Artotem’s Neighborhood

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Paris's Jewel-like Orangerie, Home to Monet's Waterlilies, Reopens, Polished and Renovated

While the Orangerie museum was rebuilt around them for six years, Monet's waterlily paintings, too large to move, had to remain in place in the oval rooms built for them in 1927.

By ALAN RIDING

Published: May 16, 2006

PARIS, May 14 — Over the last six years, as the Musée de l'Orangerie underwent a $36 million renovation and expansion, its most valued treasure, the eight tranquil paintings of Monet's large-format waterlily series, remained trapped inside a noisy and muddy building site.

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

The waterlilies at the Orangerie are some of Monet's most abstract.

There was no alternative. While the museum's Walter-Guillaume collection of Impressionist paintings traveled the world, the waterlilies could not be detached from the walls where they were installed in 1927, one year after Monet's death. Construction — and demolition — had to take place around them.

To protect the paintings from water, heat, dust and vibrations, they were sealed inside reinforced boxes, each attached to an alarm system. Even so, "On one or two occasions, because of vibrations, the waterlilies began screaming, and the workers had to drop tools," noted Olivier Brochet, the project's chief architect.

clipped from www.flickr.com

Chicago & glass flowers (Dale Chihuly) - Garfield Park Conservatory.
According to Chihuly’s Web site:
In the Garfield Park Conservatory context, the blossoms on the Persian Pond evoke Claude Monet's gardens in Giverny. They are a witty inversion of Monet's transplantation of real water lilies to a pretend Japanese garden based in turn on the Japanese woodcuts that inspired Monet's paintings. Chihuly's brilliant yellow forms, on the other hand, reflect real light and color, as opposed to translating them into highlights on canvas. This triple inversion, with its multiple implicit referents, lends the Persian Pond installation particular piquancy.

clipped from www.coolest-gadgets.com

This is the strangest looking elephant gun I’ve ever seen, an elephant sculpture made out of old guns.

The elephant made from guns is part of an art collection that has been created using disused weapons from the Cambodian civil war. There’s chairs, tables, animals and all sorts of stuff, very bizarre.

Loads more pictures over at freshome.