Musée Cantini and More

This will probably be a short post because I didn’t do much this afternoon. I visited only Musée Cantini, a small art gallery, and I returned to the scene of the crime. More on that later.

There are a couple of reasons for me not doing much. For one, I lingered over lunch at the restaurant at Mucem because I wasn’t eager to head out into the rain that fell all day today. For another, did I mention it was raining? I didn’t want to traipse around Marseille in the rain much.

I leave for my next destination tomorrow morning, so I’ll pad this otherwise likely short post with a summary of my time in Marseille.

Before getting into that, I’ll pause here to note that I noticed that this is my 551st entry in this journal. That means that this morning’s post was number 550. I consider that to be a significant milestone. To celebrate, I had a glass of wine at dinner.

Having said that, I’ve had a glass of wine with dinner every evening of this trip. So, now I have to come up with other accomplishments to retroactively reward with those other glasses of wine.

Jeez. 551 entries. I don’t think any of them clocked in at fewer than 800 words. And many had significantly more. That’s a heck of a lot of words.

If you know anyone who leads an empty shell of a life and who would enjoy filling it by reading seemingly endless claptrap that will likely put them to sleep, be sure to send them here. Now that I’ve said that, if you know any insomniacs, send them, too. This will cure them.

Okay. That was enough padding for this entry. Onto Musée Cantini.

Musée Cantini

Musée Cantini is in a former mansion, although its interior doesn’t look all that large for a mansion.

It looks bigger on the outside. It probably is. I read that entrance to the permanent collection is free, but there may be a charge for the temporary exhibitions it mounts. I can confirm the free ticket for the permanent collection, but there wasn’t a temporary exhibition on when I was there. I imagine there’s another space where they mount the temporary exhibitions.

All of the signage in Musée Cantini was in French and English, except for any labels beside individual works that listed only very basic information like the title and artist of the piece. If the label included any descriptive text, no matter how little, there was usually an English translation for that too.

At the start of the exhibitions in Musée Cantini, there was a sign that, apologetically, said, “Within this prestigious collection, we aim, in the future, to include more female artists and artists from around the world, particularly from the Mediterranean, to better account for the pluri-vocal art-history of the modernities.”

It occurred to me that, in the backward-sliding United States, that sign would have been banned these days as being too “woke.”

The entire collection is modern art. I recognized the artist of I think it was three of the paintings without having to look at the labels. They were by Picasso. The pieces were all done in his long, “don’t talk to me about anatomy, this is art, dammit“ period

One of the Picassos looked like a painting of an origami project. Another had four eyes, only one of which was approximately where an eye would be on a human, although another eye was close. But I’ve never met anyone with two eyes on their chin.

I didn’t recognize any of the other artists just by looking at their works. But I read many of the labels. I recognized only one of the other artists’ names, Max Ernst.

That’s not to say that none of the other artists are famous. It’s to say both that I didn’t read all of the labels and that I’m an art ignoramus.

Not all the works at Musée Cantini were paintings. There were also a few sculptures. One looked like a space alien. It had large quartz crystals in its head and a concave mirror in its belly, which was a little lower than where a human belly would normally be, and a single eye at human-belly height.

It had three arms. Two of them were hanging down. The third was crooked up, with the palm open and facing straight ahead, in an “I come in peace” pose. There were objects in all three hands, but the hands were open flat, not curled around the objects. The one in the upraised hand in particular looked more like a growth than a held object.

In my mind, the alien was saying, “Forget about your leader. Take me to your doctor. I need to have this looked at.” Now, that’s art!

Some of the signage in the museum talked esoterically about the driving philosophy of the works. For example, one noted that, ‘Merleau-Ponty developed a philosophy of what he called “the flesh of the world”: our material bodies, he argued, are in constant interaction with objects, which are themselves interconnected.’

I hope that the objects that my body is in constant interaction with aren’t things like trucks. Depending on the speed of the truck, that might happen only once in your foreshortened life.

As I said, the Musée Cantini is small. I don’t have much more to say about it. But, small though it was, its works engrossed me because I still wasn’t eager to go out into the rain, and I can feign being engrossed when it suits me.

Porte d’Aix: The scene of the crime.

In my first entry from Marseille, I provided an account of the “Marseille Incident,” as it’s now infamously known, that happened to me when I visited Marseille in 2010. I won’t repeat it here. You can read it in that first entry from the link here if you haven’t read it already or heard it from me personally, or if you need to refresh your memory, or if you’re the sort of person who likes to click links for no good reason.

Today, I had a morbid desire to return to the scene of the incident. Which is what I did after leaving Musée Cantini.

At the time of the Marseille incident, I serendipitously arrived at the site in front of which it happened while walking randomly. At the time, because I immediately reacted so rashly to the incident, I didn’t take the time to find out what it was called. And later, I was so traumatized by the incident and my thoroughly reckless response to it that I still didn’t think to find out its name. All I knew was that it was a triumphal arch.

On this trip, I found it in my walking tour app. It’s called Porte d’Aix or, alternately, Porte Royale. It’s located at the end of the road from Aix to Marseille. Conveniently, it’s also the start of the road to Aix from Marseille. It’s funny how it works like that.

I was nervous as I approached Porte d’Aix. Flashbacks occurred and reoccurred in my head. When I was there in 2010, it was a sunny, warm day, and there were crowds around Porte d’Aix. Today, it was raining, not cold, but a touch on the cool side, and there were very few people there. But that still didn’t quell my angst. I was certain a mugger would materialize from nowhere and try to grab my iPhone.

I stayed vigilant about being aware of my surroundings. I tried, and succeeded, in maintaining a distance of at least several metres between me and anyone else. That wasn’t difficult as the place was almost empty. There was a bit of a crowd sheltering under the arch, I assume to stay dry, so I didn’t walk through the arch, just 360° around it.

And then, without incident, I went back to my hotel.

Marseille Summary

I like Marseille. It’s a very pretty seaside city.

I won’t contend that it’s my favourite city in the world. I can’t name which city is my favourite. I’ve never been able to rank stuff like that. There are too many criteria to consider and to weigh. Marseille is not in contention for my favourite, but it’s not terribly outside the range. And it’s well worth a visit, in my opinion.

I spent seven nights, translating into about six and a half days, here. If the primary purpose of this trip were sightseeing, and if I hadn’t taken day trips to Aix and Cassis from Marseille, that would have been too long for me. But sightseeing was a secondary objective. The primary objective was to escape the Toronto winter for a bit. Marseille served that purpose well, and I expect the other stops I have coming up on this trip will as well.

And I did take those daytrips. It was the first time I’d been to either Aix or Cassis. I loved them both. I think they both could have benefited from some overnight stays.

All things considered, the time I spent here was probably just the right amount for me.