The Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris, is closed to the general public till 2 March, as a part of a year-long renovation undertaking to enhance customer entry and circulate. Regardless of the pandemic and final yr’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 individuals anticipated was about 600,000 yearly,” says the director Claire Bernardi, who has been in put up since January 2022. “Right this moment, the precise determine stands at 1.2 million.”
This yr’s renovation is just not about rising capability however quite regulating current ranges in a means 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: Trying 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 throughout 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 exterior. The welcome desk, lockers and audio-guide counters are being reworked, the reward store renewed. The workforce can also be reassessing entrance ranges and counter heights to higher accommodate accessibility wants. “These aren’t works designed to be observed,” 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 attainable, respectful of the placement, 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 influence of the infamous Tuileries mud. Novice gardeners would possibly flock to on-line boards searching for 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 structure. However for Twenty first-century museum administrators, it’s only a huge headache.
Vans ferrying in items for the intensive public programming, which the gardens host successfully, always grind the fabric right into a unstable powder that, as one journalist put it in 2013, “invades all the things”. The concept 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 an enormous carpet on the entrance. However that didn’t work,” Bernardi says. “We’ve accomplished lots of work with the Louvre workforce to stabilise the bottom across the museum. After which, it’s our inner groups working onerous at, nicely, cleansing and dusting, on these days when the museum is closed.”
Having a five-week closure now provides conservators the possibility 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 feel there’ll be a definite earlier than and after. For connoisseurs, it’ll be spectacular,” Bernardi says.
