Early closing Luxembourg Gardens Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic on linen 12 x 12 inches
Christmas trees near St Sulpice Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic on linen 11 x 14 inches
View Winsted, CT Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic on cardboard 11 x 11 inches
Ferraro's Market Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic on canvas 20 x 16 inches
ARNOTES: EVERYTHING
The free “Museum of Everything” charged us
5 Euro to enter. Really, that’s
not very much. Not nearly as much as
the “Bohemes” show at the Grand Palais, that I went to a week ago.
I was actually thrilled by the Museum of Everything – it was
a collection of wonderful folk and outsider art. These artists were the true “bohemians”, who
heard that crazy artistic voice and followed it. There were 20 foot tall drawings of creatures
done in colored pencil on rice paper;
hubcaps with holes and tongues attached, created by a blind man; a room
of wooden dolls fashioned by a man and his wife in the Mojave desert; a
painting of the Brown Bomber on a beat up piece of sheet metal. It was a three story exhibit of wild artwork
executed by people who knew civilization in a different way from the rest of
us.
The Bohemes show, on the other hand, was a collection of
what regular people thought “bohemian” people were all about. Actually, I loved some of the pictures at the
show: delaTour’s Fortune Teller, lit in a
way to bring out the color; Van Gogh’s
gypsy wagons; a surprisingly large
Toulouse Lautrec; and a great Franz
Hals. But this show wasn’t
Bohemian: it was about so-called
Bohemians once removed. I expected to
see something provocative: what I saw was a show I had to “read about” to
figure out what they were doing. As one
of the artists in the Museum of Everything wrote:
trying to find meaning in art is like trying to find the price tag on a
suit.
It’s not easy to look at artwork outside-the-box like at the
Museum of Everything. It’s scary to find
oneself fascinated by something so off the grid. It was hard to find the line where an artist
skipped from being Max Ernst to being certifiably nuts. But seeing and playing around that border
was moving. It made me wonder (more
than usual) about “what if there wasn’t civilization as we know it?” Suppose that cityscape sculptures made out
of transistors and brushes and silicon chips were as respected as sculptures
made out of bronze?
I am always trying to explain to people why “real” art is so
much better than posters or prints. When
one saw the work at the “Museum of Everything” there was no question. The viewer could feel the spark inside the
art.
The Museum of Everything
reminded me of many of my “beginner” workshop painters. There is something so fresh and innocent
about their work, it touches me to the heart.
At the Museum of Everything
artists recognized that they were doing just what they were meant to
do: they weren’t going to make it
larger or paint the edge of the canvas because that was what society dictated.
At the end of the show was a funky coffee and gift shop that
gave us the chance to wind down before stepping back out onto the
ultra-civilized boulevard Raspail in Paris.
Museum of Everything 14 boulevard Raspail // Paris 75007 until 1
February 2013
Birch Trees Laurie Fox Pessmeier Acyrlic on canvas 16 x 20 inches
Orangerie Luxembourg Gardens early December Blair Pessemier Oil on linen 21.5 x 15 inches
