The Beauty & Inspiration of seeing Ceramic Arts While Traveling

Tomorrow I leave for Munich and Barcelona. My “day job” employer, the University of Colorado Boulder, is sending me to an international conference in Barcelona, but we (my family is coming with me) are first flying to Munich for the beginning of Oktoberfest. This extension of the trip is what happens when you are married to a professional brewer ;). After a few days in Munich we will take the train to Barcelona for my conference, but still I will have quite a bit of free time there to explore. And I HAVE been researching museums and galleries and historic places of interest and inspiration, for weeks! I will post more about my discoveries and inspirations when I return.

But this reminded me of our first trip to Europe just a couple of years ago, in 2022. We had first planned a trip to Paris in 2020 to celebrate a big wedding anniversary. Well….. we all know what happened to travel after COVID swept the world and that trip only happened two years later. Trying to figure out all the cultural things one should fit into a 10-day trip, especially to Paris if you are an artist (!!!), is daunting. We ended up buying one of those packages of tickets where you can get straight into most museums without any additional need to stand in line and buy tickets for each. And so, you tend to do the things that the ticket package company promotes. I mean, after all, you paid for it. So, of course, I saw the Louvre, the Musey de Orsee, the WONDERFUL Centre Pompidou (because I adore Modern art from about 1890 - 1950), etc.

But one evening, resting back at the hotel and surfing the web, I came across a description of the Sèvres Manufacture et Musées Nationaux. Luckily a translation stated that it was a sort of National Ceramics Museum, and it was at the end of a subway line from Paris about a 25 minute ride. I was so elated that I dropped whatever plan we had for that day and off we went!

Now the first issue was that we did not understand the French custom of completely closing business during the 1 (or 2) hours at lunchtime. So we arrived to find the gate to the museum closed and locked. There I stood like some sort of sick puppy who had gotten locked out in the cold. I looked again and told my husband, “It is supposed to be open!”

When you get further from Paris, there are fewer people who also speak English, and the only person we saw around was a groundskeeper who was about to start mowing the lawn. We tried to communicate our question about whether the museum was indeed open that day, and somehow we understood from him that it was only closed for lunch. Thank goodness we made this effort and did not just turn around and take the subway back into Paris!

The museum is an absolute treasure both for the famous and historic Sèvres pottery that I learned all about, but they have a whole collection of pottery from historic times to the present and very well displayed! If I remember correctly the placards were all in French, but I took photos of so many things that inspired me and was able to later translate things I was especially interested in. I took so many photos, in fact, that I was worried the museum docent thought I was casing the place for nefarious reasons. I still look at those photos, today, and learn from them.

So, I hope I find something so special and surprising on this trip. Who knows! But I know that I will return expanded and inspired but the creative efforts of others across the centuries in yet another special place I feel supremely lucky to visit!

A few items from the Sèvres pottery museum. You have to be grateful to a country that values the arts so much that it has this entire museum devoted just to we pottery makers!