Pompidou Center

The students' last art history outing was to the Pompidou Center (spit on the ground).   The Pompidou Center is Paris's modern art museum.  The building was constructed in the late 1970s and remains controversial for its bizarre architecture.  Chris says you have to spit on the ground when you dare say the name.  I think the building is fitting for a modern art museum but out of place in the middle of Paris. We went with the students to the Multiple Modernities exhibit which featured art from 1905-1970.  After class we went on our own to the rest of the exhibits (1970-present).

Delaunay's Towers of Laon
Chris really liked this painting.

Picasso's The Guitarist

Andy Warhol

Ghost by, Kader Attia
This was one of my favorites

From the artist's website:  In Ghost, a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer, Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. Made from tin foil - a domestic, throw away material - Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies - from religion to nationalism and consumerism - in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. Attia’s Ghost evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience.

View of Paris from the top floor of the Pompidou.

External view of the building.