Treasures of the Musee D'Orsay (Tiny Folio)

All the pleasures of 19th-Century art, from Manet's Luncheon on the Grass to Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles and Seurat's Circus, are showcased in this handsomely designed volume of works selected by the former director of France's extraordinary and popular museum.

Located in a soaring Parisian train station that has been transformed into a wildly popular museum, the Musee d'Orsay boasts the world's most impressive collection of art created from 1848 to the early years of the twentieth century. Since its opening in December 1986, some thirty million visitors have marveled at both the museum's permanent collections and the exhibitions that it has presented at the nearby Grand Palais.

Every aspect of the museum's collection-oil paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, pastels, drawings and watercolors, architecture, and photography is well represented here in full-color, generously sized reproductions made from new photographs taken especially for this project. A lively essay by the museum's former director, Françoise Cachin, provides a knowledgeable introduction to the history of the museum and of its far-ranging collections. In addition, concise essays at the start of each chapter illuminate the illustrations that follow.

As Mme. Cachin says in her conclusion: may this book "help the reader preserve vivid memories of the quality and the variety of works seen at this museum. May it especially instill a desire to return again and again in search of new discoveries."

Other Details: 240 full-color illustrations 204 pages 9 x 9" Published 1995

opening of the Orsay, has successfully overseen the completion of the Louvre's spectacular renovation and extension), began thinking together about appropriate uses for this train station. For all of us, deciding what should be chosen or eliminated, what the priorities should be and how the spaces should be organized was a difficult, passionate, often contentious process. What a challenge! On the very spot where trains came and went, at the site of so much commotion, of so many timetables and fleeting instants, were to be presented museum objects which by their very nature aspire to eternity. In addition, permanent exhibition rooms had to be created without destroying the essence of an architectural structure that was itself a museum piece. Some of its main advantages were the immense glass vault overhead and the glass bays overlooking the Seine, diffusing northern light and, from the top floor, affording a marvelous view of Paris and its river.

Let's put aside the building for a moment and go inside the museum, which has been open to the public since December 1986. The period represented runs from 1848 to approximately 1905 for painting, and until 1914 for the rest. Why this time differential? Because pictorial developments generally preceded those of the other arts, displaying paintings made up to the start of World War I would have meant introducing to the Musee d'Orsay Fauvism, Cubism, and the beginnings of abstract art basically a large part of the Beaubourg's domain and currently considered as belonging more to the beginning of the twentieth century than to the end of the nineteenth. This may, in fact, be open to debate. In any case, clear administrative boundaries had to be determined: thus, artists born between 1820 and 1870 are presented at the Musee d'Orsay; those born before that are in the Louvre, after that, at the Beaubourg. There are a few exceptions: the entire body of work by Edouard Vuillard, who was active until the 1940s, is at the Orsay, while the entire body of work by Henri Matisse, except for the one Neo-Impressionist painting reproduced here, is exhibited at the Beaubourg, even though he was born in 1869. As for Pierre Bonnard, his work is divided between the two institutions. Similarly, we did not wish to cut artists off from their immediate sources: thus, the tour of the museum begins with a few late works by Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, François Rude, and Honore Daumier, all of whom belong to the generation presented on the other side of the Seine, at the Louvre.

The dates 1848 and 1905, which in principle mark the beginning and end of the artistic creation shown here, may seem arbitrary boundaries, and a half-century of creation may seem a minor affair. But what a half-century it was! A time of such prodigious wealth and variety that the museum's eighteen thousand square meters of exhibition space barely suffice to contain it.

This mid-century corresponds, historically and culturally, to a moment of transition: it saw the appearance and recognition of Realism in the work of Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, and the Barbizon landscape artists, as well as the first Universal Expositions (London, 1851; and Paris, 1855 and 1867). These world fairs disseminated European art and were a forum first for confrontation and even...