| Facing the Tuileries across the river, on the eastern side of the Septième, the elegant but formal stone facade of the Musée d'Orsay barely hints at the all-pervasive light that illuminates its cathedral-like interior (daily except Mon 9am–6pm, Thurs till 9.15pm; mid-Sept to mid-June opens at 10am; €8.50, €6.50 after 4.15pm & Thurs after 8pm, free to under-18s and on first Sun of the month; M° Solférino/RER Musée-d'Orsay; www.musee-orsay.fr). Housing painting and sculpture from the period 1848 to 1914, and thus bridging the gap between the Louvre and Beaubourg, its highlights are the electrifying works of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. (The entrance is on the west side, on rue de la Légion de l'Honneur.) The building was inaugurated as a railway station for the 1900 World Fair and continued to serve the stations of southwest France until 1939. Orson Welles used it as the setting for his film of Kafka's The Trial, filling the high, narrow corridors with filing cabinets to create a nightmarishly claustrophobic setting. De Gaulle used it to announce his coup d'état of May 19, 1958 – his messianic return to power to save the patrie from disintegration over the Algerian liberation war. Notwithstanding this illustrious history, it was only saved from a hotel developer's bulldozer by the colossal wave of public indignation and remorse at the destruction of Les Halles. The job of redesigning the interior as a museum was given, in 1986, to the Milanese Gae Aulenti, the fashionable architect who had transformed Venice's flashy Palazzo Grassi two years earlier. Her design is as considered as it is beautiful, though the crowds of visitors streaming from one room to the next can provoke the uncomfortable feeling that you're late for a train. Taken at an easy pace, you could easily spend half a day, if not a whole one, meandering through the rooms in their numbered, chronological order, but the layout makes it easy to confine your visit to a specific section, each of which has a very distinctive atmosphere. The collection begins on the ground floor, under the huge vault of steel and glass, then continues up to the attics of the upper level, before ending with the terraces of the middle level, overlooking the main chamber. The café on the upper level of the museum, and the gilded restaurant and tearoom on the middle level, are wonderful spots to recuperate.
Pages in section ‘Musée d'Orsay’: Ground floor, Upper level: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Middle level.
Alternate spellings:: orsay, musée, museum, d'orsay, art, paris
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