Paris France: The Army Museum

Posted on by Thor

My last stop before flying back to the States was Paris France. I stayed in a small hotel at the Ecole Militaire metro stop. Returning the rental car was an adventure in itself since the parking garage was unmarked and I ended up driving backwards up some winding exit ramps to finally find the level I was supposed to be on.

My goal in Paris was to explore all the World War II museums and there are many. The hotel was situated walking distance to several of the war museums as well as the Eiffel Tower. My first stop was to the Army Museum at Les Invalides. There are actually several war museums in this complex.

Louis XIV initiated the project by an order dated November 24, 1670 to create a home and hospital for aged and disabled soldiers, the veterans of his many military campaigns. Les Invalides is a complex of buildings containing museums and monuments, all relating to the military history of France, as well as a hospital and an old soldiers’ retirement home. The buildings house The museum of the Army of France, the Museum of Plans-Reliefs, and the Museum of C0ntemporary History. The complex also includes the Cathedral of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides. It is adjacent to the Royal Chapel known as the Dome of the Invalides, the tallest church building in Paris at a height of 351 ft.

The Army Museum (Musée de l’Armée) was created in 1905. On display are all things related to weapons from the late Middle Ages through to World War II. They include weapons, armor, works of arts and technology. I of course spent most of my time on the floors devoted to World War II. The floors were dedicated for uniforms, weapons, and documents. I made my way through the chronological displays several times before settling on this spot to sketch.

One display caught my eye. It displayed all the things an American GI might carry into battle. There were 3 boxes of K Rations, an old can of what might be green beans, a Coke bottle, foot powder, shoe polish, a razor for shaving with Gem double edge blades, a large syringe, a tiny tin can camping stove, mess kit, canteen, several pockets full of shaving cream, tooth paste and a shaving brush, armed services editions of several books including Big Ben and Fireside Book of Verse, Pal Mall Cigarettes, a wrist watch, some Chiclets, dog tags, a lighter, whistle, a small satchel full of bobby pins, tweezers and a nail file, a knife fork and spoon, a small folding shovel, a flashlight and some V Letter envelopes, and a pin up girl photo. I can’t imagine any one soldier would carry all of these items. In the Netherlands I remember being told that the Americans were known for leaving plenty of Coke bottles behind. Some of them were still full. Another item often left behind was foot powder. Cases of this were left behind. So much so that the curator of the military museum offered me a tin of foot powder but I had to refuse. My backpack was already too heavy.

As I sketched there was a WWII video playing in the room to my left. There were the sounds of aircraft hurling towards the earth along with fires and ling lines of displaces persons searching for a place to call home. The video always zoomed on  a young girls face as she boarded a box car. I saw that image repeat over and over. I still haunts me.

Still Life Demo

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I did a quick still life demo with one of my virtual Elite Students. The goal was to gather a few items from the room and organize them into some sort of still life tableau. I am teaching seven day a week this summer so my work is bouncing all over the place depending on the student’s needs.

This is a painting of a bottle of port, a bit of garlic and a coffee pot that I have never seen used. I figured the Eiffel Tower might add an international flair. The goal wasn’t to create a finished painting but to demonstrate how to block in the large masses of a painting.

The COVID series is still happening but at a much slower pace. I have to steal an hour here and there just to research and keep up with the state of the pandemic. The highly transmissible BA5 variant is spreading like wildfire infecting those who were infected before and those who are vaccinated. The country is “done” with the pandemic which allows for plenty of spread for the virus.

Maintaining six feet of distance used to be the golden rule but now you can get infected just by walking past someone both inside and outside. BA 5 is the second most infectious disease known to man. My standard since the start of the pandemic has been to maintain 4 head to toe bodies lengths between myself and the next person. That is about 22 feet. That standard is impossible to maintain with people stopping to look over my shoulder as I sketch, so I am always wearing a cloth mask outside and a KN95 held in place by my cloth mask inside. I am always the only one masked and that is just fine.

Eiffel Tower on the Strip

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The Eiffel Tower on the Las Vegas strip is part of the Caesars Casino in Paris Las Vegas (3655 Las Vegas Boulevard South

Las Vegas , NV 89109). At the top of the tower is a viewing deck located 46 stories up in the half scale replica of the world-famous Paris, France landmark.

As an artist, all the magnificent architectural detail was fun to draw. As I worked on this sketch, a guy was going though his bag in front of me. He seemed really upset that he had picked up the wrong sun glasses. The impression I got was that he lifted the glasses, threw then in his bag and walked out of the store. He had stolen the wrong brand. I should have done a quick sketch of his face  in case the police were interested but I was in the midst of all the detail on this sketch and didn’t want to side track.

This was done several blocks closer to the Mandalay Bay Hotel where the mass shooting happened. My sketching experience was getting me used to huge throngs of people pressed together on the side walks that were separated from traffic with cement stanchions. On this day I made it as far as the New York, NY facades one block from Mandalay Bay where shots were fired on a crowd on October 1, 2017 killing 58 and wounding 413 others. About one month after the shooting, all of the preservable memorial items were gathered, boxed and taken to the Clark County Museum, (1830 S. Boulder Highway, Las Vegas Nevada) to become part of the museum’s permanent collection. The county has cataloged more than 12,000 items that were used to create
makeshift memorials following the Oct. 1 shooting. On October 1, 2018 one year after the shooting the strip went dark at 10:01PM in remembrance of the 58 victims and hundreds injured in the senseless shooting.

The moments during and just after the shooting rampage were recorded on multiple cell phones. For some the effects of that night will last a lifetime. Memorial sites sprang up but most concert goers were from out of town. And the hotels on the strip wanted to get back to business right away. On September of 2019, In the spirit of helping the community heal, MGM Resorts announced that the 15-acre plot where 22,000 people gathered for a country music
festival that ended in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history is
being converted to a community center and parking lot. In coming weeks and months, Las Vegas visitors will notice construction
activity near the shooting site, which has remained unused since the
tragedy. The company said it will also support any effort to install a permanent 1 October Memorial.

Eiffel Tower

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Terry and I eventually make it to see the Eiffel Tower. We had seen it in the distance from the other side of Paris from the Pantheon. The whole tower lights up with blinking flash bulbs. We decided to go to the tower at sunset to catch the light show. Neither of us wanted to to go to the top of the tower. Large crowds stood in line at the base of the tower to get in the elevators that go up into the lattice work. The structure was named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Erected in 1889 as the entrance arch to the 1889 World’s Fair, it has become both a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

Police were walking along the hedges keeping an eye open for abandoned packages. In the park across the street vendors hawked metal models of the tower hanging from metal rings. I never actually saw anyone buy one of these tourist trinkets, but there were dozens of these vendors aggressively selling their wares. As the sun set, the tower caught the warm orange light as the park turned blue in the shadows.

There must be billions of cell phone photos of the tower. Tourists stood and sat on the stone steps taking pictures of their loved ones with the tower in the background. The steps grew cold as it got darker and we bundled up. Once the sky was dark enough, the tower finally flickered on. The crowd murmured. Terry scrambled to find her cell phone to take a picture. The last time she saw the tower she didn’t have enough  time to take a photo. The blinking light show only lasts for ten minutes every hour to save energy.  

When it was built, not everyone liked the tower. A committee of 300, one member for each meter of the towers height, wrote, “We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of
the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength,
with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against
the erection…of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To bring our
arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower
dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its
barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe,
all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream.
And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the
hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal”

Upon the German occupation of Paris in 1940, the lift cables were cut by the French so that Adolf Hitler would have to climb the steps to the summit. The parts to repair them were allegedly impossible to obtain because of the war. When visiting Paris, Hitler chose to stay on the ground. It was said
that Hitler conquered France, but did not conquer the Eiffel Tower. A
Frenchman scaled the tower during the German occupation to hang the French flag. French hearts in time warmed to the landmark.