Orsay - Paintings [antikvár]

Preface Henri Loyrette Director of thie tviusée d'Orsay Several million visitors have filed through the rooms and galleries of the Musée d'Orsay since it opened in December 1986. Most have probably already forgotten that many of the pictures were previously exhibited at the Louvre or the Musée National d'Art Moderne before it was transferred to the Centre Pompidou, or in the case of the Impressionists at the Jeu de Paume, which is now reserved for exhibitions of contemporary art. Others which were scattered in a variety of depositories or had been kept hidden from gaze in reserve stocks for nearly half a century have once again been hung, making it possible to conjure up the full diversity of the pictorial creativity of the period allocated to the Musée d'Orsay, the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Michel Laclotte who was in charge of the museum's conceptual team until 1986 outlines the history of these collections. In opening this museum we wanted to show the best of what had been obscured by the ascendancy of modernism, without challenging its pre-eminence. It is from that angle that the museum's painting collections have continued to be enhanced. We have magnificent donations to thank for the arrival of La Nuit étoiiée by Van Gogh, an immediate popular success, or very recently for masterpieces by Cézanne such as the Portrait de Gustave Geffrey and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Other major works - by Courbet, Daubigny, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Redon - have fortunately been assigned to the Musée d'Orsay after being accepted by the state by way of dation, donation in lieu of payment of death duty: that is how L'Origine du monde, a long-hidden picture by a painter not afraid of scandal, now comes to be exhibited in the Salle Courbet. It has been possible to purchase outstanding works with the generous help of benefactors: Berthe Iviorisot au bouquet de violettes by Manet, Galotée by Custave Moreau and Portrait de I'artiste au Christ jaune by Gauguin. The collection of foreign paintings, started in line with official taste at the end of the 19th century - though as early as 1891 it included the famous Portrait of the Artist's fvlother by the American artist Whistler - before being neglected for forty years, had major gaps. Even before the museum was opened, works by Burne-Jones, Bocklin, Klimt, Khnopff and Munch were acquired. Then it was the turn of Hodier and Mondrian, and just recently of Giovanni Giacometti and Cuno Amiet. The policy of holding one-man exhibitions of foreign artists has allowed the public to become familiar with painters who are often not well known in France, such as the Danish artist Hammershoi, who was a real revelation; the museum now exhibits his Repos. All this is tantamount to saying that the collections are not only being enriched but are developing, with the constant ambition of offering visitors a wide, contrasting panorama of the painting of the second half of the 19th century.