I was in Omaha last weekend to attend the Lauritzen Garden Antique Show.  I had spoken to a few dealers before I left and all agreed that one of the draws of the show was the remarkable hospitality provided by their hostesses.  I was the very grateful recipient of this hospitality, which extended to a wonderful dinner in a private home Friday night.

While we were having a tour of the house I stopped dead in the upstairs hall.  Hanging there, nonchalant and elegant, vibrant and graphic, was Sonia Delauney.  We’d met, Ms. Delauney and I, at the Cooper-Hewitt last spring and were surprised to bump into one another again in Omaha.

Charlotte Moss was the speaker at that day’s luncheon and she began her talk by noting that all of our experiences are tucked away somewhere and they surface as inspiration and reference points as we move through the world.  I’d expected good things in Omaha, but I had not expected to be able to press my nose to the glass of a Sonia Delauney painting.  There is wonder everywhere we go.

Image via the Cooper-Hewitt.  This was not the painting in the hall, though it was similar.  I did not, literally, press my nose to the glass.  I swear.

One of the things I like about art fairs is being able to see such a wide variety of artists in one place.

I’ve had a little stack of cards on my desk since the Brookside Art Fair, including Jody Depew McLeane’s pastels, top.

Signe & Genna Grushovenko collaborate on oil paintings based on vintage photographs.

And Dick Daniels’s cartoonish commentary.

All images via the artists’ sites which you can find through the highlighted links above.

I ate and drank everything without a care and gained nary an ounce, hereby confirming that the fried potato is the enemy.  (It must be a embedded in my Irish peasant genes; I can never resist.)  Certainly a country filled with bread and pastry and wine is going to be high on my list.

Will I remember, I wonder, the smell of the lillies in the Rodin Museum?  Or the sound of the rain on the gravel path?

Or the feeling of getting on a bicycle for the first time in thirty years as the young woman gave the seat a shove and said, “Don’t worry!  Momentum is your friend!”?

I hope that I do.  I will certainly remember our last lunch, our best meal.  He had his tenth piece of beef, so rare he could barely cut it, so delicious he could barely pause to speak.  Though he’d tried a variety of things, escargot being the most memorable, he refused a bite of my pate.  A foolish move.

“If we didn’t have to leave tomorrow, if we could stay as long as you wanted, how long would you stay?”

“I would stay for years.”

That meal was unforgettable.

We received so many wonderful recommendations for food that it would have taken years, indeed, to try them all.  These are a few favorites.  Brasserie Fernand, Polidor, Le Bouldogue – where we actually ate twice we were so charmed (and not just by the three French Bulldogs in attendance), and Le Comptoir de le Relais.  The last was our best meal, as it had been promised to be.  We’d been instructed to wait if there were a line.  There was.  We did.  We were glad.

Catherine Futter, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, commented to me once, “All art is decorative.”  And, indeed, most artists create for personal buyers.

One of my favorite spaces in Paris was the Musee de l’Orangerie.  The Waterlilies, yes, the waterliles.

But more so for the remarkable collection of Paul Guillame.  Guillame was a dealer and collector in Paris in the early part of the century – a great supporter of the arts.  He amassed a remarkable collection that his widow, Domenica, donated upon his death.  Cezanne, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Rousseau. (My youngest son studied the Impressionists in second grade and since he will say things like, “That is so Rousseau,” and “That’s definitely a Matisse.”  His voice was in my head the whole visit.)

There are small dioramas depicting Guillame’s home, its walls graced with the art now in the galleries.

It was so personal.

The collection is actually the Jean Walter and Paul Guillame Collection.  Domenica named the collection for both her husbands, Guillame and Jean Walter who followed him.  This seems a little wacky to me, but women do all kinds of crazy things when it comes to men.  All images my own, some tragically blurry, but I could not leave them out so charming were the “rooms.”

Paris was such an interesting combination of large and small.  It’s difficult not to be struck by how many enormous and enormously beautiful buildings there are.  And the enormous egos and energies that it took to create them.

Additionally, the amount of detail involved was staggering.  No anonymous, graceless office buildings these, but intricately detailed spaces.

Sometimes it was all I could absorb, the painstaking details of the personal necessity of these spaces.

As we approached the massive facade of the Louvre, I asked my son, “Can you even imagine conceiving of something so massive?  Of designing something so large and in such detail?”

Without a glance to me, his gaze steady on the building all the time, he said, “Yes.  I can.”  And I marveled some more.