Wait, there's *more* art? Who made this stuff?

Started the fourth day in Paris with a wander to the Pompadour.  I think that's how it's spelled.  It's Paris's museum of modern art, and I have to admit, it is pretty interesting.  (Still not my favorite, but such is life my taste in art.)  Although anywhere that has an enormous fabric structure that looks like a Dr. Seuss creation is pretty cool.  Another one of my favorites was A Bicycle built for 2,000.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=Gz4OTFeE5JY.  Except they had the computer version, the whole song, and different tracks of the song.  You can't hear it except by listening to the individual tracks, but there are a few spots where people's imitations were burps, xylophones, and other fun sounds.  The one that I really liked was, I guess, the fan that was floating two cassette tape circles in the air.  There was a platform with shallow edges, the fan was above and blowing directly down, and the air pressure, I assume, was redirected upward by the box, while the tapes kept themselves relatively well centered by virtue of being circles--if one side pulled too far, the other side would be caught in a draft and pull back and so forth.

Interesting thing about the Pompadour--it was built to look unfinished; rather, to look like the skeleton of a building and yet be a completely functional building.  Hard to explain.  So check it out instead.  (The zig-zag is the escalator shaft.)

From there we wandered through Napoleon's tomb on our way to the Rodin museum.  For a dictator and a short dude, they went over the top for Napoleon.  Pretty much literally.  (Nicole says it's because they were trying to prevent him escaping.)

Well, on to Rodin.  Dude, the guy's a genius!  Well, yes, he does have a fondness for the nude model, but his sculptures are incredible.  They had (a copy of) the Thinker, the Gates of Hell for which said Thinker was Dante-ing, a lot of marble sculptures and smaller ones and on and on.  Jessica's note was that he put a lot of tension into his sculpture, no matter the subject matter.  If I could sculpt as well as Rodin, I'd be pretty pleased with myself, I think.  The Waltz is one I rather like--the motion is pretty awesome.  And the second one is because I'm in awe of the detail.

Our last stop of the day was the d'Orsay, which is also a great museum.  Tell you what, if you're in Paris and for some reason want to skip the Louvre, come here.  Since we got there late, I didn't have as much time as I would have liked, but I went up to the post-Impressionist room and looked at the Van Gogh stuff they've got there.  I find I much prefer those of his paintings that had absolute swaths of paint, where the texture creates half of the feeling.  I did a sketch in the time before the museum closed of the Reapers.  No pics, sorry, they weren't allowed.