Word: orsay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gare d'Orsay was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel, but its glories lasted only 40 years. By 1939 changes in railroad technology had downgraded it to a commuter station. In 1969 the last train left, and the place was abandoned: a rusting abode of cats and pigeons, whose damp silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker's ball. In 1971 the French government, under...
...Paris, as a proof of their passage. But no President de la Republique since World War II showed a more recklessly phara- onic commitment to changing the face of Paris than Pompidou. By a curious irony, the political consequences of this urge are what saved the Gare d'Orsay. Pompidou had ordered the razing and redevelopment of the vast central food market known as Les Halles -- Zola's "belly of Paris." The market, which had formed a bolus of stalled, honking traffic, was shifted to Rungis, near Orly Airport. In its place Paris received, among other things, a giant structure...
...destruction of Les Halles rallied the preservationists. The inadequacies of Beaubourg fed a mood of doubt about "radical" museum techniques. By the early '70s it was clear to the men of the Elysee that razing the Gare d'Orsay would be a major vote-losing blunder. The Gare d'Orsay stayed, Pompidou died, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the new President, inherited the problem...
...architecture for the Ministry of the Environment, was put in charge of the plans. Michel Laclotte, the Louvre's head curator of painting -- and, as such, the key influence in the "Louvre system," which controls the distribution of government-owned works of art throughout France -- became head curator of Orsay as well. "I had to wear two hats," Laclotte recalls, "and sometimes it gave me a headache." For the Louvre is by nature a monopoly, with the gravitational pull of a black hole. So many of the canonical masterpieces of the 19th century -- Delacroix's Massacre at Chios...
Meanwhile, Orsay found its director at the Beaubourg: Francoise Cachin, a brilliant, Sorbonne-educated art historian whose specialty is Manet. The first issue she had to settle was the scope of the museum. What did 19th century mean? There was no way the Louvre was going to surrender its masterpieces of early 19th century classicism and romanticism. So Orsay's program must begin after the peak of the romantic movement. Cachin, Laclotte and the new museum's staff wanted to start in 1863 -- the emblematic year that saw the first Salon des Refuses, Manet's epochal Le Dejeuner...