Guy Kogvall, former director of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, dies at 70
Guy Cogeval, director of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from 2008 to 2017, died on November 13 at the age of 70. Le Monde November 17th.
An iconoclastic and sometimes controversial figure in the museum world, Kogvar was a passionate scholar of 19th-century art whose specialty was the Nabis, a group of French Post-Impressionist painters active in the late 1800s.
Kogwal was born in Paris in 1955 and graduated from Sciences Po in 1977. Obtained a master’s degree in art history in 1982 and passed the French Curator Entrance Examination in 1985.
He began his curatorial career as an intern at the Orsay Film Department. He later served as assistant director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon and then as deputy director of cultural affairs at the Louvre.
From 1992 to 1998, Kogvar was director of the Musée National de Monuments de France in Paris, and in 1994 he curated “Italian Renaissance Architecture from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo”. The exhibition subsequently traveled to Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Alte Museum in Berlin.
In 1998, Kogvar was appointed director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. There he organized a series of exhibitions that later traveled to Paris, including “Hitchcock and Art” (2000), “Erotic Picasso” (2001) and the acclaimed “Edouard Vuillard, Master of Post-Impressionism” (2003).
After arriving at the Musée d’Orsay in 2008, Kogvar undertook a major overhaul of the museum. As director of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, he merged the two museums into one. He also oversaw the major renovation of 80% of the Musée d’Orsay’s galleries and the rehanging of much of the collection.
Kogvar organized important traveling exhibitions of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings during his tenure at the Musée d’Orsay, which is renowned for having the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the world. More eclectic exhibitions, often organized with or by guest curators, include exhibitions devoted to crime and punishment, the male nude, Impressionism, and fashion.
But while Kogwal has received high marks for his masterminding and financial oversight of the agency, his management style has come under increasing criticism. In 2017, a year after his third term as director, he was succeeded by Laurence des Cars, now director of the Louvre Museum.
Since then, Kogvar has continued his research into Nabis and symbolism.
