How could we have missed this...the Stravinsky Fountain?

Browsing "The Little Pleasures of Paris" was like revisiting favourite haunts in Paris but this was new to me and it is very close to the Centre Pompidou which we visited several times.   We stopped going when they started to charge to get up the escalator to see the view.   BTW,  we saw Pompidou in the Bastille Day Parade in Paris in 1972.   We had special tickets that allowed us to get to the front row compliments of some Americans we met on the Metro going to the parade.   I think their family was in the diplomatic core.  We did feel a bit guilty having such a good view when French citizens  were  way back and trying to see the parade through periscopes.  But I digress.

I just love the wonderful sculptures of Niki de Saint Phalle on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and to think that there was this amazing work of art...so playful and colourful...that I missed!

The Stravinsky Fountain is a shallow basin of 580 square meters located in Place Stravinsky, between the Centre Pompidou and the Church of Saint-Merri. Within the basin are sixteen works of sculpture inspired by Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and his other major works. The black mechanical pieces of sculpture are by Jean Tinguely, the colored works by Niki de Saint Phalle.

The sculptures in the fountain represent:

• L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird)
• La Clef de Sol (the Musical Key of G)
• La Spirale (The Spiral)
• L'Elephant (The Elephant)
• Le Renard (The Fox)
• Le Serpent (The Serpent)
• La Grenouille (The Frog)
• La Diagonale (The Diagonal)
• La Mort (Death)
• La Sirène (The Mermaid)
• Le Rossignol (The Nightingale)
• L'Amour (Love)
• La Vie (Life)
• Le Cœur (The Heart)
• Le Chapeau de Clown (The Clown's Hat)
• Ragtime (Ragtime)

The basin covers some of the rooms and offices of IRCAM, the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique, an organization devoted to promoting modern music and musicology, connected with the Pompidou Center. The founder of the IRCAM, composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, suggested the work of Stravinsky as a theme for the fountain. Because of the offices and rooms below, the fountain was designed to be as light as possible, with very shallow water, a bottom of stainless steel, and sculptures composed of plastics and other light materials.