by Kelly Presutti | 12 February 2011 | Museums
Françoise Cachin, founding director of the Musée d’Orsay, died in Paris last weekend at age 74. She was the granddaughter of Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac and a specialist in Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. After leading the Musée d’Orsay for eight years, Cachin went on to serve as Director of Museums in France. William Grimes writes in the Times:
An unbending traditionalist, Ms. Cachin helped formulate the law, passed in January 2002, that now governs most French museums. It defines them as providers of a public service with the obligation to make their collections available to as wide an audience as possible and regard their collections as a public possession, not for sale…. Although high-minded about the mission of museums and impeccable in her scholarship, she had a populist streak. “I do not look down on ‘tourists,’ even if they do not look at things very closely,” she told the British art magazine Apollo in 1994. “They come to absorb something which they feel is important, and I feel one has to respect this.”
In her memory, Le Monde reran Cachin’s passionate 2006 article cautioning against museums’ increasing tendency toward the “entertainment business” and protesting paid loans and satellite museums. She was particularly wary of the Guggenheim model and the inevitability of major French works being sent to Abu Dhabi. Cachin wrote:
Of course, we must lend our works of art if their condition allows it and their security is guaranteed – but without charge, and in cases where there will be a contribution to the knowledge and history of art. This was, until recently, a moral and scientific imperative… Patrimonial objects are not consumable goods, and protecting them now will guarantee, for the future, their universal value.
