US Exhibits The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
About

ORSAY – U.S. COLLABORATIONS 

Every year, the Orsay and the Orangerie museums send over 200 objects to the United States in support of collaborative projects with American art museums, including:

  • The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Gauguin: Metamorphoses; Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde – From Signac to Matisse and Beyond)
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux; Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet)
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Degas/Cassatt; Gustave Caillebotte. The Painter’s Eye; Frédéric Bazille, The Youth of Impressionism; Cézanne Portraits; Degas at the Opera)
  • The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA, and Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (The World is An Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne; Renoir: Father and Son / Painting and Cinema; Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist)
  • Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (Monet’s Mornings on the Seine)
  • Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, and Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO (Working Among the Flowers: French Still Life in the 19th Century)
  • Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist)
  • Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX (Faces of Impressionism: Portraits from the Musée d’Orsay, Gustave Caillebotte. The Painter’s Eye)
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (Paul Durand-Ruel. Champion of Impressionism)
  • De Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (Pierre Bonnard; James Tissot: Fashion & Faith)
  • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s; Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist)
  • Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY (Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today)
  • The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist)
Exhibitions
History

In 2008, the Orsay and Orangerie Museums began to strengthen their ties with the American public. This interest was seen in the formation of the American Friends of the Musée d’Orsay, along with the museum’s increased commitment to programs of loans, participation in exhibitions, and collaborations with museums in the United States.  When the Orsay realized that it would be closing its entire fifth floor for renovations in 2010 in anticipation of the museum’s 25th anniversary in 2011, it made the surprising move to loan more than 100 of its masterpieces to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Nicolas Sarkozy, then President of the French Republic, supported the decision making the following comment:

Each of these two shows brings together masterpieces that, once they return to the Musée d’Orsay, will never again be loaned out for exhibition as a group. I hope they will excite the interest of the American public in order to strengthen further the links between our two countries.

Following its presentation in San Francisco, The Impressionism exhibition traveled to the Frist Museum for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee and marked the beginning of the Orsay’s commitment to an ongoing collaboration and program of loans to the United States.