VISIT ORSAY. MASTERPIECES OF THE MUSEUM (ARCHITECTURE, SCULPTURE, PAINTING, GRAPHIC ARTS, PHOTOGRAPHY, DECORATIVE ARTS) - VALERIE METTAIS

Boasting a worldwide reputation as the veritable cathedral of impressionism, since its earliest days the Musée d'Orsay has endeavoured to draw on the limitless diversity of its collections to maximise its international prestige. The transformation of the railway station (an architectural masterpiece constructed in time for the Universal Exhibition of 1900) into a museum dedicated to the cultural history of the second half of the 19th century, proved to be the extraordinary consecration of a new era which the railway station had itself symbolised.
The Musée d'Orsay became a temple to this modernity celebrated by the greatest artists and thinkers, from Charles Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin. The multi-faceted, polyphonic artistic explosion specific to this period was henceforth embodied within the Musée d'Orsay by a determination to offer a panorama of this art by means of eclectic collections.
The museum hosts flagship works by artists dubbed as impressionist or postimpressionist - from Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia by Édouard Manet to the Bal du Moulin de la Galette by Auguste Renoir, not forgetting the ballerinas of Edgar Degas and the water lilies of Claude Monet, or for that matter La Nuit étoilée by Vincent Van Gogh and La Belle Angèle by Paul Gauguin. However, these works must not be allowed to overshadow other avenues of creation from the same period whether so-called official or academic art, then more readily showered with Salon prizes, or indeed other movements and sensibilities (classicism, romanticism, realism, symbolism, pointillism, Nabis, art nouveau, etc.) whose outriders who were no less famous - Bouguereau or Cabanel, Corot, Courbet or Millet, Bonnard or Denis, Moreau and Puvis de Chavanne, Seurat and Signac, etc. The artistic invention at work in these cases was not restricted to pictorial expression but also covered architecture, decorative arts, graphic arts, cinematography, photography and sculpture.
The multidisciplinary nature of the Musée d'Orsay collections demonstrates the sheer wealth and dynamism of the creative arts in the century of industry and imperialism. This guide offers a remarkable overview of this diverse yet coherent ensemble both in terms of the selection of works it contains and the wide-ranging angles of approach adopted by the attendant commentaries. It is our sincere hope that the reader's appetite will be whetted sufficiently to inspire a visit to the museum itself.