Erik Brady: Elaine Sciolino is Buffalo's gift to Paris − and now, too, to the Louvre

Retired New York Times Paris Bureau Chief Elaine Sciolino returns to Buffalo, where she was raised, to talk about her book "Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum" on May 15.

Elaine Sciolino has some practical advice for first-time visitors to the Louvre: Never go on an empty stomach. Or a full bladder.

She wasn't equipped with such knowledge when she visited for the first time while touring Europe on a budget in the summer of 1969. She was traveling with two Canisius College classmates, Donna Smith and my sister Kristin. And that serendipity makes me love Elaine's new book all the more.

It is called "Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum." Elaine didn't fall in love with it, at first. She kept a journal that summer and, decades later, noticed that she had written more about lunch with her dear friends than about their visit to the Louvre.

But now, all these years later, Elaine knows that fortress turned palace turned museum with a singular intimacy. The same goes for her connection to its most famous resident.

"We tread lightly with each other," Elaine says of the Mona Lisa. "Someday I would like to see her naked, without all the protective glass and varnish that keeps us away from her. But they wouldn't dare restore her, so we are left with an incomplete relationship. It is part of her mystery. And we need mystery, don't we?"

Elaine, 76, is a retired Paris bureau chief for the New York Times. She still lives there − an American in Paris. Better yet, a Buffalonian in that other City of Light.

She is coming back to Buffalo on May 15 to talk about "Adventures in the Louvre" as part of the Larkin Square Authors Series. While here, she plans to visit the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. That's where, as a girl growing up on the West Side, she first encountered great art.

"My mother had a 1952 powder-blue Plymouth, and she would pile us in and take us to the Albright-Knox," Elaine says. "She really wanted us to learn."

The new book is dedicated to her mother: "In memory of Jeannette Limeri Sciolino, who saw blue in the bushes.”

Elaine's friendship with Kristin and Donna began when they worked on the Canisius student newspaper. Elaine would become a top editor of The Griffin, and has been at her craft ever since.

"As a lifelong journalist, I have learned to talk about anything with anybody," she writes, "from farmers and factory workers to presidents and kings. But as a visitor to the Louvre, I had to communicate with works of art. That meant seeing, really seeing."

Elaine's mother schooled her early on about this notion of really seeing. She would ask her children to look hard at paintings by Géricault and Matisse and Monet at the Albright-Knox, as the AKG was then known.

"Look at ordinary things," her mother would say of the apples and knives of a still life. "They tell stories."

Elaine has made a life of telling stories. She covered the Middle East for Newsweek when she was the first American, and first woman, to interview the Ayatollah Khomeini. She joined the Times in 1984 and covered beats such as the CIA and the United Nations before taking over the bureau in Paris.

To be made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor is a high distinction of the French state; the award was established by Napoleon in 1802 for civic or military merit. France awarded it to Elaine in 2010 for her “special contribution” to the friendship of France and the United States.

In 2011 came her book "La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life." It is, according to Vogue, "that rare book written by an American that French people could read to understand themselves."

Next came a pair of best sellers: 2015's "The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs" and 2019's "The Seine: The River that Made Paris." (We told you about that one here.) "Adventures in the Louvre" completes what she calls her Paris trilogy.

"I wrote about a street, I wrote about a river and I wrote about a museum," she says.

When Elaine was growing up, her street was Busti Avenue, her river the Niagara and her museum the Albright-Knox. She hasn't been back since it reopened as the AKG.

"I hope to come and see it in a different way," she says, "rediscovering a museum I have always loved."

She did not love the Louvre until, for this book, she taught herself how. For so many of her Paris years, she had thought of it as this cold, forbidding place where she had an obligation to take visiting out-of-town friends.

"It was like art purgatory," she says. "And we always had to see the Mona Lisa."

Elaine never cared much for Mona, or for the crowds who always surrounded her. It was, after all, just a small painting of a silk merchant's wife. During her research for the book, though, a curator offered Elaine a private, after-hours viewing.

Elaine recently wrote a guest essay for the Wall Street Journal with the headline: "I Didn't Get the Fuss Over the Mona Lisa. Then I Got to Know Her."

"We stared at each other," Elaine writes. "I moved my gaze to her lips, and to the smile they call the most famous in the world. Trust in me, believe in me, she told me."

Elaine's research took years. Some weeks, she was at the museum every day. She has a good reporter's way with people, which is how she could charm a curator into allowing her that one-on-one with the one and only.

Let's just say the Louvre is no longer purgatory for Elaine.

"Now, it's sheer bliss," she says. "Now, with my book out, I get to talk about art, beauty, and history to people who are interested in having a distraction from the incoming fire on this battleground that is our world today."

Which is not to say that Elaine is an expert in art history. There are already many books about the Louvre by people who are. She looks at the Louvre instead through the lens of a highly skilled journalist.

Kristin and Donna, her college friends, went into academia. My late sister earned a doctorate at the University of Toronto and became an authority on the short stories of Thomas Hardy. Donna earned a doctorate at Harvard University and became an authority on Elizabethan theater.

Elaine writes in her book's introduction of remembering nothing about that first visit to the Louvre, but wishing she could claim she'd been moved by its majesty.

"Kristin and Donna had studied art history with Thalia Feldman," Elaine says of the noted chair of the art-history program at Canisius. "They knew the overview of art history. I knew nothing."

Donna, who lives in London, recently joined Elaine for another trip to the Louvre.

"We missed Kristin, but she was with us in spirit," Elaine says. "And she will always be a part of that extraordinary summer we had."

Elaine is currently on a cross-country book tour. Last month, she appeared at Politics and Prose, in Washington, D.C., in tandem with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, her friend from their time as metro reporters at the newspaper 40 years ago.

Dowd told the standing-room audience that her parents had a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in the home where she grew up. She asked Elaine if Mona is great art − or overrated.

"She is extraordinary, and she is overrated at the same time," Elaine answered. Then she told how the painting only achieved true worldwide fame when it was stolen in 1911. (The Times headline: "60 Detectives Seek Stolen 'Mona Lisa,' French Public Indignant.")

By now, Elaine says, the Mona Lisa is famous for being famous − like the Kardashians. That family's first taste of fame, by the way, came when Robert Kardashian was one of O.J. Simpson's attorneys at his murder trial.

Which brings us back to Buffalo. As it turns out, Elaine's mother became a painter herself after her kids were grown. She took art courses at the University at Buffalo and the Chautauqua Institution and converted Elaine's childhood bedroom into an art studio.

"I had a strained relationship with my mother, at times," Elaine says. "I was going off being a foreign correspondent and doing these dangerous things, and she didn't approve of it all. But when I had kids, it brought us back together. She loved being with my girls. My mother delighted in teaching Gabriela how to paint."

When Elaine's mother died, 20 years ago, Gabriela's eulogy included a story: "One time, when we were painting together, she told me there was blue in the bushes. At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. But then, I learned there was more to art than what you see at first glance, and in order to capture an image, you must look at it hard and interpret it in different ways."

That reminded Elaine of the time when the painter Beauford Delaney showed the writer James Baldwin how to see more than the water in a puddle. Look closer and, lo, a veneer of oil reflected a city streetscape.

"He taught me how to see," Baldwin said, "and how to trust what I saw."

Elaine Sciolino taught herself how to see, and to trust what she saw. Now, with this book, she lets us see − really see — the many treasures of the Louvre.

And the blue in the bushes.