by Jon Lackman | 1 February 2008 | Museums
From Le Monde:
The Musée d’Orsay, which is devoted to nineteenth-century art and is one of France’s most important institutions, will have a new chief as of March 7: Guy Cogeval, 52. Formerly the director of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal – he spent nine years there – he was the favorite to replace Serge Lemoine, who is reaching retirement age.
The latter’s record isn’t bad – museum visits went from 1.7 million in 2001 (the year Lemone was named director), to 3.2 million in 2007 … “I especially increased the number of temporary exhibitions, which now average 16 a year, and I developed exhibitions outside the museum’s walls, especially abroad, which welcomed 2.2 million visitors” … His greatest accomplishment, in his view, was to have built bridges between contemporary art and nineteenth-century art: “It’s an idea that everyone’s taken up, to the point of making it banal.”
However, Lemoine wasn’t welcomed [by insiders] at the Orsay … [because] this reputed professor and art historian, who had successfully renovated the Musée de Grenoble, was not a nineteenth-century specialist … Guy Cogeval, “a man of the nineteenth century,” should please them …
However, this flamboyant curator … considered iconoclastic by some, has had some harsh words for the “museum bureaucracy” and the institution that trains it, the Ecole du patrimoine …
He has mounted exhibitions on themes such as Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. “I like doing thematic exhibitions that are at the same time popular and scholarly. It’s a difficult marriage to pull off. However it doesn’t stop me from also completing monographs such as the one I did on Vuillard” …
Cogeval [also] wants to open up the Orsay to infrequently represented disciplines such as theater, opera and cinema.
