Five of the best in the Musee d'Orsay
Beauty, love, sex and La Belle Epoque in a place once marked by trauma
Motoring around New Zealand, we have been staying in a series of “Top Ten” campsites. No poll has taken place. Top Ten is just a brand name, exuding confidence and excellence. The fact that these campsites are in fact rather good is not the point. I was taken by the fact that one could deem anything to be in a Top Ten.
Hence, my series of “Five of the Best…”. A list of the most excellent pieces in any given gallery. According to whom? Well, to me. Trust me. As always, the list is for people who might be daunted by the idea of stepping into a giant collection where there is simply so much stuff in huge gilt frames. The list must be accessible. It will include the following; a) a world famous image and b) an image which sums up an element of the host nation. This week, I am swerving back to Europe and taking my Five Best lens to the Musee d’Orsay.
Once upon a time, all the famous Impressionist paintings in Paris were stuffed within the Jeu des Paume in the Tuileries Gardens. This was built as a space for real tennis (sort of like a Renaissance version of Padel), and commissioned by Napoleon III. Thinking about it as the home for the heart of the d’Orsay collection is simply bewildering, but that was where we all went in the 1980’s. But in 1986, everything changed.
The d’Orsay was originally built as a giant station to carry French crowds coming to see the Great Exhibition of 1900. Iconic destinations from south west France; “Rouen”….“Limoges” etc, are still visible across the front elevation which faces the Seine. By 1939 the short platforms had become unsuitable for the longer trains then in use, and it was decommissioned. A dark time was to follow. At the end of WW2, it was turned into a reception centre for liberated prisoners returning home from Nazi incarceration. Janet Flanner, in one of her A Letter From Paris fortnightly columns for the New Yorker, writes of the horror of this moment. Devastated and traumatised prisoners arrived back at the Gare d’Orsay, hardly recognisable to those awaiting them. This was no grand reunion. The ceremonial lilies carried by those who waited were dropped, and trampled on as stumbling, skeletal vestiges of humanity walked down the platforms into an uncertain future.
In 1970, plans were drawn up to demolish the d’Orsay, but the Minister for Cultural Affairs intervened and the idea was born to turn it into a museum. In 1986, it was opened by President Mitterrand. A place haunted by pain and sorrow was turned into a home for beauty and art, one of the largest museums in Europe, holding at its heart the collection of the Jeu de Paume. This, then, is where you must come for a double cream serving of Impressionism. What a treat lies before you! Here is the handful of paintings around which you might arrange your visit.
1. Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, Manet (1863)
The Musee d’Orsay has an array of stunning paintings by Manet. There is Le Balcon, an arrangement of green, white and shadowy black where four people, one of whom is Manet’s sister in law Berthe Morisot, look over a green iron balcony to something unseen.