I had the pleasure of visiting Paris 6 or 7 years ago and visited the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay. The Louvre is the go-to for antiquities, but my impression was that the permanent collection more or less cut off around 1800 and the age of Napoleon. The Impressionists and other modern movements were much better represented at d’Orsay. Is there a reason the Impressionists are apparently shut out of the Louvre? There may be some rooms I overlooked and maybe they are there, just not prominently. What’s the straight dope?
From the Wikipedia page on the Louvre:
From the Wikipedia page of Musee d’Orsay:
There are however a small number of Impressionist paintings still in the Louvre, such as those donated by Hélène and Victor Lyon, because the terms of the bequests required them to be displayed there.
That explains it, thanks!
And it is perhaps worth adding that prior to the opening of the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre’s Impressionist collections had mostly been displayed in the Jeu de Palme and that earlier there had been only a relatively brief period when many of them were displayed in the Louvre itself.
All art looks impressionistic to me after a few eye surgeries. Thus I’m easy to please, or confuse. I can’t afford a trip to Paris so I’ll go look at murals in French Camp, south of Stockton CA. They’ll look blurry enough.
Note: I’m no big fan of Impressionism. An artist down the road from my last home billed himself as a Northern California Impressionist but all I saw were colored blobs, and that was before the eye infections. He’ll keep going till a giant redwood falls on his studio. What an impression THAT will make!
I’d always thought that the Louvre, and the Louvre alone, was the archive of record of Western art. A post here about six months ago, about the proud tradition of WWI-era artists (cough Picasso) wholeheartedly looting the Louvre of minor pieces and reselling them (because why not?), sparked the idea in me that the Louvre hasn’t always been the LOUVRE and that this was the case a lot more recently than I would have imagined. It’s good to know that they have a specific mission and that other museums in Paris are in a position to shoulder the load.
Yes, on my first visit to Paris, in 1984, the Impressionists were at the Jeu de Paume.
I’ve been there, brother, but ten years ago I found myself teaching an art class to young English language learners in Korea and having to research this stuff 25 years after I was supposed to have done it in college.
–The darlings of l’Academie were churning out soulless (albeit well-rendered) crap that didn’t look like any real person’s life, and Impressionism was created as a reaction to this. They favored raw honesty over melodrama in their themes. They painted workers and decaying buildings instead of kings and gleaming palaces.
–Prior to the Impressionists, almost nobody went outside to paint a landscape, and they created shadows by adding black to the colors on their palettes. The Impressionists understood that light doesn’t work the way most artists up to that time depicted it, that daytime shadows were blue and not black, and that nighttime scenes had freaky lighting that you couldn’t just make up sitting in your studio. You have to go into an opera house at night to paint an opera house at night, and you have to go out into the sunlight to paint outdoor sunlight.
–They avoided mixing colors, preferring brush strokes (or dots) of different colors closely side by side, letting your eyes do the mixing.
–“Impressionist” was originally intended as a dismissive insult, kind of like “fauvist” or “punk.” And like the Fauvists and Punks, it rolled right off them.
Drop by your local library, the 700 section, preferably where they keep the oversize books, and give the Impressionists another chance!
Western art is mostly handled by three Paris museums under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture: the Louvre (roughly pre-1848 revolution), Musée d’Orsay (1848 tomorrow WWI) and Musée National d’Art Moderne (modern art). They are three major pieces of the French National Museums. Musée du quai Branly covers African, Asian, and indigenous American art. Numerous smaller museums have more specific charters, frequently concentrating on a particular artist (Rodin and Picasso, for example).
I’m fairly sure that most visitors to the Louvre have very little sense of just how much it has evolved even over the past century. For example, until the late 1930s it included what is now the Musée national de la Marine. And some of us can remember the building before it became the ‘Grand Louvre’.
The oddity is not that over the years bits of the Louvre have been hived off. Almost all European countries sub-divide their national collections of Western art between two or more museums. Frankly, it would probably be better all round if the Louvre was further sub-divided.
That goes double for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which looks like it was curated with snow plows. I guess I’m just used to the small, tasteful collections in the National Gallery of Art in DC that I grew up with.