Praeterita

I'm in Paris, France, for three weeks, teaching on Columbia College Chicago's study abroad program. The students don't arrive until the weekend, so I'm just relaxing in the city and our rented apartment in Montparnasse, on an easy schedule of one museum per day followed by a nap and a light dinner (with wine, of course). On Wednesday, we went to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, near the Place de l'Alma. Half of the permanent collection was closed, but I still saw some seminal twentieth century works. From the first third of the century, there was the giant canvas-mural La Danse, the second version, painted for an American patron in the early 1930s. Inside the vast room that housed the works, there were two small cabinet with some fascinating photos, such as this one of Matisse sketching the mural: When you enter the hall where the paintings are displayed, you first see the sketched version: On the right, you can just about see one of th...

This week's Meditation is on an installation series by French artist Christian Boltanski, whose work deals with memory, loss, and death, often arising from references to the Holocaust:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader