Gerhardt Richter at the Louis Vuitton 12-23-25

I mentioned yesterday that I was trying to find out whether we could enter the Fondation Louis Vuitton early or not so that we could eat at the restaurant in the museum. I contacted the ticket sellers via email and explained the situation. For whatever reason they couldn’t give me any information without my ticket reference number. We didn’t want to buy tickets without knowing whether we could eat before the exhibition, a classic catch-22. Finally we broke down and bought the tickets, so I emailed the ticket information to them. This morning when we woke up I had an email back informing me that I had bought tickets directly from the Fondation and not them, so they weren’t able to offer me any information. Gaaaa! So we decided to just go and trust to luck that we could somehow convince them to let us in. We took a bus to where we could get the dedicated shuttle. It runs from Charles De Gaulle-Etoile, aka the Arc de Triomphe, out to the museum.

That went off without a hitch and dropped us off in front of the museum. It was an amazing thing, there was no line waiting to enter the museum and essentially we breezed in without a second glance. 

So we went directly over to the restaurant and procured a table. It is a nice restaurant in which to eat, the food is very good but tres cher (expensive). But given the rent they must pay the prices have to cover all the overhead. Plus the chef  has received Michelin star awards and we pay for that as well. No matter, we like it and always enjoy our meals there.  For an appetizer I had a bowl of lentils cooked with carrots and turnips which was very good. Then Deb ordered a Shepard’s Pie and I had a fillet of bar (sea bass). Of course now we think every fish we get that fits the description is Croaker. Mine was served over 

a medley of winter vegetables. Also excellent. I finished with a lemon tart. They did have a special dessert dedicated to Richter. It looked like a sort of cake with a full sized candle stuck into it. A salute too one of his most famous paintings of a lit candle. I thought about it but I didn’t want to be saddled with a candle. We sat next to a couple from the U.S. one of whom expressed a desire to see some Daum crystal, so Deb politely interrupted them and told them about the Art Deco exhibition at the Decorative Arts Museum. They were very happy to find out about it.

When we finished we checked our coats and bags and entered the Richter exhibition. To say it was extensive says too little but it wasn’t every painting he has ever done, quite. He is considered to be one of the top painters in the world today. And the range of topics and methods he has addressed is truly impressive. He was born in eastern Germany just before World War II and studied art. After the war he lived in the Soviet controlled area until just before the Iron Curtain went up. His family then fled to the west and he then studied in West Germany. But his art life began with his copying of photographs from out of the magazines of the time and photographs have remained a source of inspiration for him for his entire career. Not always a literal copies, because he branched out to abstraction in the 60’s and 70’s so the literal

photographs served only as an inspirational starting point. Honestly of his early abstract works almost none of them were attractive to either of us, but they were interesting. He then went through a period where he was switching from abstraction to representation back and forth. Then seemed to have gone back to full representational work. Our favorite room was one with only 6 paintings. The first was a copy of the Annunciation by Titian, but done in a soft focus manner that he almost always used. Then he did 5 abstractions based on that painting. Every one of them was incredible because no matter how abstracted it became you could find the original idea. Finally in the latter part of his career he began working in the abstraction for which he is most celebrated. He applied layers of paint one on the other in different colors and then used a squeegee device to break through the layers exposing earlier

colors. They are wonderful and quite attractive to our eyes. Most of his work addresses current events as he interprets them, but late in his career he visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and created 4 large paintings expressing his reaction to the photos and documents he encountered during the visit.  He is still working but now mostly in small non-figurative drawings. Although many look like cloud studies to me.  We managed to get to all eleven galleries across three floors but it was pretty challenging and we were happy to be done.

We caught the shuttle bus back to our starting place, the Arc de Triomph. We debated catching the Metro back to our neighborhood, but the stop (Stalingrad) is not a particularly nice place at night. So we opted for a walk down the Champs Elysees

which is decorated for Christmas. It was overrun with people but we walked down several blocks enjoying the atmosphere. It was getting later so we took a side street over to where we could get a bus running close to our apartment.