reads a book" and "My car is long." My court. Luxembourg Gardens. No experience shaped my aesthetic sense more than living in Paris from late November 1973 till Bastille Day 1974. I saw a streaker dash across a stage at a panel discussion on Watergate, witnessed students protest the overthro...

"Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams" opened at the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts in mid-July. Letting too many people into a museum is a physics problem ― too many particles moving erratically, unpredictably, in space. When that space is not sufficiently air-conditioned you have a health problem. Physicists have devised sophisticated tools, like heat mapping, to describe where particles collect and how they move in time. The Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris could not give two fucks about these nuances, and as a result, the promising "Christian Dior: Couturier du Reve" exhibit becomes a death shuffle of banging elbows and a chorus of "pardons." It is a shame, because this is the first Dior exhibition in Paris since Francois Mitterand was president (1987), and it is currently Fashion Week in one of the world's most fashionable cities. A question for the museum's patron: Have you strolled through your museum's current exhibit? Have you ...

"Homage to Delacroix" by Fantin-Latour. I did not live in mid-19th-century Paris, obviously, but it cannot possibly have been as joyless and claustrophobic as depicted in Henri Fantin-Latour's series of paintings at the Musee D'Orsay. In them, all are men, all are somber, nearly all are in black coats and exuding an air of importance ― possibly boredom ― and it is tempting to write these works off as skilled examples of group portraiture and little else. Their turgidity is best seen in "Homage to Delacroix" (1864), with six standing figures and four seated ones, with a painting of a lithograph of Delacroix shown slightly above head level. The "homage" part of the title is problematic ― this is a painting by Fantin-LaTour, after all, in muted hues. If it is an homage, it is a constipated one, and as far from a flamboyant Delacroix painting as one can imagine. Fantin is the only subject pictured who is not looking outward. Manet has his hand i...

"La Joconde" and her many fans. Their expedition for Senegal set sail on June 17, 1816, with 365 people on four vessels. When one of the boats inexplicably ran aground on a reef off the coast of Mauritania ― in clear weather and calm seas ― its occupants were stuck, unable to fit onto the other three boats. The decision was made to build a raft to hold these 150 unlucky seamen. They would be towed to shore and all would be saved. That was the plan. A sturdy raft was indeed built. But for reasons that remain unclear, it was abandoned by the rest of the expedition, its tow rope tossed into the sea. Those on the raft had no charts or oars, only a bit of wine, water and soggy bread. Within a few days started they fighting one another. Delirium followed. Thinking there was no escape, some chose to jump overboard. Within a week, crewmates' corpses were being hacked and eaten. Only fifteen remained alive by Day 13, when a ship was seen on the horizon. They straightened ...

$47 a night in the 18e. View of the Sacre Coeur.