Musée d’Orsay

From October 8th, 2024 to January 19th, 2025

The exhibition presented at the Musée d'Orsay in the fall of 2024 takes as its subject the predilection of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) for male figures and portraits of men, and aims to question the radical modernity of the artist's masterpieces from the prism of the new look that art history has on the masculinities of the nineteenth century.

From September 24th, 2024 to January 12th, 2025

Unknown outside the borders of her country, the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer was nevertheless the most renowned female painter in her country at the end of the 19th century. Famous for her use of rich and bright colors, she has made a very personal synthesis of indoor scenes and outdoor practice. She drew her inspiration from the realistic current as well as from the innovations of Impressionism through a free touch and a very great interest in variations in light. She is also known for her sensitive portraits of the rural world and her interest in church interiors.

From October 15th, 2024 to February 2nd, 2025

The great Scandinavian troublemakers of contemporary art, Elmgreen & Dragset are invited to place their poetic sculptures in dialogue with the iconic Nef of sculptures of the Musée d'Orsay.

Their exhibitions are always at the crossroads of performance, space and sculpture. The presentation they created specifically for the Musée d'Orsay will upset the eyes of visitors, invited to dive into a museum upside down.

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.