Guide to the Musée d'Orsay [antikvár]

"The railway station is superb; il looks exactly like a Palais des Beaux-Arts. Since the Pala is des Beaux-Axts happens to resemble a railway station, I suggest that Laloux" (the architeel of the Gare d'Orsay) "... should switch their functions while there's still time." So vvrote the painter Detaille, just before the inauguration of the two buildings in 1900. One of them had been designed to receive and lodge the visitors to the Universal Exhibition (the station was enveloped, so the speak, by its hotel), and the other to present the masterpieces of the 19th century, then at its triumphant close. Eighty-six years later, Detaille's ironical suggestion has been in part adopled. The 'palais'-cum-railway station has become a terminus for sixty-six years of prodigious artistic output. The Musée d'Orsay is a showcase for the years 1848 to 1914, with coverage of the beginning and end of this period slightly blurred in terms of chronology. For example, the museum could hardly omit photography prior to 1848, the science having been invented in 1839; likewise the ensemble of Daumier's work is shown, including early canvases from the 1830's. The close of the museum's chronological cycle is roughly 1905, to coincide with the beginning of the period covered by the Musée d'Art Moderne; but again exceptions are made for artists such as Bonnard, Degas, Maillol, Monet, Rodin and Vuillard whose work straddles the epoch. Broadly speaking, these choices have been made using generations, rather than years, as a yardstick. The Musée d'Orsay can be said to contain the work of architects, painters, sculptors, photographers and creators of decorative and industrial art, born between 1820 and 1870. The museum is planned chronologically in broad sequences, technique by technique. Our goal was to evoke every aspect of creativity properly belonging to the epoch, including music and literature; but we rejected the type of 'atmospheric reconstitution' which (for example) would have placed a NapoleonllI canapé, the maquette of a Haussmann fagade and a 'history' painting of the kind favoured by the Salons, all in the same room with soft background music composed by Meyerbeer. Nor did we like the idea of a 1900 Charpentier dining room, with articles by Octave Mirbeau on a Thonet pedestal table beside a Gallé vase with a painling by Gaugin hanging above! Of course not. The works in the Musée d'Orsay are exhibited to the visitor in stylistic families, and wherever possible artist by artist. The main rooms are dedicated to Daumier, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Puvis, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gaugin, along with a Carpeaux square, a Rodin terrace and a Guimard tower. The visitor will have no difficulty afterwards in