49 works exceptionally leave the Musée d’Orsay for a new project

Better than throwing soup on paintings, the Musée d’Orsay is launching a new operation entitled “100 works that tell a story”. Each year, the institution wishes to highlight a major contemporary subject while transporting its masterpieces across France. In 2025, the theme will focus on climate and will offer a dialogue between art and science in 31 museums spread across 12 regions. The Musée d’Orsay will also offer a tour through its rooms to echo a reference work which will explore the major current ecological issues through around a hundred works.

Providing equitable access to culture

« Our collections are the archives of the planet », declared Sylvain Amic, president of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, during the press conference given Tuesday January 21 in the sumptuous community hall of the museum. This new operation is inspired by “150 years of Impressionism” which in 2024 enabled 178 works from the institution to travel to 34 participating museums. The president thus continues his desire to bring works from national collections to all territories to promote the democratization of culture.

The operation aims to provide equitable access to culture. “ After the success of 100 years of Impressionism, it is necessary to circulate works of art for the 22 million of our fellow citizens who live in rural areas », Adds Rachida Dati, Minister of Culture. The operation should become an annual event in French museums. The theme for 2026 has already been announced by Sylvain Amic. It will be about work, “ an essential subject in our artistic representations », Explains the president of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie.

A convergence of dates

For this first edition, the Musée d’Orsay is tackling climate change, a subject that could not be more topical with the disasters that recently occurred in Los Angeles and Mayotte. The convergence of the dates of the collections of the Musée d’Orsay (between 1848 and 1914) and the industrial revolution allows us to take a look at the period. “ From 1850, we had the first reliable climate records and we began to use fossil fuels.comments Servane Dargnies-de Vitry, project referent and chief curator of paintings at the Musée d’Orsay. During this period of great change, artists captured these changes. »

The century of landscape

In addition, 19th century artists were particularly attentive to the beauty of landscapes, flora and biodiversity. Certain works can sometimes be considered as sources for documenting an extinct species of plant or animal or even a retreating glacier. Using comments from experts and scientists, the Musée d’Orsay wishes to make the works speak to ecological issues and play a role in the battle against global warming.

Journey through water, disappearing trout and the tumults of modern life

Thus, the institution has chosen projects of great diversity, but always anchored in the local fabric, for its off-site operation. At the Gassendi museum in Digne-les-Bains (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur), the exhibition “Raconter le climat” will renew the look at the collection of 19th century Provençal painters with the help of loans of paintings December day (circa 1893) Albert Edelfelt, The Mail (around 1900) by Étienne Martin and the mythical Saint-Lazare station (1877) by Claude Monet. The art and science museum will address questions about the tumults of modern life and the journey of water, “ a threat that already weighed in the 19th century », Specifies Sandra Cattini, director of the Gassendi museum, landlocked in the middle of the Alps.

In Ornans (Bourgogne-Franche-Comté), the Courbet museum will exceptionally receive Trout (1873) by Gustave Courbet. More than a simple still life, this portrait of a dying fish is considered a symbolic self-portrait of the artist returning to Franche-Comté after his imprisonment in 1871 following his participation in the Commune. This loan will allow the museum to raise awareness about the disappearance of the wild trout which inhabit the Loue, the matrix river of the valley where the master of Ornans was born.

The Musée d’Orsay will not only lend paintings. In La Roche-sur-Yon (Loire" rel="tag">Pays de la Loire), the Cyel museum and contemporary art space will host photos by Alfred Stieglitz for “Like a Cloudless Sky”. The exhibition will create a dialogue between the series of pictorialist photographs Equivalent (around 1885) by Stieglitz with the capture of clouds by contemporary photographers. If the cloud is a favorite subject of certain artists, it is also a climate indicator, at the heart of the latest scientific research carried out by meteorologists on changes in cloud cover and their links with global warming.

The impact of climate change and natural disasters on heritage

Museums can also be victims of natural disasters. In 2016, the temporary reserves of the Girodet museum in Montargis (Centre-Val de Loire) were seriously flooded for three days, following the rupture of the Briare canal during exceptional floods in the Paris basin. 86% of the museum’s collection was damaged, a first in France. Eight years later, only 40% of the works have been restored.

As part of the “100 works that tell…” operation, the exhibition from the Maximilien Luce fund at the Girodet museum will present works restored after being damaged by the 2016 disaster as well as The Flood in Marly (1876) d’Alfred Sisley et Swimming in Rolleboise (around 1920-1930) by Maximilien Luce to raise public awareness of the risks linked to climate change and illustrate the possible resilience of heritage places in the face of these challenges.
100 WORKS THAT TELL ABOUT CLIMATE – Trailer – FR | Orsay Museum