Leviathan, 2011, by Anish Kapoor, at the Grand Palais, through June 23. (Photos by Vincent Desjardins. With a hat tip to Yvonne Connasse.)

Once upon a time, in our youth, we were asked to write for a companion guide to a famous novel by Dan Brown. We visited many locations in the book and wrote with some authority (being versed in art conservation matters) about the restoration of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan. But we wrote from a distance about the Caravaggio holdings at the Louvre.

Our challenge was to figure out which painting in the Grand Gallerie could have been yanked off the wall during a key murder scene. We went for the fabulous Death of the Virgin (and luckily, so did the movie-makers, who turned the novel into a Tom Hanks romp, complete with straightened hair). But having just been to Paris to visit said gallery in person, we think that we may have made a mistake…

…because Death of the Virgin is a tad large for one person to hoist.

In the meantime, we passed the madness that surrounds THE Italian painting of all time: La Mona Lisa. It seems to be behind more layers of glass, Plexiglas, barbed wire and concrete than on our last visit (not exactly an intimate experience with Leonardo). But the Louvre does allow photography, giving each visitor the briefest instant to record the sublime experience digitally. It reminded us of the Pope’s 2005 funeral, when the peak moment for those lucky enough to wave goodbye to JP2 consisted of a split-second CLICK photo op.

I think I may have someone’s elbow permanently wedged up my nose. Send help.

Seriously.

Who cares about the rest of the gallery when there’s a Mona Lisa to be photographed?

As close as we got.

Anyway, back to the Baroque paintings…we regretted not having chosen Caravaggio’s much more modestly scaled The Fortune Teller as the key work in the opening scene of that Code book.

Oh well! A la prochaine fois!

Meanwhile…at the Palais Royal…

Daniel Buren’s subtle echo of the colonnade of the Palais Royale is getting a colorful facelift. While the water elements get upgraded and the artist’s stripey, black-and-white columns get scrubbed, the public can peek through technicolor panes of glass as the work carries on in the “cour d’honneur” courtyard. How nice when a contemporary art installation is classified as a “monument historique!” (Our own favorite moment for the columned courtyard? The final-reel shootout between bad guy Walter Matthau and good guys Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Stanley Donan’s thriller Charade, 1961. “I had to kill them, Mrs. Lampert!“)

Palais Royal in orange…

…in blue…

…and red.

Q: What’s better than SUPERTITLES at the opera?
A: REALLY BIG WALL TEXT REALLY HIGH UP at an art museum!

We loved seeing the exhaustive (and exhausting) Kandinsky retrospective at the Beaubourg, a.k.a. Centre Georges Pompidou: the bold splotches of color, the whimsical shapes, all that kinetic motion from the peripatetic 20th-century master whose career took him from the Blue Rider through the Bauhaus. The only thing that left us puzzled was the wall text, which was writ LARGE and placed WAAAY up the wall. I suppose it’s so that even if visitors are stacked five-deep and can’t see the art, they can at least read the name of the painting over the tousled heads of fellow art-gawkers. Maybe some U.S. museums will catch on to this user-friendly trick. The Guggenheim will get its opportunity in September, when the show travels to New York.

Calder at the Pompidou is up through July 20; Kandinsky, through Aug. 10.

Click on images to supersize.

The Pompidou: Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s 1977 inside-out masterpiece.

Both big shows are up on the 6-eme…just keep climbing…

The building has one of the most fab views of Paris.

The view of Paree competes with the art where it leaks into the Pompidou’s galleries.

Art? Cityscape? Why, I’ll have both!

Kandinsky. With SUPERTITLES!

Kids love Calder because he was one of them.

Oh, by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, on permanent display in its own pavilion near all the buskers and picnicking college students in the Place Beaubourg is Brancusi’s studio. And Renzo’s Piano’s reimagining of the sculptor’s environment is even better than the original: it’s got glass walls!

Brancusi was so in love with the harmony of his own permanent installation that when he sold a sculpture, he would replace it with a plaster cast. (See a 360-degree view of the whole studio here.)

After the show, a visit to the Café Beaubourg is in order – it is our favorite place in the area for beautiful people-watching ops.

It is best known for the concrete interieurs tres chic which put Philippe Starck on the map of design-lovers back in 1980. Keep the Gauloises outside, please; they interfere with the delicate — and expensive — nuances of the cordon bleu.