Guy Cogeval

This month, after two years of renovation, the director of the Musée d’Orsay will reveal a dramatically different museum. The change has been a huge challenge for the art historian who fought to see a dream come true.

With his sharply angled face and penetrating gaze, Guy Cogeval brings to mind a painting in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection, an 1888 portrait of Eugène Boch by Vincent Van Gogh, who called his model The Poet. For 56-year-old Cogeval, who recently also took the helm of the Orangerie museum, autumn 2011 is a season filled with challenges.

On October 20, after a two-year overhaul, the doors will open on the “new Orsay”—the result of a €12 million renovation that has strikingly altered the museum’s original 1986 interior design by architect Gae Aulenti. In converting the palatial Belle Epoque railroad station, Aulenti had “transformed travelers into museum visitors”. Since then, the expectations of those visitors have changed greatly. And in the end, the Italian diva has given her blessing to the great shakeup.

Displayed beneath the museum’s ornate, 105-foot-high vaulted ceiling, France’s national treasure of 19th-century Western art—more specifically, art from 1848 to 1914—includes not only the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works but also galleries devoted to sculpture, decorative and graphic arts, photography and architecture.

Even so, the enormous establishment seemed to be spinning its wheels until Cogeval’s appointment as its director. An art historian and recognized authority on Post-Impressionist artist Edouard Vuillard, Cogeval got his start as an intern curator before continuing his career at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyon, the Louvre, the Musée des Monuments Français and the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal.

When he arrived at the Orsay in January 2008, he says, the museum was “dull and lifeless. [Former Minister of Culture] Jack Lang told me that the architecture reminded him of an opera set, very Aïda. And psychologically, most of the curators also conveyed that same impression of immovability, of resistance to change.

“Everyone told me that if we closed for renovations we’d die. But little by little, with a group of collaborators, we became more daring, ready to do a complete remake. We did not close. We kept the museum open using half of our floor space, closing only certain sections, with the construction area taking up 70,000 square feet. And we were determined to be more active than ever while it was going on, to fully commit ourselves to exhibits like those for Jean-Léon Gérôme and Manet.

“We also sent 250 works that we had to take down on tour, after cleaning and restoring them. The Birth of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism exhibits, the quintessence of our collections, had a huge success abroad in 2010, attracting a total of almost three million visitors in some notable venues, among them Tokyo, Madrid, San Francisco.

“There’s a natural sense of fraternity with my American colleagues,” he adds. “Some, like George Shackelford, head curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with whom we’re co-producing Degas and the Nude next March, or Gloria Groom of the Art Institute of Chicago, are long-standing friends.”

Last year’s traveling exhibits brought in nearly €2 million each. “The works are back home now. We’ve been rehanging them over the last month or so, and not without emotion. They won’t be making such a great journey again anytime soon.”

Daring design

The Wilmotte agency was chosen for the facelift of the museum’s fifth floor, which houses the Galerie des Impressionnistes, along with adjoining galleries dedicated to drawings and photographs, and a temporary exhibit gallery that will be used for two or three events a year.

Also newly redone is the Pavillon Amont, a 27,000-square-foot pavilion in the northeast section of the museum. Previously almost unused, it’s been restructured by the Atelier de l’Ile and will now be entirely dedicated to the decorative arts: five levels adroitly linked to the main museum building and given a big boost by a gigantic wall panel painted vermilion red.

And then there’s the Café de l’Horloge, behind one of the two giant clocks in the museum’s twin towers, redesigned by the Brazilian wonder boys, brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana. Their colorful, high-spirited furnishings for the café will be made by their usual producer, the Italian contemporary furniture company Edra, but with a special Orsay label. With the Campanas, and Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka, who created monumental benches for the Galerie des Impressionnistes, the Orsay has stepped right out onto the cutting edge of contemporary design.

The Orsay renovation had several goals. One was to increase visitor capacity—there were almost three million visitors in 2010, but Cogeval says he hopes for a 20 percent increase. Another was to facilitate traffic flow within the museum. But the most important was to take advantage of the latest technologies available to display the artworks at their best.

“The lighting system today is nothing like what was being done in the 1980s!”says Cogeval. “In the Impressionist gallery, natural and artificial light are now balanced—the central two-story skylight brings in daylight, while from the sides high-quality halogen lights will focus more precisely on the paintings. We’ve protected the artworks with nonreflective glass casings, so invisible you won’t know they’re there unless you put your nose against them.

“There’s also the floor, where dark parquet has replaced stone. And above all, there’s the color. It’s radical—the walls are anthracite gray. I’m expecting a controversy. I’ve lost sleep over it. It bothered me to say no to Wilmotte, and he conviced me. If I had chosen a tepid color, people would have protested that there was no change. With this—we’ve got a real disruption.”

Crosscurrents

The aim of the new Orsay is to surprise visitors, to make them reflect, says Cogeval. “We will put the artworks into context with other disciplines: history, literature, music, even philosophy and psychoanalysis. The approach will be broader, looking for similarities, for intersections.” That’s something Cogeval has long done. As a curator, he introduced the idea of interaction with cinema as the basis for Hitchcock et l’Art, an exhibit shown in 2000 in Montreal and later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It examined the role of Salvador Dalí’s work in the dream sequences in Spellbound. He returned to cinema in Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney; the 2006 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris spotlighted stories and legends—the sources of inspiration for the Disney team.

“I’d like to have a major exhibit at the Orsay on the birth of cinema,” he says.“Not so much about its technical invention, but its mental invention, what made artists look forward to the possibility of images in movement. Everyone from Degas to Wagner laid the ground for it to happen.”

Currently, through January 15, the Orsay is on English time. The dazzling Beauté, Morale et Volupté dans l’Angleterre d’Oscar Wilde, an exhibit co-produced by the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum and London’s Victoria and Albert, focuses on the emblematic figures of the Aesthetic Movement, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, James McNeill Whistler and Edward William Godwin (several of whose furniture pieces are in the Orsay’s collections). “And, of course, Oscar Wilde, whose aphorisms adorn the walls…. Those artists, who devoted themselves to the cult of beauty, whose motto was ‘Art for art’s sake’, shook up rigid Victorian society.”

After that will come the highly anticipated Akseli Gallen-Kallela retrospective (February 7 to May 6, 2012), introducing the French public to a giant of Finnish art, “one of the great Nordic symbolists” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cogeval took advantage of his travels to Finland, he says, to buy some armchairs designed by Eero Saarinen for the decorative arts galleries.“We’ve acquired a lot of Scandinavian furniture,” he adds, which will soon be on display in the new Pavillon Amont, along with works from Glasgow and the Vienna School—“a nicely complementary collection of objects, paintings and sculpture.”

Cogeval’s leisure time is so rare, he says, that for now he has given up writing and dinner parties, mostly staying home in his 7th arrondissement apartment, where American Art Deco sits next to 1950s Italian glassware—Italian design is one of his great passions. “I’m not very mondain,” he says. He is currently rereading the unexpurgated version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and likes listening to Debussy, Mahler and Bartok. “I’ve spent my entire life living with the 19th century, with all its rich diversity. When I taught at the Ecole du Louvre, I made my students love it, too. Presiding over the Orsay was my destiny!”

Originally published in the October 2011 issue of France Today