Spent a couple of hours looking at Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art at the Musée L’Orangerie (a small museum in a corner of the Tuileries Gardens). I always feel bad about only having an intellectual and aesthetic appreciation for most of these paintings. They don’t get me in the heart or the crotch or the soles of the feet. Which makes me feel defective, in a way. The only canvas in the exhibition that gave me any frisson was a Picasso, Enceinte (Pregnant):

I was hooked by the ambiguity - on the one hand, the woman and man are almost joined into one flesh in an image of extreme closeness between two people. On the other hand, their faces are hidden, taking away any view of their intellectual, social or spiritual being; the swelling in her stomach looks almost threatening, and their embrace might be one of tender love or mutual grief and despair, perhaps over an unwanted child, perhaps over their own mortality - we’re all subject to the authority of the flesh, is one of the things I feel this painting says. You get pregnant, you get sick, you die, and your being is erased, while the next generation of flesh is born and grows up. It’s hard to tell whether Picasso painted these bodies - particularly the woman’s - with feelings of tenderness, revulsion, or a mixture of both.
I also got rather obsessed with this statue of Theseus and the Minotaur in the gardens:

Theseus, to whom the sculptor has given the generic physique and features of the average heroic Greek bloke, is about to club the Minotaur over the head. It’s his big moment, but the sculptor seems to have been more interested in the Minotaur. The contorted posture is wonderfully wrought, and the bull’s head is more expressive and alive than the man’s, with its tongue lolling out and one soft ear squashed against the assassin’s thigh. It’s another ambiguous image - hero as thug, or thug as hero.

Random picture - afternoon light at Place de la Republique: