Sylvain Amic, an art historian who seized the helm of Paris’ Musée D’Orsay last year, died at the age of 58 in southern France. Former French Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Marac New York Times That kind of friend died of heart failure.
His death was treated in shock in France and elsewhere. Just 16 months ago, he served as the leader of one of the most popular museums in Paris.
Laurence Des Cars, the current president and director of the Louvre Museum and former head of the Musée D’Orsay, praised Amic as a “motor of imagination and open culture” in a statement posted on social media. French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that kindness “knows the universal liberation power of our culture, between heritage and creation.”
Born in Dakar, Senegal in 1967, Amic was a French parent who would continue to lead a school in Banjul, Gambia before becoming a curator in the late 1990s. Between 2000 and 2011, he worked at The Musée Fabre, a museum in Montpellier, France, known for its collection of 19th and 20th centuries French art. He then went on to work in Rouen, where he brought together a group of 11 museums and named it the Rouen Museum.
From 2022, he began serving as an advisor to Rima Abdul Malak, who served as French Minister of Culture until 2024.
Amic died while Orsay was preparing to open a research center. He also served as a leading program for permanent collections, and recently pioneered the masterpieces from the museum’s assets.
When the show visited the Park Art Museum in Shanghai this summer, Amik said keeping past history was his goal and showed it didn’t have to stay stale or stodgy.
He told earlier this year souquee“Even though people in the past made great efforts to preserve art, we still need to ask ourselves: Does this concept still make sense today?
