Postmodern History at the Musee d'Orsay

Abstract

The subtitle of Le Debat's special issue on the new Mus6e d'Orsay, Toward Another Nineteenth Century, is the most straightforward acknowledgment thus far of what is at issue in the controversy surrounding the new museum.' Everything about this museum of nineteenth-century art has been challenged: its architecture, its installations, its selection of works, its chronological scope. But the central issue has been, from the beginning, the revision of accepted historical readings of the past that inevitably accompanies political shifts in the present. This struggle over the appropriation of history has been largely misunderstood or ignored in the American press, where reports have been either patronizingly indulgent or extravagantly adulatory. The twin poles of this response are clear even in their titles: from Richard Bernstein's In a City That Loves a Debate, Storms Swirl Over Its Newest Museum and Cultural Funds, in the New York Times, to Barbara Rose's Amazing Space, in Vogue.2 The Mus6e d'Orsay was first planned under the presidencies of Georges Pompidou and Valkry Giscard d'Estaing to show the relations between the visual arts and the larger culture; with the election in 1981 of Francois Mitterrand and the socialists, the program was revised to focus on the relationship between art and politics.3 Now, with the opening of the museum, these conflicting positions