Celebrating the Reopening of the Nineteenth-Century French Galleries Symposium: Reinstalling the Nineteenth-Century European Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

July 2012 - Gary Tinterow, director, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Following a two-year renovation, the galleries devoted to impressionism and post-impressionism in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art reopened on January 28, 2012. Among the world's greatest collections of paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, the Gallery's later 19th-century French paintings returned to public view in a freshly conceived installation design. In honor of the reopening, the Gallery hosted a public symposium on April 27, 2012, focused on issues surrounding the reinstallation of three major 19th-century paintings collections: The Barnes Foundation, the Musée d'Orsay, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.