SCity governments should never give up their museums. The case of the Petit Palais shows why. In the 1980s, the Parisian municipal government under Jacques Chirac seriously considered boxing up the collection of their Musée des Beaux-Arts and converting the building. Today the Palais is the most visited of the fourteen city museums – and a special rebirth.
The palace was built for the 1900 World Exhibition, which offered visitors a “Rétrospective de l’art français”. Two years later, as the “Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris”, it housed a collection that the city had built up since 1870. But over time, interest in nineteenth-century art, which forms the focus of the collection, waned; the immediately adjacent Grand Palais outperformed the “Small Palace” as an exhibition venue. Eighty years after its construction, the interior was disfigured by partition walls, the building fabric was dilapidated, and the identity was watered down.
Fortunately, a general renovation brought the originality of Charles Girault’s building back to the fore. Its architecture pays homage to an eclectic neo-rococo style typical of the time: the simplicity of the floor plan – an isosceles trapezium with four corner rotundas around a semi-circular inner garden – is exaggerated by a richly painted and sculpted decoration and by the polychromy of mosaic floors and marble cladding. More light, air and space also brought out the best in the collection. This ranges from Graeco-Roman antiquity to 1914; The focus is on eighteenth-century furniture, tableaux and objets d’art, atmospherically presented in an enfilade of small rooms with wood panelling, but above all a panorama of French art production from the Napoleonic era to the First World War.
When it reopened at the end of 2005, the joy of encountering a new collection of its own quality, exhibited in one of the most characterful museum buildings in Paris, dominated. However, the labyrinthine nature of the course on the ground floor and the partial distortion of Girault’s architecture by the Chaix & Morel office met with criticism.
An increasingly indispensable complement
At the end of 2012, Christophe Leribault took over the management of the Petit Palais. In the almost nine years before he became head of the Musée d’Orsay, he sharpened the profile of the house, which became one of the top addresses in the Parisian, indeed in the French, museum landscape. Leribault created a room for Romantic, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, the former and the latter with brightly colored walls as was customary in the past. On the ground floor he exhibited designs for Parisian monuments and for the painted decorations of the capital’s city halls, which were steeped in the emphasis of the early Third Republic. And he dedicated the north gallery to sculpture, as he did when the museum was founded: around thirty large sculptures – mainly plaster models – bear witness to the “statuomania” of the capital at the end of the nineteenth century.
With the exception of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Leribault placed this unpopular era at the center of his exhibitions. Thus the Petit Palais often filled in gaps in the Musée d’Orsay (covering the period between 1848 and 1914) and the neighboring Grand Palais – not as a makeshift substitute but as an increasingly indispensable complement. Leribault’s predecessor, Gilles Chazal, already organized retrospectives for forgotten artists, of whom the museum has substantial holdings. Among the sculptors, Jean Carriès stands out, whose faun faces, horror masks and chimeras in glazed stoneware oscillate between the Middle Ages and Japonism. Among the painters, Fernand Pelez should be mentioned, who captivated with Rembrandtesque republican hymns to prowess, motherhood and class brotherhood, but above all with miserabilistic pamphlets in oil, the titles of which betray the social thrust: “Homeless”, “Grimaces and Misery – Jugglers”. .