Word: orsay
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...