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Word: orsay (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Orsay had its architect, and the choice held its own cultural significance. Not only would Orsay be directed by a woman, but it would be designed by one: Gae Aulenti. In the U.S., where no woman architect has ever had such a commission and only one major museum (the Philadelphia Museum of Art) has a woman director, this would have been seen as a major feminist victory. The French press hardly commented on it: a real meritocracy takes sexual equality for granted...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Out of a Grand Ruin, a Great Museum | 12/8/1986 | See Source »

...Orsay was by far the largest job of Aulenti's career, involving thousands of drawings during six years of almost daily discussion with the museum's staff. Born near Udine into a family she calls "minor intellectual nobility," Aulenti, 59, honed her sense of design during ten years on the staff of the architectural magazine Casabella, and made her name as a designer in 1969 with her Olivetti showrooms in Paris and Buenos Aires. "In one way, she's a great success as an architect," says Italy's leading architecture critic, Bruno Zevi, who considers her work inspired and sensitive...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Out of a Grand Ruin, a Great Museum | 12/8/1986 | See Source »

...must have land. Here, this old building was my new land. There are two ways to look at an old building: historically, as a monument or structure, and geographically. My way is geographic." No internal structure could abolish or convincingly mask the "geographic" form of the Gare d'Orsay. Instead, Aulenti set out to work with it as a given fact, making a new building that encourages constant reference to the old while scrupulously reflecting in its layout the narrative lines of the collection...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Out of a Grand Ruin, a Great Museum | 12/8/1986 | See Source »

...Laloux's iron arches, have segments cut out of them through which one glimpses vistas of the original building. Laloux's space is "quoted" by breaches, angles, slippages, unexpected openings; no room is wholly enclosed, yet the effect is never choppy or distracting. Its essential medium always is light. Orsay is theatrical only at one point, where it should be: the key exhibits of its architectural section, at the far end of the nave, are two astounding models of the Paris Opera by Richard Peduzzi. One is a transverse section -- the ultimate doll's house, with every balustrade, fresco, gilded...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Out of a Grand Ruin, a Great Museum | 12/8/1986 | See Source »

...aspect of Orsay's collection that is likely to be controversial -- though not with the general public, which is sure to love it -- is the amount of space given to so-called pompier art of the Third Empire. (Pompier means "fireman," and the allusion is to the heroic nudes with Greek helmets, resembling the casques of the Paris fire brigade, that infested beaux arts academic painting.) Cachin and her colleagues have dredged up an astounding panoply of period kitsch, from 1850s imitators of Ingres through Bouguereau to what must be the most obsessively pederastic elocution in all art history, Jean...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Out of a Grand Ruin, a Great Museum | 12/8/1986 | See Source »

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