The Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris, is closed to the general public till 2 March, as a part of a year-long renovation mission to enhance customer entry and circulate. Regardless of the pandemic and final 12 months’s Olympic Video games, attendance on the museum is at an all-time excessive. “When the museum reopened in 2006 after Olivier Brochet’s profitable renovation, the utmost variety of folks anticipated was about 600,000 yearly,” says the director Claire Bernardi, who has been in put up since January 2022. “At the moment, the precise determine stands at 1.2 million.”
This 12 months’s renovation is just not about rising capability however fairly regulating present ranges in a approach that prioritises each the wants of the general public and workers. It’s being funded with the proceeds of the touring exhibition, Cézanne and Renoir: Wanting on the World. (This assortment of masterpieces from the Orangerie and the Musée d’Orsay is at current on present on the Hong Kong Museum of Artwork earlier than travelling to Tokyo and Seoul.)
The place customer ingress and egress have till now merged in a single tight spot, historic monuments architects are creating a definite exit inside the northern façade of the constructing that appears out on to the Tuileries Gardens. This new gateway will enable for a extra spacious foyer space, with much less queueing outdoors. The welcome desk, lockers and audio-guide counters are being reworked, the reward store renewed. The group can also be reassessing entrance ranges and counter heights to raised accommodate accessibility wants. “These aren’t works designed to be seen,” Bernardi says. “We’ll see the adjustments. And the general public will little question really feel them. However the thought is to be as humble and discreet as potential, respectful of the situation, the works and the listed constructing itself.”
Coping with Tuileries mud
Crucially, the architects are putting in revolving doorways and a vacuum system designed to cut back the affect of the infamous Tuileries mud. Novice gardeners would possibly flock to on-line boards in quest of the recipe for the royal gardener André Le Nôtre’s Seventeenth-century stabilisé, that pale mixture of pea gravel, sand and whitewash that paves the elegant alleyways of his parterre format. However for Twenty first-century museum administrators, it’s only a large headache.
Vans ferrying in items for the intensive public programming, which the gardens host successfully, consistently grind the fabric right into a risky powder that, as one journalist put it in 2013, “invades every thing”. The thought of eliminating it altogether was floated on the time, however at €15m, the associated fee was deemed prohibitive.
Managing it within the interim has been a conservation problem. “At one level, we had a giant carpet on the entrance. However that didn’t work,” Bernardi says. “We’ve carried out loads of work with the Louvre group to stabilise the bottom across the museum. After which, it’s our inner groups working laborious at, effectively, cleansing and dusting, on these days when the museum is closed.”
Having a five-week closure now offers conservators the prospect to totally renew the 2 oval rooms that home Claude Monet’s eight Water Lillies panels. They’re dusting the fabled works, repainting the partitions and changing the skylights. “I believe there’ll be a definite earlier than and after. For connoisseurs, it’ll be spectacular,” Bernardi says.
