{"id":217,"date":"2007-10-10T02:53:24","date_gmt":"2007-10-10T10:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2007\/10\/it-wasnt-like-they-hated-monet\/"},"modified":"2007-10-11T09:57:25","modified_gmt":"2007-10-11T17:57:25","slug":"it-wasnt-like-they-hated-monet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2007\/10\/it-wasnt-like-they-hated-monet\/","title":{"rendered":"It wasn’t like they hated Monet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Drunkards<\/p>\n

Five drunken\u00c2\u00a0people broke into the Musee d’Orsay early last Sunday morning, October 7. How the police knew they were drunk from the surveillance video, I don’t know exactly.\u00c2\u00a0Authorities don’t think the\u00c2\u00a0thieves–more properly “vandals”–were there to steal paintings. It wasn’t like they hated Claude Monet, the Impressionist painter best known for his studies of water lilies at his gardens in Giverny. But why\u00c2\u00a0molest one of his paintings? Whether this was an art heist gone awry, a statement against Monet, or just plain alchohol-fueled stupidity, the wayward five punched a 4-inch hole in\u00c2\u00a0the 1874 painting “Le Pont d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Argenteuil” (the bridge of Argenteuil, pictured above) before fleeing. A detail of the\u00c2\u00a0tear is shown\u00c2\u00a0below.<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Christina Albanel, the French Minister of Culture, said the picture will be restored, adding, “We know there were four or five people, likely four boys and a girl, who entered around midnight to 1 a.m., broke a door that was, perhaps, fragile. We will not tolerate this.”<\/p>\n

The Musee d’Orsay is a large, airy museum along the Seine’s Left Bank. You can see it’s lanky body with the bold coppery green clocks–with the correct time!–as you float along the Seine in a Batobus water taxi on a sunny day. On a foggy, polluted\u00c2\u00a0day you can also see it.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Restored from the Gare d’Orsay,\u00c2\u00a0a train station until after train travel declined in the 1970s,\u00c2\u00a0the d’Orsay museum has a lot of famous\u00c2\u00a0art (see above), including at least 60 works by Monet. The museum has a particularly spectacular atrium with light from the glass roof bathing many wonderful sculptures.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The vandalism occurred during\u00c2\u00a0Paris’s annual all-night October festival Nuit Blanche<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 According to Wikipedia, Nuit Bla<\/em>nche (“White Night” or “All Nighter”) is a festival that goes from sundown to sunrise on the first Saturday\/Sunday in October.\u00c2\u00a0There are also Nuit Blanche <\/em>festivals\u00c2\u00a0in Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal. Museums, art galleries, and other cultural institutions typically offer free admission\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0the\u00c2\u00a0city core is turned into one huge art gallery with installations and\u00c2\u00a0performances.<\/p>\n

Here in Paris, people were also most likely out celebrating France’s victory over New Zealand’s All Blacks\u00c2\u00a0on Saturday in the Rugby World\u00c2\u00a0Cup.\u00c2\u00a0France’s Bleus now advance to the cup’s semifinals. This perhaps unfortunate convergence of mirth, celebration, and drink may have contributed to\u00c2\u00a0Sunday’s d’Orsay disturbance. With great apologies to Monsieur Monet, I\u00c2\u00a0slept through it all.<\/p>\n

Post script<\/em>: On another trip through the d’Orsay several days later, there was no trace, posted\u00c2\u00a0explanation, or blank space where the damaged painting had been. (There also did not seem to be any heightened security that I could notice.) It was as if museum curators had brought up another Monet from the basement cold room and had installed it so quickly no one was the wiser.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five drunken\u00c2\u00a0people broke into the Musee d’Orsay early last Sunday morning, October 7. How the police knew they were drunk from the surveillance video, I don’t know exactly.\u00c2\u00a0Authorities don’t think the\u00c2\u00a0thieves–more properly “vandals”–were there to steal paintings. It wasn’t like they hated Claude Monet, the Impressionist painter best known for his studies of water lilies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}