The Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris, is closed to the general public till 2 March, as a part of a year-long renovation challenge 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 folks anticipated was about 600,000 yearly,” says the director Claire Bernardi, who has been in publish since January 2022. “Immediately, the precise determine stands at 1.2 million.”
This yr’s renovation will not be about rising capability however moderately regulating present 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 permit for a extra spacious foyer space, with much less queueing exterior. The welcome desk, lockers and audio-guide counters are being reworked, the present store renewed. The workforce can be reassessing entrance ranges and counter heights to higher accommodate accessibility wants. “These aren’t works designed to be seen,” Bernardi says. “We’ll see the modifications. And the general public will little doubt really feel them. However the concept is to be as humble and discreet as doable, 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 scale back the affect of the infamous Tuileries mud. Beginner 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 format. However for Twenty first-century museum administrators, it’s only a large headache.
Vehicles ferrying in items for the intensive public programming, which the gardens host successfully, continuously grind the fabric right into a unstable powder that, as one journalist put it in 2013, “invades the whole lot”. The concept of eliminating it altogether was floated on the time, however at €15m, the price 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 performed a number of work with the Louvre workforce to stabilise the bottom across the museum. After which, it’s our inside groups working exhausting at, effectively, cleansing and dusting, on these days when the museum is closed.”
Having a five-week closure now offers conservators the possibility to completely 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.
