Celebrating the Reopening of the Nineteenth-Century French Galleries Symposium: Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Art History in France: The Musée d'Orsay Renovated

July 2012 - Xavier Rey, curator of paintings, Musée d'Orsay. 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.