Art travels with Babar
By Brooke Masters
Published: February 2 2008 00:22 | Last updated: February 2 2008 00:22
Mommy,
I think I’ve found one. Come on,” Andrew, my eight-year-old son is
practically quivering with excitement. He pulls my arm as we walk
through the museum in Paris. “It’s her, isn’t it,” he says with pride,
pointing to a dark figure on the wall.
He is right. The painting is James McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Grey and Black”, better known as “Whistler’s Mother”, and we have been looking all over Paris for her.
It all started when my husband John and I were living in a suburb of New York City and we began reading the books about Babar the Elephant by Jean de Brunhoff and his son Laurent. Among the standard tales of Babar’s children and his war with the rhinoceroses, we discovered Babar’s Museum of Art, an introduction to masterpieces of art with all the human figures changed into elephants. (Picture Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” with a bearded elephant reaching out to a naked one, and Georges-Pierre Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” populated with pachyderms and you’ll get the idea.)
One bedtime, we were speeding through the story, which describes the conversion of an elephant railway station into a museum, when my daughter Eleanor, then barely three, stopped me at a picture of an Egyptian-style temple. “Mommy, we’ve seen that,” she said. Indeed we had. It was an elephant version of the Temple of Dendur exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complete with the slanted glass wall overlooking Central Park. “Can we see the other pages too?” Eleanor asked.
With that a project was born. The Babar book helpfully includes the names of each artist and painting or sculpture in an index at the back, so we looked each one up on the internet to discover its location. We started with the New York museums and quickly learnt that young children cannot live on art alone. The leisurely strolls around galleries that I used to enjoy in my pre-children days have been replaced by surgical strikes.
Essential aids on the art trail
Shelter: We’ve found the best options for travelling with children tend to be apartments or hotels with pools. Chain hotels lack character but are more likely to offer rooms with two beds that will fit the whole family. Corporate apartments, which make it easier to cater for picky eaters, can be a bargain during weekends and holiday periods, though they are often located in business areas rather than near the sights.
Food: carry snack-sized packages of favourite treats for ill-timed hunger pangs. Restaurants with children’s menus can cut food costs but our children get tired of chicken nuggets and spaghetti. Mix things up with a visit to a market for fresh bread, cheese, fruits and vegetables and have a picnic.
Entertainment: A portable DVD player makes flights more enjoyable. Battery life is far more important than picture or sound quality. Other possibilities include small toys (Playmobil and Matchbox cars are good) and books related to the destination. Classic picture books include Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, Kay Thompson’s Eloise and the This is London (or Rome or Paris etc) series by Miroslav Sasek. The Katie series by James Mayhew is all about masterworks of art. For older children, try the Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary, The Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osborne and the Astérix books by René Goscinny. Bring paper and crayons or markers everywhere to pass the time in long lines and in slow restaurants.
Breaks for snacks or lunch in the museum cafeteria are a must. If we get an uninterrupted hour in the galleries, I count myself fortunate. We have also become experts at finding places to play near the museums we want to see. The Ancient Playground on Fifth Avenue beside the Metropolitan is lovely for children of all ages, as it has a sandy bottom, pyramid-shaped climbing equipment and a water spray area in the summer time. At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a visit to Jackson Pollock’s “One: Number 31” was frankly overshadowed by the Bell-47D1 helicopter installation and the snack bar beside the sculpture garden.
Last year, we learnt we were moving to London. During a brief visit to pick out schools and a place to live, Andrew spotted one of the Babar pictures (Jan van Eyck’s “Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife”) on a poster in the Tube. The National Gallery went to the top of our to-do list and the Babar art quest was reinvigorated. The children were older and occasionally willing to pause in front of masterpieces even when elephants were not involved. Trafalgar Square’s lions and fountains proved to be an acceptable substitute for a playground. We timed our visit to Tate Modern to coincide with the giant slide installation but a walk along the river probably would have done nearly as well.
The half-term trip to Paris, however, was more ambitious. All our previous museum excursions involved a single afternoon or morning at a time. The Babars in Paris were spread all over town and we hoped to squeeze in a trip to Versailles as well. In a fit of optimism, I ordered two-day Paris Museum passes, (€30 plus a €12 shipping charge if you buy online in advance). It would only be worth the money if we made it to at least four museums, churches or palaces in two days. We also booked rooms at the Hotel St James & Albany, located within walking distance of both the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, home to seven of the Babar masterworks.
The hotel rooms were dingy but the breakfast buffet was ample and it was hard to beat the location across from the Jardins des Tuileries, less than a block from a Métro station. We set out early for the Louvre, breezed past the line for tickets (thank-you museum pass) and started looking for the “Mona Lisa”. But the surprisingly small lady with the enigmatic smile wasn’t our only stop. Both children were by now interested enough in Leonardo da Vinci that they wanted to see his other paintings and we had several other artists to find. Eleanor, five, was the first to spot Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” and Andrew helped us navigate our way down the stairs to the “Venus de Milo”.
Before our next art excursion, we set out for lunch at the Eiffel Tower. Warned by a fellow soccer mom that the regular queue to get to the top could be brutal during school holidays, I had booked a table at Altitude 95, the less expensive of the two restaurants located in the tower.
It has a separate ticket booth and lets you bypass the wait for the first elevator. The food was surprisingly good – the kids had salmon while John and I had oysters. There was no escaping the 25-minute line for the elevator to the top but the children said the view was worth the wait.
Our next stop, the Musée d’Orsay, was the model for Babar’s art gallery. (In the story, Queen Celeste decides to convert the old train station into a museum, much as Parisians did with the old Quai d’Orsay.) Here we would have our encounters with Manet, Monet and “Whistler’s Mother”. We also struck it lucky: there was a temporary exhibit of Auguste Rodin’s plaster model for his statue of Balzac, sparing us the need for a separate trip to the Rodin Museum.
Much as I like Rodin’s work, three art museums in a weekend had seemed like a bit much. So we stopped for hot chocolate in the café tucked behind the old railroad station clock and spent the rest of the afternoon in a playground in the Tuileries.
Versailles impressed the children with its sheer size and the dust on the cobblestones outside. Eleanor liked the old furniture.
Andrew didn’t exactly share her enthusiasm but they both enjoyed the Hall of Mirrors, which had figured prominently in another well-loved picture book, Eloise in Paris by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight. The museum pass not only covered this visit but also a 10-minute stop to admire the stained glass windows at the Sainte-Chapelle and a climb to the top of Notre Dame Cathedral to snarl at the gargoyles.
The pass not only paid for itself but we realised that we should have bought a longer version.
Even though there was no Babar connection, the children wanted to visit the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musée de Cluny (officially known as the Musée National du Moyen Age) on Sunday before taking the Eurostar home.
Their passion for art museums remains unquenched. Right now, in fact, they’re lobbying for Rome.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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