Friday, May 21, 2010

**[In fourth paragraph, corrected the date Musee d'Orsay was built and added the date San Francisco City Hall was built.]

Today's free Examiner had a color art history insert. Start the day with beauty is not often the newspaper deal, but it was today.

Pictures by Impressionists and by the people they would have been looking at before they were Impressionists, for the birth of Impressionism show, soon to open.

I think they were partly doing this to make sure we the public get that this whole show isn't Impressionists, that it is muchly about where they were coming from.

Beautiful pictures, but I liked as much as anything the photograph of the Musee d'Orsay, the museum they are on loan from, which was built as a railroad station in 1900--gorgeous. A sort of cousin of San Francisco's lovably elaborate City Hall, built in 1916.

Somehow, the Musee d'Orsay and all the beauty in mid- newspaper led me to seeing the chipped paint on the side of a bus shelter as gorgeous. Dark paint on top, light paint underneath, here comes the light, here comes beauty.