Word: orsay
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...Washington and which, after closing there July 31, will be seen through the fall at the Art Institute of Chicago and in early 1989 at the Grand Palais in Paris, is of this kind. When the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris found they were all planning separate shows on different aspects of Gauguin -- his prints, his Brittany paintings and his Tahitian work -- it seemed obvious to merge the three. The result, thanks to its curators (Francoise Cachin and Claire Freches-Thory in France, Richard Brettell and Charles F. Stuckey...
...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...
...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...
...show 19th century taste as it was, not as it ought, in the eyes of a retrospective modernism, to have been. Orsay, one feels, was right to include the work of these heroic flatterers and contaminated virtuosos. Not only are they better than we once thought, but they help one recognize the true achievement of the avant-garde alternative. The triumph of the avant- garde over the pompiers has been so complete that one can now look at the losers with calm interest and historical understanding. This is not a matter of camp revival, as some moralists insist...
...this way Orsay points to the future, for the old relation between museums and contemporary painting has switched in the 1980s. A hundred years ago you had brilliant painters and dumb museums; today the reverse. It is inconceivable that the marginality and hamfistedness of most of what passes for major painting at the end of the 20th century could have been taken seriously in the Paris of Degas, Cezanne and Rodin. Under the heat of the market, avant-garde and pompier have simply fused into an opaque, complacent lump. Only in the museum, it seems, can the full evidence...