The huge new Orsay Museum in Paris was revealed to the public in early December during a week-long flurry of festivities. It stand inside the imposing glass and iron shell of a former railway station, magnificently located on the Left Bank, just across the river from the Tuileries. Having been born, so to speak, with a silver spoon in its mouth - heir to the Jeu de Paume, six major private donations, and important portions of the Louvre collection and numerous other museums in France - it received at birth 2,300 paintings, 250 pastels, 1,500 sculptures, 1,100 art objects, and 13,000 photographs from all these sources and is clearly, from the outset, one of the major museums in the Western World.
The opening was marked by a cross fire of controversy, praise, and criticism. Many were enthusiastic, but about every other person apparently believed he could have handled the project better. Organizers had steeled themselves for such criticism early on, and Michel Laclotte, curator of paintings at the Louvre and the man chiefly responsible for the way the works are presented the inside the new museum, even declared that he would be disappointed if certain people actually approved of what he had done.
The idea of a museum devoted to the art of the nineteenth century was first proposed in 1974 during the presidency of Valerie Giscard d'Estaing. The large station had long stood vacant not far from the Louvre, and President Georges Pompidou had even signed the order to tear it down. But demolition was not undertaken immediately and after the public commotion raised by the destruction of Baltard's glass and iron awnings for the Paris fruit and vegetable market at Les Halles, officials began to feel that they would henceforth have to be more careful about what they did with city landmarks.
The lumpish but imposing structure, with its great barrel of a hall, covers 30,000 square meters. It had originally been completed in 1900 by architect Victor Laloux as a luxurious expression of the prestige of France, then at the zenith of its imperial power. In 1939 it was reduced to being no more than a commuter station, and in 1969 it was completely closed down. Gradually, the general idea of turning it into a "museum of the nineteenth century" emerged. Once things came into focus, it was decided that the museum would cover the period between 1848 and 1914 - between the revolution that spread across the continent like a brushfire and the war that sealed Europe's decline.
The place chosen and the period fixed, the next big questions were: (a) How should a structure designed for railway traffic be turned into a museum? (That was the architect's headache). And (b) How was a period so diverse to be represented there? How, for instance, could the Impressionists be shown beside the cinemascopic monstrosities begotten by the great academic painters of the day? This was something the curators had to struggle with, working closely with the architect all the while.
"Valley of the Kings"
Responsibility for the inner structure was entrusted to architect Gae Aulenti, a fifty-nine-year-old Italian woman who had solved the difficult problem of installing a permanent museum of modern art inside a paradoxical structure without any real walls, floors, or ceilings, the Centre Georges Pompidou. The solution she came up with there was a model of
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