Musée d'Orsay (art museum)

Camille Pissarro : Le Pont Boïeldieu à Rouen, en 1896, huile sur toile, H. 54,0 ; L. 65,0 cm., Dation, 1983, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) : Un atelier aux Batignolles (1870). Huile sur toile. 204 x 274 cm. Featuring: Édouard Manet (painting), Zacharie Astruc (sitting), standing from left to right: Otto Scholderer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (wearing a hat), Émile Zola (bearded, lorgnette in hand), Edmond Maître, Frédéric Bazille (in profile), Claude Monet. Musée d'Orsay. Photo: Google Art Project.

Musée d'Orsay
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
Esplanade du Musée d'Orsay
62 rue de la Lille
Rue de la Légion d'Honneur
7 quai Anatole France
75007 Paris
Visited on 5 March 2023.

The catalogue:
Christophe Averty : Musée d'Orsay.
Paris : Könemann © 2020 koenemann.com GmbH, © Éditions Place des Victoires.
ISBN 978-2-8099-1770-3
Dépôt légal : 4ème trimestre 2020.
In French, with translations in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.
Printed in China by Shyft Publishing / Hunan Tianwen Xinhua Printing Co. Ltd.
480 pages. Dimensions: 32 x 29 x 3,8 cm. Poids: 3210 g.
    Chapters:
The Art of a Century
Academic Arts – Freedom born of constraints
Naturalism and Realism – The colors of the world
Symbolism – Journeys to the innermost
Impressionism – The Painter's time
Post- and Neo-Impressionism – A new beginning
On the Threshold of Expressionism – Disenchanted Realities
Lonely geniuses – Everyone goes his own way
Emerging abstractions – A never ending journey

" The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe. " (English Wikipedia)

AA: For the first time I visit the Musée d'Orsay. During my first visit to Paris in the 1970s it did not exist. It is a destination so daunting that a lot of mental energy is required. Most of the paintings I have never seen in an exhibition. Many are familiar from art books since childhood, including ones by the old friends immortalized by Henri Fantin-Latour in the group portrait above.

I focus on the fifth level (Niveau supérieur), the rooms 28–47.

De l'impressionnisme au néo-impressionnisme: Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Seurat, Signac.

Post-impressionnisme: Pont-Aven: Bernard, Gauguin, Sérusier. Cabinet d'arts graphiques et de photographies. Galerie Françoise Cachin: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon. Le Cabaret du Chat Noir. Cinéma 1895–1914 (this room I pass by as quickly as possible).

It is deeply moving to see some of the most famous paintings of all time in the flesh: Van Gogh's La Nuit étoilée, Renoir's Bal du Moulin de la Galette and Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Most importantly, the well curated and mounted fifth level department has a cumulative impact. We get to see many paintings from many major artists in one go. There are felicitous pairings such as Renoir's Danse à la ville and Danse à la campagne. Further, the artworks collected here contribute to a larger experience of a golden age of painting before the First World War, the twilight zone, the transitional period between realism and abstraction.

Gauguin is displayed in dialogue with Van Gogh, and young Gauguin is seen along late Gauguin, including his large scale wood sculpture for La Maison du Jouir. I register the melancholy looks of his Tahitian subjects. We searched for the lost paradise in Tahiti, never learned to understand, and destroyed in the process an ancient, alien lifestyle with alcohol and venereal and other diseases.

A painter whom I today register fully for the first time is Gustave Caillebotte, a great intermediary between realism and impressionism. In his great realist paintings there is a touch of the uncanny. There are impressive paintings on display that have only recently been added to the museum's collections.

After a break I head to the second and ground levels. I have just read from Conversations with Susan Sontag the great writer's remark that she burst in tears (of disappointment) during her first visit to Musée d'Orsay, because of the exhibition on these very levels. The difference is still marked compared with the fifth level. Even proper lighting is sometimes missing. The volume is at its most overwhelming here both in the number of paintings and the size.

I don't try to see everything. I am impressed by the fantastic sculpture alley with a lot of Rodin. The rooms filled with academic paintings provide context to the general story. Realism is represented by some of the most legendary classics. I am in tears seeing for the first time "live" Millet's L'Angélus and Des glaneuses, revered by Van Gogh and Agnès Varda. I am awed to see for the first time Courbet's L'Atelier du peintre in its majestic 361 x 598 cm grandeur. Musée d'Orsay does justice to the hugitive paintings of the 19th century. There is a good survey on Symbolism.

Add to that a number of special pleasures such as a Douanier Rousseau selection including La Charmeuse des serpents, which impressed me as a child examining art books. Here she is again, a mysterious figure, now belonging to the collective dreamscape of mankind, preceding Surrealism.