New Visions Arrive at the Orsay

By MARY TOMPKINS LEWIS

Paris

Twenty-five years after it opened along the left bank of the Seine, just across from the Tuilleries Gardens and the furthermost reaches of the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay has opened again after a period of expansion, refurbishment and thoughtful rehanging of its collection. The massive, cavernous complex, designed by Victor Laloux in 1900 as a central train station for the city of Paris and flanked by an opulent hotel, was boldly transformed in the 1980s into a museum for late 19th- and early 20th-century art. At the time, its trove of early modernist works enjoyed sufficient exhibition space and offered a largely chronological art-historical narrative that no other Parisian edifice could afford. Since then, however, the spectacular growth of both the Orsay's collection and viewing audience—with nearly 60 million visitors to date—as well as evolving museographic approaches, have demanded a new vision. After several years of planning and renovation, during which time some of the building was shuttered and much of its collection sent on tour, that vision has now been realized.

Even in the decades it served as a train station, concerns about security and the flow of foot traffic loomed large for Orsay architects. Today, after entering and passing under the clock, visitors walk the length of Orsay's colossal cofferred nave with its central allée of sculpture and flanking galleries of Second Empire decorations and mid-19th-century art. At the very end, on the left, are the brilliant red walls of the newly reconfigured Pavillion Amont. Formerly the station's engine house, it was sorely underutilized in the earlier conversion but has been thoroughly redesigned and incorporated into the whole by the Atelier de l'Ile, one of four architectural firms that have shaped the new Orsay. A gallery of deep-purple walls abuts the pavillion and houses four massive canvases by Gustave Courbet; two of the best-known, "A Burial at Ornans" and "The Artist's Studio," which were nearly impossible to see in the sunlit glare of their previous hang, are shown to staggering effect in their dramatically illuminated new home. Known for his unforgiving naturalism and impudent brushes with authority (and also for erecting his own private exhibitions), Courbet no longer duels here with his academic contemporaries as he did in the museum's earlier installation but instead invites us to ascend to it's vaunted collection of Impressionist paintings by the vanguard artists who, like the Orsay's new architects, saw in his work a foundation for their own.

A tower of red walls and cascading light that extends from the ground floor to the Impressionist galleries five floors up, the Pavillion Amont also draws the visitor en route into three new levels of rooms devoted to late 19th-century decorative arts, the Nabi paintings of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and a handful of their French and foreign cohorts. In simulated private chambers with violet walls and delicate, ambient lighting, the Nabi no longer appears, as they did before on the top floor, the poor stepchild of late Impressionism but part of an international, cross-disciplinary movement that challenged contemporary hierarchies on its own terms.

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Courbet's massive canvases are now shown to staggering effect in their dramatically illuminated new home.

The fifth floor opens with exquisite northern views from the tower's windowed clock of the Seine, the city's rooftops and Montmartre, a momentary pause that reorients the viewer entirely within the milieu the Impressionists would make their own. Edouard Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'herbe," a Parisian studio painting with potent plein-air connotations that was long sequestered on the first floor, assumes its rightful place and appears here both more monumental and prescient. Throughout the Impressionist galleries, the ceilings have been opened, cathedral style, to reveal structural beams, a nod to the Orsay's industrial aesthetic, and also to admit an ingenious blend of artificial and natural illumination that beautifully captures on shimmering, grayish-lavender walls the effect of lambent sunlight. The Orsay's new palette allows us to appreciate, as its white walls never did, the depth and range of Impressionist color, and to ponder both newfound allegiances and profound distinctions between its masters, their predecessors and contemporaries, something also encouraged by provocative, and often convincing, new groupings of familiar works. Auguste Rodin's life-size bronze sculpture of St. John the Baptist, for example, one of the most powerful nude figures of its age, looks across one of the subsequent galleries to a late painting of bathers by August Renoir, and suggests not only the primacy of the nude in modernist art but the vast range of approaches it encompassed.

Despite the new square footage added in the course of the Orsay's renovation, the fifth-floor paintings, surprisingly, are densely installed, and also hung low to capture the streaming, overhead light; circulation issues may yet persist for museum-goers on its most popular floor. Some respite is provided, however, by the contemporary Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka's vitreous "Water Block" benches, which seem to float in their luminous space, and by the chic Café de l'Horloge, a Jules Verne-inspired fantasy by the Brazillian Campana team that fills the floor's foremost clock tower.

The paintings of the Post-Impressionists, including Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, which formerly hung in the claustrophobic, columned Bellechasse gallery, are cosseted now one floor below in small, elegant, midnight-blue galleries dedicated to the late scholar Françoise Cachin, who served as the museum's first director. Exhibited for the first time here under artificial lighting, in itself a departure from the plein-air aesthetic of Impressionism, they hang in close and revealing proximity to Symbolist art. But in a subsequent gallery, dedicated to moody "Nocturnals," Manet is summoned once more into the heady mix, suggesting that the museum has abandoned not only the sterile white-box galleries of the past but its teleological reading of art history. In ways both subtle and monumental, the historic Orsay has become a vibrant expression of our age.

Ms. Lewis, who writes frequently about the arts, teaches art history at Trinity College, Hartford.