Word: orsay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gare d'Orsay, this building was once the grandest railway station in France. As the Musee d'Orsay, opening next week, it is now the world's best museum of its kind. Its conspectus of painting, sculpture, architecture and photography, representing the last half of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century in France, is definitive. The Musee d'Orsay is to this period what the Uffizi is to the Italian Renaissance or the Museum of Modern Art to the 20th century. There are some masterpieces it will never get, but as a discourse of objects from...
Naturally, Orsay begins with an advantage: the huge, untapped reserves of France's government-owned 19th century art. These collections of painting and sculpture were spread very widely, throughout Paris and on loan to regional museums and government offices. Orsay has called them in and resifted them. The best-known of these collections was that of Paris' renowned impressionist museum, the Jeu de Paume, which, before its collection was moved across the Seine last summer, was attracting three-quarters of a million visitors annually to gaze at its superb Cezannes, Monets, Renoirs, Van Goghs and Lautrecs. There was a residue...
...with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris, was quite a lot: a vast semicircular barrel vault of iron and glass, stretching 150 yards from end to end, with elliptical-domed side vaults along the Quai Anatole France facing the Seine...
...paintings in this exhibit were garnered from 38 museums and 19 private collections, according to the exhibit's organizers. The most generous lenders include Paris' Musee d'Orsay (Galerie du Jeu de Paume), which offered 10, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., which offered seven. The MFA has also contributed seven works, including "Flowers in a Vase" and "Dance at Bougival...
What we see in this wholly enjoyable show is a painter whose high moments (two owned by Paris' Musee d'Orsay, War and The Snake Charmer; two by MOMA, The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream; and one by a private collector, The Hungry Lion) must be weighed against a good deal of medium-rate work and potboiling. Enjoyment of the lesser Rousseaus is usually tinged with condescension, though at least they are not cute or kitschy, like the truckloads of pseudonaive painting that would sprout from Montmartre to Haiti after his death. They have their period charm; you have...