Last week, in the mild sunlight over the Seine, in the belated blue of a dying November, the work of grooming the “elephant” for its last incarnation drew to an end. Masons were finishing the limestone slabs on its wide steps up from the Quai Anatole France. On the parapet, a crane solicitously set down an allegorical bronze of Oceania by some 19th century pompier — a colonial damsel with thick lips, melon breasts and a Tahitian war club, flanked by a kangaroo.
Inside, the elephant seemed perfect, down to the last coat of beige paint on the last iron rosette in its immense barrel vault, arching a hundred feet above the floor. The minute hand of its floriated and gilded clock, one of the largest in France, which since 1900 had declared the time to generations of anxious travelers, now moved in sedate jerks toward apotheosis. The Manets were in place. From the bay of Courbets, dense and dark, impacted with reality, one could look across the nave to their diametric opposite, Thomas Couture’s pedantic warning to the Third Empire, The Romans of the Decadence, ancestor of all Cecil B. DeMille orgies. In the distance, on a raised loft that stood where the trains once came in and out, was a grimy white gleam: the spectral plaster of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. In a side gallery, a visitor furtively ran his finger over the marble nipple of a luscious demimondaine writhing naked among stone roses, once the sensation of the salon of 1847, whose model had been apostrophized by Baudelaire.
As the Gare d’Orsay, this building was once the grandest railway station in France. As the Musee d’Orsay, opening next week, it is now the world’s best museum of its kind. Its conspectus of painting, sculpture, architecture and photography, representing the last half of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century in France, is definitive. The Musee d’Orsay is to this period what the Uffizi is to the Italian Renaissance or the Museum of Modern Art to the 20th century. There are some masterpieces it will never get, but as a discourse of objects from a given period, it has no equal. One is used to museums that get things three-quarters right and implore the visitor to be sanguine about their unrealized hopes. None of that is needed at Orsay. On every level, starting with the creative intelligence its designer, the Italian architect Gae Aulenti, has brought to the hard task of converting a dead station into a live museum and finishing with the range and stature of its collections, the museum is exemplary. It shows what state patronage can do. Nothing the private sector could summon up, in or out of France, could possibly rival it.
Naturally, Orsay begins with an advantage: the huge, untapped reserves of France’s government-owned 19th century art. These collections of painting and sculpture were spread very widely, throughout Paris and on loan to regional museums and government offices. Orsay has called them in and resifted them. The best-known of these collections was that of Paris’ renowned impressionist museum, the Jeu de Paume, which, before its collection was moved across the Seine last summer, was attracting three-quarters of a million visitors annually to gaze at its superb Cezannes, Monets, Renoirs, Van Goghs and Lautrecs. There was a residue of 19th century work from Paris’ former Musee National d’Art Moderne, whose 20th century collections had already been siphoned off into the Centre Pompidou. Major sculptures, including Rodin’s original plasters, came from the Rodin museum in Paris; others were recovered from obscurity in warehouses where they had languished unseen since before World War II. Versailles, Fontainebleau, the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Museum of Ceramics at Sevres surrendered their treasures. Bequests given long ago to the state on condition that they be shown intact — the collections of Gachet, Chauchard, Kaganovitch, Personnaz and others — were also folded into Orsay. In all, the museum’s holdings comprise 2,300 paintings and 250 pastels, 1,500 sculptures, 1,100 miscellaneous art objects from furniture to enamel plaquettes, 13,000 photographs (a collection built from scratch in the past eight years) and a large but unspecified number of architectural plans, mock- ups, details, fragments and models.
The building in which all this is gathered was for two decades an obsolete pachyderm of tawny limestone occupying as beautiful a site as Paris, or the world, can offer: a stretch of the Left Bank across from the Louvre, with a panoramic view of the Tuileries. Originally, the Cours des Comptes had stood here, and after the ravages of the Paris Commune of 1871, its melancholy, fire-gutted ruins remained untouched for nearly 30 years. Then, in 1898, the Orleans railroad company bought the site and raised on it a railroad station with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France’s supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d’Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris, was quite a lot: a vast semicircular barrel vault of iron and glass, stretching 150 yards from end to end, with elliptical-domed side vaults along the Quai Anatole France facing the Seine, all encased in a wrapping of richly carved limestone facades whose swags, cartouches, urns, allegorical figures and pediments bring to mind the words of Antoinin Careme, Talleyrand’s chef: “architecture, which has as its principal branch la patisserie.”
The Gare d’Orsay was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel, but its glories lasted only 40 years. By 1939 changes in railroad technology had downgraded it to a commuter station. In 1969 the last train left, and the place was abandoned: a rusting abode of cats and pigeons, whose damp silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker’s ball. In 1971 the French government, under President Georges Pompidou, issued a demolition order.
All French Presidents like to leave monuments behind them, preferably in Paris, as a proof of their passage. But no President de la Republique since World War II showed a more recklessly phara- onic commitment to changing the face of Paris than Pompidou. By a curious irony, the political consequences of this urge are what saved the Gare d’Orsay. Pompidou had ordered the razing and redevelopment of the vast central food market known as Les Halles — Zola’s “belly of Paris.” The market, which had formed a bolus of stalled, honking traffic, was shifted to Rungis, near Orly Airport. In its place Paris received, among other things, a giant structure that looked like an oil refinery and was to be the biggest cultureprocessing plant in Europe: the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, otherwise known as the Centre Pompidou or, after its site adjacent to Les Halles, Beaubourg.
By the early ’80s, it was clear that this immensely publicized structure was, ; at least in its primary role as a museum, a turkey. It differed from most other architectural turkeys by wearing its entrails outside its skin. Its architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, had festooned its four sides with such a tangle of ducts, pipes, risers and shafts that it became the first steel-and-glass building to exclude almost all natural light from its cavernous interior. Since Beaubourg was meant to be (in the jargon of the day) a culturally transparent, non-elitist, participatory, anti-hierarchical, modular omnisensorium, it had no walls to speak of: walls were for palaces and prisons. Instead it had temporary screens, on which its Matisses and Miros hung transfixed like rabbits in the glare of spotlights. Entropy set in the moment it opened in 1977.
The destruction of Les Halles rallied the preservationists. The inadequacies of Beaubourg fed a mood of doubt about “radical” museum techniques. By the early ’70s it was clear to the men of the Elysee that razing the Gare d’Orsay would be a major vote-losing blunder. The Gare d’Orsay stayed, Pompidou died, and Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the new President, inherited the problem.
Meanwhile, independently of the Gare d’Orsay, the question of a 19th century museum had become a key issue for France’s cultural bureaucracy. It went without question that 19th century Paris had succeeded 17th century Rome as the greatest cultural compressor in history — the center of French imperial power, the Babylon of its wealth, the Athens of all Europe. From Ingres and Delacroix onward, its painters created the aesthetic diction of their age. Its artistic politics — the rivalry between realists and academicians, the power of the salon, the opulence of its official artists and the quasi-mythic struggle between their pompier taste and that of new generations represented by Degas, Monet, Manet, Cezanne and eventually Matisse — had dictated the terms by which the history of painting was experienced in the Western world. The 19th century in France was also the last great age of public sculpture: the time of Daumier, Carpeaux, Rodin and a score of others.
But the extraordinary thing was how relatively little of all this could be seen coherently in Paris itself. Paris had the Louvre, unquestionably the world’s major encyclopedic collection of painting and sculpture from remote antiquity to the triumph of romanticism: the Victory of Samothrace at one end of the time scale, The Raft of the Medusa at the other. It had Beaubourg for / modern art. But for what lay between, it had wretchedly little. The Jeu de Paume, repository of France’s impressionist patrimony, was ill lit and so cramped that much of its collection had to be stored away in the reserves. Moreover, there was no place in which the complex, intertwining currents of 19th century pictorial thought could be presented. To think of Degas as an impressionist in revolt against the academy, as many still do, is to travesty his work — but to understand why, one has to see the intimate relation between his pre-1870 work and that of Ingres, as well as the affinities between his late pastels and the work of Monet or Bonnard. Such matters can be teased out in temporary shows (which are soon forgotten by all but specialists), or they can be set forth permanently in a museum.
When Giscard came to power in 1974, his cultural adviser, Alain Lamassoure, listened to his colleagues in the French museum world and began to press for a full-scale 19th century museum. Although the Gare d’Orsay would not ordinarily have beckoned as the most desirable site, it had become politically necessary to do something with the structure. Besides, the French national railway could benefit from the money the government would pay for it. Giscard realized that the Orsay could become his signature project, as Beaubourg had been Pompidou’s, and in 1978 he gave it the green light.
Jean-Philippe Lachenaud, director of architecture for the Ministry of the Environment, was put in charge of the plans. Michel Laclotte, the Louvre’s head curator of painting — and, as such, the key influence in the “Louvre system,” which controls the distribution of government-owned works of art throughout France — became head curator of Orsay as well. “I had to wear two hats,” Laclotte recalls, “and sometimes it gave me a headache.” For the Louvre is by nature a monopoly, with the gravitational pull of a black hole. So many of the canonical masterpieces of the 19th century — Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios and his Death of Sardanapalus, Courbet’s The Studio and Funeral at Ornans and so on, ad infinitum — are in the Louvre that Laclotte was faced with appalling difficulties in getting anything to cross the Seine to Orsay. Moreover, since he was only on loan to Orsay, he wanted to go back to an undepleted Louvre when his work on the Left Bank was over. Giscard had to take the unusual step of inviting the Louvre’s curators to the Elysee for lunch in order to persuade them to give up some of “their” paintings, and even at that several threatened to resign then and there.
Meanwhile, Orsay found its director at the Beaubourg: Francoise Cachin, a brilliant, Sorbonne-educated art historian whose specialty is Manet. The first issue she had to settle was the scope of the museum. What did 19th century mean? There was no way the Louvre was going to surrender its masterpieces of early 19th century classicism and romanticism. So Orsay’s program must begin after the peak of the romantic movement. Cachin, Laclotte and the new museum’s staff wanted to start in 1863 — the emblematic year that saw the first Salon des Refuses, Manet’s epochal Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe and the formal rupture of the avant-garde from the academy. Giscard demurred. He wanted Orsay to begin in 1830, with Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People — which the Louvre flatly refused to release. Back to the drawing board. But then, in 1981 a new Socialist government headed by Francois Mitterrand came in, and Mitterrand let it be known that the 19th century must begin in 1848, the year of populist revolutions and the collapse of monarchies, in which Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and the grandeur of French bourgeois culture began to move toward its apogee. Courbet, not Delacroix, would thus be the emblematic figure. As for the end of the 19th century, there was never any doubt about that: it was 1914, the beginning of World War I.
It was clear from the start that whatever form the collection took, Laloux’s vast and grimy barrel vault made demands of its own. It had 30,000 square meters of floor and no walls. The group led by Lachenaud figured that the collections would need 47,000 square meters enclosed by walls on which to hang the paintings. This meant putting a new building inside the old, and there was no question of designing it in the manner of Laloux. “It could not be a pastiche,” says Lachenaud. “The station itself was pastiche, a 19th century parody of what the 18th century was thought to be — iron and glass technology layered over with archaic decor. So we knew we could make no compromise with the original design.”
By 1980 Orsay had its architect, and the choice held its own cultural significance. Not only would Orsay be directed by a woman, but it would be designed by one: Gae Aulenti. In the U.S., where no woman architect has ever had such a commission and only one major museum (the Philadelphia Museum of Art) has a woman director, this would have been seen as a major feminist victory. The French press hardly commented on it: a real meritocracy takes sexual equality for granted.
Orsay was by far the largest job of Aulenti’s career, involving thousands of drawings during six years of almost daily discussion with the museum’s staff. Born near Udine into a family she calls “minor intellectual nobility,” Aulenti, 59, honed her sense of design during ten years on the staff of the architectural magazine Casabella, and made her name as a designer in 1969 with her Olivetti showrooms in Paris and Buenos Aires. “In one way, she’s a great success as an architect,” says Italy’s leading architecture critic, Bruno Zevi, who considers her work inspired and sensitive. “In another, she’s unsuccessful — up to now her work has been limited to various forms of ‘re’: refurbishing, renovating, recycling.” But after Orsay, there is no doubt that Aulenti — who lists her primary modernist influences as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and above all the American architect Louis Kahn — will be seen worldwide as a major architect, not a recycler.
“Usually when you build a new museum, you go get some new land,” Aulenti says. “To build, you must have land. Here, this old building was my new land. There are two ways to look at an old building: historically, as a monument or structure, and geographically. My way is geographic.” No internal structure could abolish or convincingly mask the “geographic” form of the Gare d’Orsay. Instead, Aulenti set out to work with it as a given fact, making a new building that encourages constant reference to the old while scrupulously reflecting in its layout the narrative lines of the collection.
The big view as one enters is the avenue, plunging down the main axis and flanked on either side by raised terraces clad in squares of soft, tan-gray Burgundian limestone. The avenue is for monumental sculpture (some very monumental indeed, like the huge stone original of Carpeaux’s La Danse, a copy of which decorates the facade of the Paris Opera). It finishes in a pair of windowless double-cube towers, containing smaller galleries, set against the glass end wall. Inside the terraces, left and right, are enclosed galleries. On top of these are two smaller “streets” for sculpture, and off those, on the upper level, more galleries for painting and decorative arts. This axiality was compared, by critics who saw it in the model or not at all, to the Maginot Line or perhaps the Valley of the Kings — a set for an Italian production of Aida. Not so: it mediates beautifully between the almost incomprehensibly large space of Laloux’s vault and the scale of one’s own body. It retains all that was most benevolent in beaux arts grandeur — the reassurance offered by architecture that the individual is the reason for the state. And every part of it is functional: the detached facade wall of each terrace, for instance, is also a thick screen that carries the ducting needed to circulate 8 million cubic meters of conditioned air an hour.
Along the avenue, portals framed in warm black terrazzo give access to the internal galleries. Here, Aulenti has done marvels with adjustment of scale to image. Each space suits its contents, whether one is looking at Daumier’s 36 clay caricature heads of the Celebrites du Juste- Milieu, no bigger than grenades and as lethal, whose passionate violations of the human face would so deeply affect Giacometti a century later, or at the large, suave, marmoreal forms of Ingres and early neoclassical Jean-Leon Gerome.
The “narrative” of the galleries is split in half. On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are — Daumier, Millet, the Barbizon painters, Fantin-Latour, the rural sentimentalists like Jules Breton, culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion). On the right are academic idealism and romanticism, Ingres and his heirs, Delacroix and his, smooth recipes of Grecian flesh and turbulent Byronic visions of nature. Beyond Courbet on the left, you have Manet; beyond Thomas Couture on the right, there is Degas. To stand in the sculpture-avenue between them, savoring the confrontation, framed in their respective portals, of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe with Degas’s Bellelli Family, each the masterpiece of its maker’s youth, is to receive a museum experience of a very high order. Lucky the architect who can collaborate in it.
In fact, Aulenti has done more than collaborate. Both on the ground floor and in the upper galleries, she has set up a constant dialogue of detail between her building and Laloux’s. The limestone screens on which major paintings hang, inserted into Laloux’s iron arches, have segments cut out of them through which one glimpses vistas of the original building. Laloux’s space is “quoted” by breaches, angles, slippages, unexpected openings; no room is wholly enclosed, yet the effect is never choppy or distracting. Its essential medium always is light. Orsay is theatrical only at one point, where it should be: the key exhibits of its architectural section, at the far end of the nave, are two astounding models of the Paris Opera by Richard Peduzzi. One is a transverse section — the ultimate doll’s house, with every balustrade, fresco, gilded caryatid and square of marble inlay faithfully reproduced — and the other is a site model under a glass floor, so that one walks in air across the entire quartier, like a balloonist.
But in the rest of the building, natural light is Aulenti’s main subject. Her use of it reaches its peak of tact and skill in the galleries for impressionism and postimpressionism at the top of the museum, fitted into the dead space between facade and vault. This parade of rooms, with its 30 or so Van Goghs, its nearly 40 Cezannes, its Monets and Manets and Renoirs, its superb array of Degas bronzes, is bound to be the popular core of the museum, and Aulenti was right to put it up high, closest to the light. “Light is impressionism,” she says. “I wanted the light here to be felt as it was by the painters, to be experienced as it is in nature, up here where the sun shines and the rain falls.”
The one aspect of Orsay’s collection that is likely to be controversial — though not with the general public, which is sure to love it — is the amount of space given to so-called pompier art of the Third Empire. (Pompier means “fireman,” and the allusion is to the heroic nudes with Greek helmets, resembling the casques of the Paris fire brigade, that infested beaux arts academic painting.) Cachin and her colleagues have dredged up an astounding panoply of period kitsch, from 1850s imitators of Ingres through Bouguereau to what must be the most obsessively pederastic elocution in all art history, Jean Delville’s School of Plato, featuring Alcibiades and his willowy friends yearning like blessed damsels at the lucky philosopher in a landscape full of wisteria and white peaco*cks. Woven through these galleries are some of the most deliriously awful canvases of the 19th century, marvels of the salon in their day, high-finance p*rn of the ripest sort: Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus, Clesinger’s notorious Woman Stung by a Serpent. “Certainly we have bad paintings,” sniffs Director Cachin. “We have only the ‘greatest’ bad paintings.”
The aim is to show 19th century taste as it was, not as it ought, in the eyes of a retrospective modernism, to have been. Orsay, one feels, was right to include the work of these heroic flatterers and contaminated virtuosos. Not only are they better than we once thought, but they help one recognize the true achievement of the avant-garde alternative. The triumph of the avant- garde over the pompiers has been so complete that one can now look at the losers with calm interest and historical understanding. This is not a matter of camp revival, as some moralists insist, but of real history as against pious polemic.
In this way Orsay points to the future, for the old relation between museums and contemporary painting has switched in the 1980s. A hundred years ago you had brilliant painters and dumb museums; today the reverse. It is inconceivable that the marginality and hamfistedness of most of what passes for major painting at the end of the 20th century could have been taken seriously in the Paris of Degas, Cezanne and Rodin. Under the heat of the market, avant-garde and pompier have simply fused into an opaque, complacent lump. Only in the museum, it seems, can the full evidence of creativity be reconstituted. If we are to enter the world of our great-grandparents and discover why their values in art, for better and worse, were so much more intense than our own, the train that will take us there leaves from this station.
