Dec 09: Cathy de la Cruz, A Mess, a Museum

A Mess, a Museum

Cathy de la Cruz

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“Well, this is my house. I don’t know what it is: a sitting room; a music room; a mess; a museum …” 

—Serge Gainsbourg, April 1979

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The best art I saw in Paris this year was the art I was not allowed to take any pictures of. The best art I saw in Paris this year was somebody’s house. The best art I saw in Paris this year included me listening to the narration of a grieving adult daughter as she told visitors through headphones which items and rooms reminded her of favorite memories of her dead father. The best art I saw in Paris this year included a lengthy moment of me staring at the bed in which this narrator’s father died in. The best art I saw in Paris this year was Serge Gainsbourg’s house. 

I have always loved art. I have an MFA in Visual Art, which I guess doesn’t necessarily mean I love art, but I do. Living in New York City for the past eleven years has turned me into a sort of art-junkie, taking in as many museums, gallery and unconventionally housed art shows as possible. 

Art that I saw in my eleven days in Europe to illustrate my art-junkieness:

• Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
• Is that a Delacroix? The Art of Copying at the Musée Delacroix
• Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais, as well as throughout the city 
• Ellicit Es Festival Feministe De Films De Patrimoine at Cinéma Saint André des Arts
• The Third Man at Cinéma Le Champo
• Berthe Weill. Art dealer of the Parisian Avant-garde at Musée de l'Orangerie
• The Musée Rodin
• Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten at the Grand Palais
• ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought at The Palais de Tokyo
• Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal
• So much street art
• Many street performers and dancers

For the last two years, I have had the good fortune to apartment-swap with a friend-of-a-friend in Paris and call me art-naïve, but I am starting to wonder if Paris is even a better “art-city” than NYC. Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but it didn’t become glaringly so until my most recent visit to Paris, just four days after the now infamous Louvre Heist. 

October 19th is when the 2025 Louvre Heist occurred. I swear I was sitting in my Brooklyn apartment taking selfies of my new French-inspired bob. I swear I was taking a screenshot of my Parisian friend, Mile’s flight itinerary since we were about to apartment-swap. I swear I was sitting at home looking at cool things I could do while I was in Paris for 11 days (Full disclosure: I ended up in Portugal for three of those days). I swear I was taking photos of my cat, Fig. I swear I was downloading an app to see what I would look like with blonde hair. I say, “I swear” because in the days that followed it became the obnoxious running joke of many who knew me in the U.S. to tease me about how I was I was in Paris because I was part of the Louvre Heist. 

I know none of my friends actually thought I was involved in such a thing, but the fact that it was a running joke during my trip, yet I never heard or saw any mention of it while I was actually in Paris felt the way news works; how sometimes my family in Texas calls to tell me about something that happened in New York City that I don’t know about. 

I even thought that I heard the police sirens on October 25th catching the Louvre robbers, but when I check my notes in the form of the time stamped pictures on my phone, I heard those sirens on the 26th. 

I have only been to the Louvre once and it was on October 25th, 2024. I was at the Louvre within 5 hours of landing in Paris. I had never been to the Louvre and somehow had the energy to do so after a hard landing that involved my iPhone breaking as in it was completely unusable in a foreign country where I was traveling solo. In those 5 hours, I managed to nap and plop my sim card into the mutual friend’s phone all while he was preparing to travel to New York city to stay at my place. We went from apartment-swapping to me having his teenager daughter’s old cell phone. 

Once at the Louvre with my tiny retro cell phone, I bought a ham and cheese sandwich, some potato chips, and a coke like the American tourist I am. Then I made my way to painting after painting until I saw her. You know who. She was this tiny little painting on a black wall surrounded by paparazzi. There were at least seven rows of people in front of me. I took photos and videos of people taking photographs with her, the spectacle. And then I got closer. And closer. And then I found myself taking a photo with her. I was close. So close that my partner at the time upon seeing the photos later asked me if I had been given a private tour of the Mona Lisa. And then it was like I had her all to myself. And that’s it—once you reach the closest you can get to get to her, you are ushered out and it is in that moment where you are actually the closest to her and almost have a private moment—while you’re saying goodbye. It’s sort of like paying your respects at a popular person’s funeral. 

 

Now it was exactly a year later—to the day and I had an appointment to visit Serge Gainsbourg’s house. Opened to the paying-public in fall 2023, the house is now a designated historic landmark and while I do not claim to be the biggest Gainsbourg fan, I used to be a huge fan of Yé-yé music to which his contributions are unparalleled. Additionally, I understand his place in French history, and I was an American tourist in France—so visiting his home seemed right. I was also intrigued by how far tickets to Gainsbourg’s house sold out in advance. For this visit, I bought my ticket four-months in advance. 

 

I did not understand when I bought the tickets that part of the reason the tickets sell out so far in advance is because Maison Gainsbourg is an actual historic house, only a limited number of visitors are allowed in at a time. I recall only seeing two other visitors when I was there and then several staff keeping eyes on us. Though interestingly, we had full reign upstairs. Mostly I think there would have been nowhere for staff to sit upstairs. Once upstairs, I touched the door to Gainsbourg’s bedroom like a creep. 

 

What does someone who isn’t the biggest Serge Gainsbourg fan in the world get out of touring his home? I genuinely loved some of his music. I loved many of the songs he wrote for women artists, many of whom he was romantically linked to. I love the music and art of his daughter, Charlotte who narrates the entire tour. I love the fact that Gainsbourg was such a controversial weirdo who for me seems Frencher than French. Of course, I wanted to see his home on my third ever visit to Paris. 

What surprised me was how much the tour was about family life. Once inside, I sort of forgot Gainsbourg was a pop star and saw him as just an older multiple times-broken-hearted man and father who drank a lot and lived in a relatively modest house for such a star. I started to think about both my grandfathers in the final years of their lives—alone in their homes. 

Once I arrived at Maison Gainsbourg, I was given headphones, but I did not realize the soundtrack I was listening to was created by a group called Soundwalk Collective who have also collaborated with Patti Smith and Nan Goldin, among others. Their work is so subtle that I almost didn’t consider it as “work,” which I think is why the visit ended up being so powerful. Those unreleased sounds of Gainsbourg mixed 30 years after his death with his daughter’s narration and sounds collected within the space, create a feeling that is hard to explain. I felt like I was peeking in on my own childhood—like I was witnessing visions of my own family that don’t exist anymore. When I left, I could not stop thinking about what the Maison Gainsbourg version of my family’s home would be like. Then I decided everyone needs to do this with their home, as if it’s possible—as if our homes full of memories don’t get sold or bulldozed. What a gift to be able to preserve something like a family home and share it with others. 

(Photo by Pierre Terrasson from the Maison Gainsbourg website) 

 

This experience got me thinking about The House/The Home as an exhibition. Of course, a house, a home is an exhibition—a curated collection. I was so deeply moved by this personal half-hour experience. For some Gainsbourg fans, I can imagine the carpet that is pulling away from the floorboards and the paint that is chipping along with the darkness due to the closed shutters (closed for conservation purposes) might burst a celebrity-bubble, but I thought it was perfect. This is intimacy and it’s not for everyone. 

(Photography by Charlotte Gainsbourg from the Soundwalk Collective website)

 

Nothing about this tour feels forced—everything just flows. The kitchen was so small that it made me think about the home my mother grew up in in San Antonio, Texas. These were not feelings I expected to have in 2025 Paris, France. 

This is where Gainsbourg composed most of his songs. I want everyone reading this who writes or makes any sort of art to imagine someone 30 years after your death visiting the space where you made things—your first drafts—visiting that space frozen in time. It might not age well, and it might disappoint someone who held you on a pedestal. 

This space was beautiful and chaotic, and I loved the imprint of where Gainsbourg sat on his couch. I am regularly embarrassed of my own couch imprint. I loved the table of police badges that he collected from law enforcement who were not supposed to ever give anyone their badge—it was obsessive and almost pathological. I loved the upstairs room of dolls. I loved the bathtub that apparently Serge never used, but is famously photographed in. In fact, this was my favorite detail: “Dad hated taking baths.” And then a few minutes down the street at the official Serge Gainsbourg Museum, there Dad is photographed in the bath he hated taking. Home versus official-museum or reality versus public persona. 

(Photo by the author)

 

The museum itself was a bit of a letdown. Lots of memorabilia, a gift shop, and a bar—but nothing that really tells a story or evokes any real feeling. I would not recommend going to the museum without also going to the house since tickets are sold separately. The museum is the flashy clothes. The house is the body underneath those clothes. 

In comparison, the Gerhard Richter show was like exploring a cave with a bunch of fellow explorers due to the nature of how huge and magnificent the Fondation Louis Vuitton is. The Musée Delacroix felt like a claustrophobic old home that was too bright and crowded—like being at the mall the day after Christmas. Art Basel was essentially an art-orgy—decadent and fun, but also overwhelming and exhausting; I walked out it thinking I needed a break from art for a while. The feminist film festival I went to was enlightening, but very similar to things I have already experienced in my life. The screening of the Hollywood classic The Third Man at Le Champo might have been second favorite art experience of the trip because it was at 11am on a Friday and seeing an old film I’ve always meant to see at that time of day at a legendary old Paris theater made me really feel like I was on vacation. I even got yelled at by a grumpy old Frenchman for accidentally kicking his seat. He yelled something at me in French and instead of being embarrassed, I felt like I was getting a real Parisian cinemagoing experience, and I was absolutely delighted. I saw great art at the Musée de l'Orangerie, but again the experience was crowded and bright and a little tiring. The Musée Rodin was great even though I am not a huge Rodin fan—I am so glad I went. Let’s just say when I got to the Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten show, the museum attendant looked concerned and said “I don’t know if you’ll be able to see everything since you only have two hours” and I knew it wasn’t going to be my favorite experience. His saying that caused me to rush through with time to spare and sweat on my brow. The show at The Palais de Tokyo was all artists I had seen before in the U.S. and while I appreciated it, it felt a little too close to home to dazzle me on my last night in Paris, but the space also had a restaurant, and I was starving so I’ll always think fondly of them for that. The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art on my spontaneous trip to Porto, Portugal absolutely blew me away and I would go back there in a heartbeat, but somehow the Serge experience is still my favorite of the trip.

The tour of Serge Gainsbourg’s home was only thirty minutes long, but it stands out in my brain as so much longer. I’m sure part of that sense of time elongated was because I was not allowed to use my phone to document anything. Whether or not it was her explicit intention, tour organizer and narrator, Charlotte Gainsbourg succeeded in capturing my full attention.

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Cathy de la Cruz was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. In 2009, she received her MFA in Visual Art from the University of California at San Diego, having completed a series of short experimental live action and animated nonfiction films. In 2014, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a Senior Metadata Manager for Penguin Random House.