Musée d’Orsay

From September 12, 2023 to January 7, 2024

Begun in Rome in 1835 and completed in 1881, The Poem of the Soul is the crowning achievement of the Lyonese artist Louis Janmot (1814-1892), a pictorial and literary work all in one. In 34 compositions accompanied by a long poem, it illustrates a soul’s initiatory journey on Earth. Comprising two cycles respectively composed of 18 paintings and 16 large-format drawings, Henri Focillon, director of Lyon Museum of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1924, described it as “Romantic spiritualism’s most remarkable, most coherent and strangest ensemble”.

From October 3, 2023 to February 4, 2024

Set to be presented at the Musée d’Orsay in fall 2023, this exhibition will be the first to be devoted to the works produced by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) during the last two months of his life, in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris. The exhibition is the result of years of research on this crucial phase in the artist’s life, and will finally enable the public to appreciate its true importance.

From October 17, 2023 to January 21, 2024

Peter Doig is considered one of the greatest living painters. For this exceptional counterpoint to the works of the Musée d'Orsay, he has chosen to present some of his major canvases which relate to modernist concerns of perspective, color, location and decor.

Far from being frozen in the legacy handed down by the Musée du Luxembourg, the Musée national d’art moderne, and the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay’s collections of paintings can be seen to be constantly evolving. Year upon year, gifts, donations and purchases help to keep the collections alive, adapting acquisitions as our knowledge and historiography of art grow.

The 19th century was a remarkably prolific period for sculpture. The triumphant middle-class and the political powers eagerly appropriated this art form, the former to decorate its homes and proclaim its social status, and the latter to inscribe the ideals and beliefs of the period in stone and bronze.

"In what place and at what price will the Louvre in the future seek to maintain the special section – so rich in wonders of all kinds – devoted to bronzes, gold work, enamel, ivories, and so on?" With rare foresight, Léonce Bénédite, the curator of the Musee du Luxembourg, asked this question in an article published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1892.

In the 1970s, when it was decided to convert the Orsay railway station into a museum for the 19th century, no fine arts museum in France had a photography section. Yet, it was quickly decided that this major invention of the period would have its place in the future Musée d'Orsay.

The Musée d'Orsay has an exceptional collection of nearly 500 pastels (467 in 2020). It is one of the finest collections in the world, including a reference collection of major works by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Odilon Redon (1840-1916), artists who profoundly renewed the art of pastel and placed it at the center of their artistic practice.

When it was decided to convert the Orsay railway station into a new museum encompassing various forms of art produced from 1848 to 1914, architecture was naturally included in the project as if it had always been a museum piece and could easily be displayed, when in fact it was, and still is, seldom represented in existing museums.