Musee d'Orsay- Sex and Impressionism

I must say I preferred the Musee d'Orsay to the Louvre. There were not as many pieces of art stuffed into each room, so it was easier to enjoy what was there. Of course the Impressionism exhibits, the museum's most famous works, were impressive. Seeing the original paintings that are so often copied for posters, purses, and just about everything imaginable was quite enjoyable. The vibrant colors of Monet's water lilies and Van Gogh's sunflowers are a visual treat, and I never knew that many of Degas' depictions of ballet dancers were done in pastels. The works in Orsay are not so much the products of thievery, and the museum does not quite have the same infamy as its neighbor across the Seine.

However, the works displayed in Musee d'Orsay show a transition in sexual attitudes that occurred over the Nineteenth Century. Female sexuality is still the most blatantly displayed, such as a painting we saw and nicknamed "Every (Straight) Man's Dream": a man dressed in an elaborate suit of armor charging into battle on a horse with a naked woman clinging to him. The Louvre was similar, with female nudity in a large portion of the French and Italian paintings. However, it was not until visiting Orsay that I saw male nudity outside of the traditional statues of naked soldiers brandishing swords, where male sexuality is directly correlated with physical power. Many post-Impressionist works displayed nude men not fighting but celebrating, sometimes with naked women and other times in vaguely homoerotic situations. The most memorable for me was a depiction of the Last Supper in which the apostles are all nude and embracing each other, in an otherwise completely platonic fashion. However, the feminization of many of their features showed a continued bias toward sexualizing the Female more than the Male, so sexual power was still not equally shared though progress was made.

According to John Baxter in his book, Orsay, after its use as a train station, became a theater for experimental plays, many of which were not all that well received. As a museum, it shows the transition between the traditional depictions of male and female sexuality as shown in the Louvre with the experimental sexuality of the expatriate authors of the 1920s. Nathalie Clifford Barney's trendy lesbianism would have been unthinkable without the cultural shift indicated by these works of art. The Musee d'Orsay provides an invaluable link between traditional Western Europe and the Paris that was a haven for eccentric authors and artists during the early Twentieth Century.