Our Man in Paris: Making an exhibition of Gauguin

Paul Gauguin was a man who loved a good punch-up. He can still cause fists to fly, 100 years after his death. The Musée du Luxembourg in Paris has infuriated the French art establishment by putting together an unconventional centenary tribute to Gauguin: an exhibition in which original canvases are made to look like movie stills or huge, garish postcards.

The exhibition rooms are dimly lit, and the paintings – from Gauguin's Breton period, before he went to Tahiti – are fixed individually by powerful spotlights, which illuminate the canvases but leave the frames in the shade. The effect is startling, as if the paintings are not paintings at all but life-size slides, lit from behind.

Why do this? The exhibition's curators say that they wanted to capture the brilliant light for which Gauguin's work is celebrated. Critics suggest that the museum, which belongs to the Senate or upper house of the French parliament, is trying to re-establish itself as a player on the Paris exhibition circuit. In other words, this museum in the sixth arrondissement is making an exhibition of itself.

In a thunderous article in Le Monde last week, Roland Recht, professor of art history at the Collège de France (a 500-year-old university open to the public, which assembles the best academic talent of the land), dismissed the exhibition as "intolerable". The light shining on the canvases "flattened" the subtlety of Gauguin and gave his work the "aspect of a television screen". It was, he said, the first example of an art exhibition in which the public was prevented from looking at the paintings.

Playing around with, or adding something contemporary to, the works of great artists is quite common these days. Even the Louvre is at it. A wonderful exhibition begins there on Friday of manuscripts, drawings, sketches and doodles by Leonardo da Vinci (it has been a vintage year for art shows in Paris).

The Da Vinci exhibition, which lasts until 14 July, is worth the Eurostar ticket for two or three of his portrait sketches alone. To add a contemporary spin, the Louvre and the French government have commissioned James Coleman, an Irish artist, to create an exhibit-within-an-exhibition about Leonardo's work.

Coleman, 62, operates somewhere in the borderland between cinema and art. His main contribution is a giant screen which shows scrolling, digitalised images of details of a Leonardo mural in Milan. There are also, scattered through the exhibition, four fake TV-editing consoles which show black-and-white still images of Leonardo sketches and doodles, and short, written commentaries on them.

At the press preview the other day, Coleman said that he wanted to do something that was "part archive, part art". He said that he regarded Leonardo da Vinci as a surrealist, even a Dadaist: someone who tried to subvert the established artistic rules and liked to poke his mind into odd corners.

No doubt I am a fuddy-duddy, but it seems to me that Coleman's work contributes little. Unlike the Gauguin slide show at the Musée du Luxembourg, its main virtue is that it does not get in the way.

There is, however, a Dadaist delight in one of the Coleman exhibits. One of the fake editing consoles shows details from a Da Vinci drawing from the Queen's collection, normally kept at Windsor. The fourth of the small editing screens, as Coleman carefully points out, shows the reverse side of the sketch, on which Leonardo has written out an early 16th-century shopping list, which consists mostly of flour, oil and butter.

Only one conclusion is possible. Among all his other great achievements, Leonardo da Vinci also invented pizza.

Sex education from Mother Teresa

School visits, continued: Our 13-year-old-son Charles has just received his annual sex education lesson in his Parisian Catholic school. The boys were separated from the girls and handed a leaflet beginning with a poem by Mother Teresa. One of its lines read: "Life is a mystery, so penetrate it." Great amusement in class.

How do you approach sex education with young teenagers these days, when they have the internet? To be fair, I think that Charles's school gets it as right as you can, save one thing. Since it is a Catholic school, all discussion of homosexuality is avoided.

Otherwise, the approach is blunt and reassuring. Your body is changing, that is quite normal. Your body is not yet changing: that is also normal. You have spots: normal. No spots: normal.

A no-nonsense, twentysomething medical student handed the boys diagrams of the genitals from which I myself discovered something (it's never too late to learn). The French word for scrotum is bourse, which is the same word as the word for purse and for stock exchange. If you ever go to the Place de la Bourse in the second arrondissement of Paris, remember that one translation is Scrotum Square.

The medical student invited questions. France being France, one of the first questions was, "Why do some contraceptives come in fruit flavours, such as strawberry?" The medical student, unfazed, shot back: "Because not all girls like the taste of plastic."

Will I ever Finnish my euro coin collection?

Anorak corner: After 16 months of collecting the different euro coins from the 12 nations in Euroland, I have finally got a second Finnish coin. Of the 96 possible coins (leaving out the Vatican, Monaco and San Marino rareties), I have discovered 85 in my change.

Of the 11 that I am missing, six are Finnish. My local baker has collected all but three of the 96 coins from the small change passing over her counter. All her missing coins are Finnish.

Come on, you Finns. Travel broadens the mind.