The biggest museums just a click away. What if you took advantage of the confinement caused by the Covid-19 epidemic due to the coronavirus to visit them, taking your time and avoiding the crowds? Several of them, solo or in collaboration with Google or YouTube, offer superb dedicated sites.
At the Louvre, with or without children
“Great hairstyle, it looks like dreadlocks. The animated little man talks about the Egyptian monarch Akhenaton. "A pharaoh, like Tutankhamun? " The Louvre puts on line cartoons already old, but extremely well made, "A minute at the museum", which will teach things not only to children.
Were you sure to remember the boat that can barely be seen at the end of the horizon, and which will come to save the last survivors of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa"? These pastilles look like one eats candy.
More difficult, the conferences on art that the largest museum in the world puts online on its YouTube channel, as well as, more classic, a stroll among the museum's masterpieces.
Chez Van Gogh in Amsterdam
At the beginning, we say to ourselves: "Well, how do we manage with these 164 paintings, apart from scrolling through them like the slide shows of our (grand) parents? And we get caught up in the game.
Enter the world of Van Gogh. Zoom in on the masterpieces. Falling at random from the navigation - like a visit to the rooms - on a very beautiful painting that we did not know, "The Old Church in Nuenen", a ruin in the middle of a field. We zoom in. We read the explanation (activate the French translation as soon as we get to the museum page): a place of childhood, a village where the artist's father officiated as a pastor.
The Van Gogh Museum site of Google Arts & Culture then offers you "recommendations" to "The Potato Eaters", "The Harvest", and other peasant scenes from the beginnings of Van Gogh, his native environment, less known as its French period, from Arles to Auvers-sur-Oise. This digital tour has other surprises in store, such as this photo of Margot Begemann. We zoom in on the young woman, then the explanations: it was Vincent's youthful love. She had said yes, but the bride's family refused the marriage. She survived a suicide attempt. Two tormented, two absolute. We did well to click.
The real story of Guernica at the Reina Sofia museum
It's a bit like the Pompidou Center of Spain. Except that he has a planetary icon: "Guernica", by Pablo Picasso. He never leaves the Reina Sofia museum, which was even created to host it in Madrid when Spain turned the page on Franco's rule and the pictorial monument in exile in New York returned in majesty to its country of origin. .
But behind the painting, what do we know about the history of Guernica and the Spanish Civil War? The Museo Reina Sofia site offered by Google Arts & Culture takes you to the heart of this drama, with amazing photos - of women shooting in groups - a wind of freedom, of danger, of resistance. The museum's photographic collection from this period is mixed with paintings on the site.
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There too, a real revelation: we discover Cubism differently, through the often very cheerful and colorful canvases of Juan Gris. A real trip.
In the footsteps of Banksy, from London to New Orleans
By dint of wondering who is Banksy, or if several people hide behind the most famous and the most mysterious of the artists of street-art, we forget what he achieved, apart from his last flashes.
The Banksy Open Air Museum presents 12 magnificent works, very well photographed, often from its beginnings in Bristol, England. Like this dog graffiti a wall, or this variation of "The Girl with the pearl of Vermeer", "The girl with the pierced eardrum", in a very modest courtyard of the English city, where the pearl is replaced by a box of alarm as piercing.
We enter the heart of his work which feeds on existing objects. Fascinating, London's “Falling Shopper”, his best-preserved work, 7 m above the ground, sheltered from vandals. Moving, the “Girl with an umbrella” or “Umbrella girl”, on a wall in New Orleans, tribute to Hurricane Katrina which swept across Louisiana in 2005. A ride, a real one.
Coco Chanel in New York
If you had the chance to go to the Metropolitan Museum of New York - we say the Met - wandering on its site will revive beautiful memories, as you cannot have memorized all the collections of one of the largest museums in the world , American painters of the 19th century, who paint the "Frontier" like a western, to the Impressionists of the same era, from Sisley to Degas.
But the Met also devotes a lot of fashion exhibitions. Right now, you can see - while surfing from your sofa - the modernism of Coco Chanel. Photos very well angled and made, in a handful of images, we understand very well the genius of the Frenchwoman, who said of herself to Salvador Dali: "I have done throughout my life that transform the male clothing into female clothing: jackets, hairstyle, ties, wrists ”.
Confined, you will still have seen an exhibition. Or hum, that's already it.
