The Musée d’Orsay in Paris reopens after two years’ restoration

20 Oct 2011

The Musée d’Orsay in Paris reopens after two years’ restoration. In the new pavilions, Goppion display cabinets protect the unforgettable works from the dawn of modern art

Goppion celebrates the reopening of the Musée d’Orsay. The Italian company, one of the world’s leading producers of display systems, has provided the Parisian museum with its special high-technology display cabinets.

After two years of work, the museum of modern art with the most prestigious collection of Impressionist paintings in the world opens its doors once more, with enlarged spaces and renewed collections. The Musée d’Orsay celebrates its first 25 years by offering visitors a major restyling of the rooms dedicated to Monet, Degas, Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley and the other Impressionist masters, together with a series of important new features. The museum now boasts a space dedicated to Symbolist art, a large section set aside for decorative art (the Amont pavilion) and a further room to be used to temporary exhibitions. The Café de l’Horloge has also changed look, and has been designed by the creative Brazilian brothers, Fernando and Humberto Campana.

The renewal project concerned 44% (7,200 square metres) of the museum’s overall space and has required an investment of over 20 million euros, about half of which for the refurbishment and transformation of the Amont pavilion. Goppion’s display cabinets, installed in three different pavilions, have been designed by the Laboratorio Museotecnico of Trezzano sul Naviglio in collaboration with Jean-Michel Wilmotte, a leading French architect and renowned museographer, commissioned to work on the renewal project for the Orsay. These display cabinets stand out for being extremely light on the eye, thanks to their miniaturised mechanical components: equipped with a special opening system using stabilising bars, they make use of hinges of a particularly reduced thickness in order to be invisible to visitors’ eyes.

Other Goppion cabinets are set out in the sculpture gallery of the Terrasse Lille. In this case, cabinets up to 3 metres in length have been used, fixed to the parapets of the terrace and fitted with stabilisation systems for the relative humidity. These have a manual sliding system to open them, enabling a single operator to gain easy access to the interior of the cabinet.

The museum’s new spaces were inaugurated on 12th October in the presence of the Prime Minister, François Fillon, and of Frédéric Mitterrand. “The Musée d’Orsay”, said the French Prime Minister during his inaugural speech, “at last has a space worthy of its success; a space that has been further enlarged. More than three million people visit the museum yearly, and this means that, together with the Louvre, Versailles and the Centre Pompidou, the Orsay is one of the ten most visited museums in the world”.

Credits:
Wilmotte & Associés S.A.

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