Discover Musée d'Orsay, the French museum of fine arts - Tiqets France Awakens Virtual Tour

Okay, good afternoon everyone. I am Lauren and this is your virtual tour of the Musée d'Orsay brought to you by Tickets Awakening Weeks. So for those of you who don't know what Tickets Awakening Weeks is, it's a six-week celebration of the reopening of museums and attractions in six countries around the world and the venues taking part in Awakening Weeks have worked night and day to reimagine their experiences and introduce new hygiene measures to make it safe for you to visit again. And for those of us who aren't able to travel just yet, they're rolling out the welcome map for us with these virtual experiences. So before I hand over to our presenter for this afternoon, I'm just going to go through a couple of logistics. So if you have any questions for the presenters, you can submit them through the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen in the centre of the Zoom window. There's going to be a Q&A at the end of the tour so if you have any questions, please feel free to send them throughout and we'll answer as many as possible at the end of the session. You can also upvote your favourite questions by giving them a thumbs up and then that way we'll ask the best questions first. So this is a Zoom webinar so your camera won't be on but you can use the chat function to participate with your fellow attendees and the speakers. Just make sure that you've selected all panellists and attendees so that everyone sees your messages. If you have any technical difficulties, you can always just send a panellist and we'll try and help you out as soon as possible. If it's an audio issue, often a quick fix is just to leave and then rejoin again. Finally, this presentation is going to be recorded and we're going to send the recording to all registrants in the coming weeks. That's all our logistics. So before we go any further, I'm going to start us off with a short video. So for those of you who don't know, that was the Musée d'Orsay and we're going to go inside the Musée d'Orsay now with our guide for the afternoon, Annette Robinson, who is a guide of the French National Museums and she's going to transport us to the world of the Musée d'Orsay. So Annette, please take it away. Hello, I'm very happy to do this tour for you. It's a mini tour and we're on the fifth level of our museum overlooking Paris. Enjoy the most stunning view that you can get over that part of Paris. Do you recognise Sacré-Cœur on top of Montmartre? Do you recognise the Opera House with the green metal roof? And do you recognise the Tuileries Gardens in front of you along the Rue de Rivoli? And we're just opposite the Musée du Louvre and there is the River Seine between us and actually what we have here is Paris, Paris through time. Isn't it poetic? Now this clock is also a memory of the buildings past. You've seen a little video and you know that the Musée d'Orsay wasn't meant to be a museum. It used to be a railway station. Now it wasn't only a station, there was a huge hotel included in the building, 370 rooms, each one equipped with a bathroom, high luxury. There was a splendid restaurant and ballroom and when they opened the Orsay station, it was 1900, time of the World Exhibition. People wondered, where are the trains? You couldn't see them neither moving in nor out. Actually these trains at the time were still steam engines but from Austerlitz station to here, there was a tunnel connecting the two stations together and of course a steam engine couldn't take them through a kilometre-long tunnel so they disconnected the steam machine and it was an electric machine that brought the trains to our station. Now that was high technology. It happened for the first time and by the way, this was the most beautiful and most modern station in the world. Beautiful because indoors you had a very unusual decor. Normally stations were never decorated because they were full of steam and smoke. No steam, no smoke here. People stepping into a big beautiful hall and then they discovered that the whole building was actually supported by a metal structure. You can't see it from the outside because of course it reminds us of the Eiffel Tower. We love the Eiffel Tower today but they didn't, the Parisians hated it. So the architect, Victor Lalou, could hide it, a stone facade on both sides from the outside but indoors, once indoors, everybody enjoyed it. Why is it not a station anymore? It was only in use for 62 years and then they had to close it. It was in a way too modern because this station was okay as long as the trains fitted in here. But time passed, traffic, well, rising traffic, the trains just didn't fit in here anymore so they had to close it. In 62 it was over and a lot of projects came along but finally the choice was put on what about a museum of the 19th century just in front of the Louvre and it would be a bridge over to modern art. And the first project was we're going to knock it down. They almost demolished it and finally at the end they decided well we could change it into a museum so we could keep the architecture and architecture is part of our museum's departments. We're talking about architecture. Our first masterpiece is actually the building. Now I think you're fit for a picnic. Would you like a picnic? Come with me. I told you this is the fifth level where the impressionists are and of course we love them today. We enjoy all of it. We don't have any problem. Some pictures travel, some never. This picture never travels anywhere else. It stays here. It's like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Would they part from the Mona Lisa even if it was for a week? Today we consider it as a milestone in the history of art. You should hear our young visitors. Normally we have lots of school classes. They always react immediately and they say that's a strange picnic. My mum never takes her clothes off when we have a picnic. So the question is why is she naked? And I don't have time to explain anything. And they say oh it was a hot day wasn't it? And another one says oh she's forgotten her swimsuit. Look this other woman is still having a bath. Now this is stunning because these kids without knowing discovered that the real subject here is not so much the picnic. It's about bathing. And the picture was inspired by a Venetian Renaissance artist called Titian. His picture, the open-air concert is in the Louvre just behind the Mona Lisa if ever you go. Just remember on the same wall just behind we have the open-air concert. Manet is the artist who represented this picture and it caused a big scandal. You know you just have to remember that art galleries didn't exist in the middle of the 19th century. This was done in 1863. And there was one way to exhibit and to live on your art because an artist who isn't seen can't live on his In France it's an institution since the 17th century. It's called the Le Salon. It's an exhibition annual and if the jury accepts you, great for you. But the jury didn't accept the picture. They refused it. But it wasn't the only one refused. There were hundreds of them. Actually 2,000 pictures were refused and the artists protested, wrote a letter to the emperor and the emperor decided that this year all the rejected would be there too but of course not in the same room. So there was a Salon des Refusés, the rejected Salon, and of all these bad pictures he was the worst. Now what is so awful about this picture? The fact that she's naked sitting beside dressed men? That wasn't the problem. The problem was she was too real. Her name is Victorine Meuron and you can recognize her in another picture downstairs, Olympia, very famous also. Does she look like a goddess? May I ask you Lauren to fuse in Cabanel's Birth of Venus? Thank you. Now listeners will see the picture and discover that there is a lady lying on an ocean. God knows how she can do it, a little footy above. It was considered as a masterpiece. The emperor bought it. Now it's not a proof, is it? Today for us it's not a masterpiece anymore because the picture lacks totally a composition. There's no inner structure. It's very neatly painted. You can look through a magnifying glass. You won't see a brush stroke while here you see all the brush. Yeah, if you come back to Manet you can see how he painted the grass. You can see how he painted that jacket. Now this was not a jacket at the time for the visitors of the salon. They said, what kind of a fabric is that? Now Manet would answer, I'm not a tailor, you know. I'm a painter. It's the color I'm interested in. They would say, now this is wishy-washy. A child can do grass like this. He would say, I'm not a gardener either. It's the color I'm interested in. And when these people said, oh, this is awful because this woman is not beautiful enough to be naked in the picture and she's not a gardener, she's not a nymph, they would say, I have never seen angels. Why should I paint them? Actually Courbet said this. Courbet is a realist and so is Manet. But when you look at Courbet's pictures, they're quite in volume. Everybody said, oh, that picture is flat. Now just think of it. All pictures are flat. But he didn't cheat. He refused to use the tricks with the eye, you know, perspective, light and shade of that. And they all called him incapable. He hasn't been trained. He knows it all. But he says, fed up. You know why? Because if you're not content, go to the photographer instead. Now photography was there since 1839 and it changed a lot in the world of arts and especially in paintings. If you ask me, where does modern art start? It starts here with Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. Why did he change the title? Because there was a young artist discovering this bath, discovering that there was a sort of a picnic in the foreground. You see, it's like a still life. And he said, I should paint a big picnic too. Let's see what he did. His name was Monet. Manet thought that can't be. There's somebody mocking me. Actually, it was really his name, Claude Monet. And you see between the two pictures, I bet your picnics look rather like this one, of course, dressed differently. But this looks like a real picnic. So it was years after this one painted in 1865 that Manet re-baptised the bath into Luncheon on the Grass. Now there's a big difference between the two. A lot of things are similar. Look at the grass, painted the same way, very similar, big brush strokes, not hidden behind anything, just seen. You can also see how he paints these dresses and he doesn't want to give us the impression I can touch it either. Flat colours, like in Manet's case, this red, totally flat, flattened shape. All this is in common with Manet. But when you look at the people, there is a man dressed, obviously, in a dark blue suit. And you could think there is black on the picture, on the canvas. There isn't. There is hardly any black in Monet's pictures, apart from the black dots and the ribbon. Now these people, we know their names, but it's not necessary. It's not a group portrait. But I can tell you, this is Camus, this is Gustave Courbet, the realist, the man behind, his name is Frédéric Basi. But if you don't know, it's not important. Actually, Camus played all the girls' parts and Frédéric Basi is also the one standing on the other side. You see, it's what we call a genre picture, a daily life scene. But actually, they're not really what's all about that picture. The real subject is light. And if you want to do a picture like this, of course, you can't do it that size. But you have to paint outside. You have to be in the forest and do it on the spot. And there is this painted sketch in Moscow. That huge canvas, it lacks a lot of space. You see, it's not complete. Actually, it ended up for many years rolled up, stored in a humid cellar, and Monet had to leave it there because he couldn't pay the rent. No money, when you call Monet, that's bad. And so, after the years, he finally had some money, bought it back, and then he discovered it was full of humid dust and he cut it himself. Now, this was painted in 1865. Impressionism is already there. Let's move over to the puppies. You might have heard about this picture. And you see, it's not the size that is important. It's a small picture, and it's worldwide known, and we love it today. The contemporaries had problems. Why does this woman has no face? You can't see her eyes, neither her mouth, no nose. The little boy's face is blank too. Oh, there's family. Perhaps he wants to get rid of them. No, he needs them so much, he puts them twice in his picture, Monet. This is Claude Monet's puppy picture, and it was refused. Of course, nobody would accept a picture like that in the official exhibition. And Monet came together with a group of artists, all the time refused, so we show our pictures on our own. And they rented a studio of a photographer. His name was Nada, very famous. And so they called in the public and critics, and all they could see were dots, no puppies. They wanted to see the details. And it's not the subject that's new. It's how it's painted. Monet only shows you what he could see from a certain distance. And this is what it gives you the impression. You were there beside him, and it just happened, a moment of the day. You see, if you want to paint light, you can't draw it. But if you're outdoors, you can try and light into color. And this is what they did. They painted them outdoors, the Impressionists. But Monet was not amongst them. Monet is a leader. Monet wants to do it his own way. He's not interested in open-air painting. And if you have a problem between Monet and the Impressionists, Monet uses black, white, and contrasts. But he's a hero to this generation. We can do it on our own, too. But they hadn't enough money to do each one for his own, so they had this group exhibition. And now we're moving on. And this group exhibition included artists like Sisley, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir. We have this one of Renoir's absolute masterpieces, Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette. It's an open-air disco. And if you come a little closer, you might see again the Sacré-Cœur through the window. And the Moulin de la Galette is just beside the Sacré-Cœur. And when Renoir paints this picture, the Sacré-Cœur is still a building site. Now, Renoir's option is rather, I want rather represent people, figure. I'm a figure artist, while Monet will be more the landscape artist. And in this picture, there is a crowd. We know who is modeling for him in the foreground, but that's not important. What is important is, you see, it's an outdoor scene, and you could go there on the weekend, either in the afternoon or in the evening. Which moment is represented? Of course, there are lamps, there are gas lamps in the picture, but they don't bring in the lights here. It is the afternoon, and the light is filtered through the trees, dancing on people's bottoms, shoulders, foreheads, on what we call canopy, you know, these foreheads. And this picture is so full of joy of life. You would never think that Renoir's life was not so joyful at the time. Renoir doesn't paint what he lives through. He says life is bad enough, difficult enough. Pictures should be happy pictures. And the art critics couldn't believe it. That's not a chair. They want you to be able to touch the wood. They said, poor women. He transforms them into cadavers, because she has a green forehead. Now, you know that the green color comes from the reflection of the trees. So what Renoir did is study light, but instead of studying light on a landscape, he studies it on women's skins. That's what he loved most. Now, just a few words about Sisley and Pissarro. They were both, just like Monet, more interested into landscapes, but everybody has a different focus. Here, Sisley represents a flood that really happened. But he says, I always start painting my pictures doing the sky first, and he's interested by the air. Try and paint a sky. It's incredibly difficult. Pissarro emphasizes on earth. His horizons are always very high located on the canvas. It was Pissarro who invited Cézanne to join them and to do open air work. Now, you see this first Impressionist exhibition. They didn't have a name. It happened in 1874. This was a big shock, and they were called Impressionists, because Monet exhibited beside the copies, Impression, Rising Sun, a picture that you can see in Paris, but not with us. It's in the Marmoton Museum. From that moment onwards, they had a name, and all together, they will exhibit eight times. In 1886, there will be the last Impressionist exhibition, but already the younger generation now comes up, joins them, and they are called Post-Impressionists. Now, let's move a little further, because there is a railway station, and of course, it's not the Orsay. It's Saint-Lazare station, painted in 1877, and you see here the station master. Monet asked for permission to do pictures in the station because he didn't paint just one. He painted a little series, not always the same point of view. He changed inside the station several points of view, but they will be very important because it's the first time that Monet will paint a series, and in this view, you have a House Manion building, typical House Manion building, because it's still there. You see a bridge. It's the Pont de l'Europe. It's still there. These houses are still there. The roof is still there. There is an extension. What we don't have in the Saint-Lazare station are steam engines, and you see that was the problem with us. Our station was a closed hall. The trains came in through the underground. Here, the trains were visible from the outside, so when the trains grew longer, it wasn't a problem. Neither of these stations was a problem, and so they could adapt a platform here they hadn't wanted, and extensions. Now, what Manet interests here is not so much the train or the station itself. Poor station master. He must have been very disappointed when he saw the result because it's not about their job. It's about the steam. What is steam? Water. Water can change color. It can be snow. It can be an ocean. It can be a river. It can be steam, and when you have water in the landscape, you double light, and it's all about light. Now, the only one of the Impressionists who said, I'm not an Impressionist. I'm not an Impressionist. I never paint outside, was Degas. You're on a horse race. Imagine you want to bet on the blue jockey, and you want to take a photograph of him. The moment you press the button, the blue jockey moved on. A yellow jockey jumped into your picture. A cart just passed by. Wrong moment, and somebody is spoiling your photograph. Has it never happened before? Of course, we all have these sorts of experiences, and this shows why Degas couldn't do it outside. He couldn't use photography to do it because he had it all in his mind before. He did some sketches. Back to the studio, he painted, and of course, we know Degas today for his famous little ballet dancer scenes. We had recently a big show here, Degas at the opera, and this show has now moved on to Washington, where you have the original of the little ballet dancer, a sculpture made with wax, and like here, a real tutu, a real fabric for the little corset, real hair, a real ribbon, real little leather shoes, and it's the only sculpture that Degas ever exhibited during his lifetime. It was in 1881. Everybody was agreeing. She is ugly and vicious. She has her revenge today. So many people come, especially to admire our lovely ballet dancer. Let's move a little bit further. We have two pictures again by Renoir in front of us. Their enormous dance in the city on the left and dance on the countryside on the right. Now, both pictures were painted in 1880, and Renoir started to have really problems, bad arthritis, and he moved back to the studio. Even the picture on the right was done indoors, and actually, when you compare the ball, Moulin de la Galette, with this picture, you see that the shapes were blurred, and the first picture here, you come back to a more distinguished shape. It's also because Renoir said, you know, when you paint all the time outdoors, you can't draw anymore. There is a moment when you just don't know how to do it anymore. So he said, I want to do it the old way, and he faded away a little bit from Impressionism, and so did Manet. By the way, Manet is not only an Impressionist. We will come a little further. There was a moment when he discovered, why should I change all the time the point of view? I could stay all day on the same spot and paint what I have in front of me, but the point is, I want to stop the moment of the day. I want to paint something the photographer could not do. In a photography, you would never see which moment of the day it was. He will show you from minute to minute that it's not the same moment, and we have in this room a series of five cathedrals. Actually, it's the same cathedral, and it's part of a series of 28 pictures, 28 times the same church. And yet, moving on, you will see on the left an early morning. Now the sun rises, and it will become a very sunny day, and then you will see, well, there is also a moment when the weather is not so good. It's grey, and the fascinating thing is, from a far distance, you see grey. From a short distance, you see lots of colours, and of course, they were not painted at the same day, the five of them. And there are 28, because he starts early in the morning, he finishes late in the afternoon, early evening, and he has started per day seven pictures. Now the following day, he wants to pick them up. If the weather is good, he can continue with pictures like that. If the weather is not so good, he will continue with pictures like this. But he has to watch the moment of the day, otherwise he will miss the light. It's all about light. And so you have 28 of these. There are at least 20 pictures of haystacks, 20 pictures of poplars. How many pictures are called water lilies? 250, and maybe a little more. You should be careful. Perhaps you have a cellar, or go upstairs under the roof, you might discover a new one. And you see this picture, very famous, because you can see a little bridge, they call it the Japanese bridge. And you can tell where Monet was standing, looking at this pond, looking at this bridge, looking at these weeping willows, that actually everything we see in this picture was planted, planned, planted by himself. And he created in Giverny, a lovely place to visit if ever you come to Paris, he created everything in this garden. We have over there another little bridge. It seems, it looks exactly the same. And you will see it's not the same moment of the day, and it's not the same season. So you can understand what meant to make series. But now do you understand also that the subject is not a problem. Actually, you could call all these pictures, you could just give them numbers, number one, number two, number three, number four, and nobody else painted that way in those years. Which means now we're in the 90s. I must tell you just a few things about Giverny. Monet had a wife who died very early, left him with two little boys. But he was lucky because he found a second wife, who was the wife of a collector. And she had six kids. And she was a friend of Monet and Camille. So she told her friend Camille on her deathbed, you can go in peace, I look after your little boy. And she kept her promise. And Monet and her created a new family, but they needed a new house. So he was looking for a house. And one day, he was in a train. The train passed in front of this house hidden behind the trees. It's a pink facade with green, gray colored shutters, and this garden in front of him. So the train passed in front of this garden. And Monet fell in love with it. It was in 1883. And he was 43 years now. So he said, why does this train not stop here? I will go out immediately. The train didn't stop, but he came back a few days later. He inquired, whose house is it? And they said to him, actually, it's empty. The owner isn't living there. Isn't there an angel? I believe an angel. So actually, he could move into the house as a lodger. He rented the house. And he rented it for seven years. You can visit it. And it's worthwhile, but it's the garden that really counts. Why the garden? Because the first thing he did, he pulled out trees. And Alice's wife said, why do you do that? It's a crime to pull out trees. And she said, now from our bedroom now, looking down to our garden, it looks like a photograph. It doesn't look like a picture. I want my garden to be full of color so that I can paint in there. And she was happy because she knew then that his second husband would be much more in the garden. Now he recreated this garden, and he created a second garden and a piece of land that he could buy seven years later. And then came up a new painting. And this new painting is very different from the two pictures around, because now you can't see what is in front of you. We're actually, like him, standing on the little bridge, looking down to the water, and he's showing us something that is horizontal in a vertical way. Nobody else did that before. But this means there is depth because it's water. But the picture is opening up to all sides. It's just a detail of the little pond. And if you like that, you should come back to us and then go over a little bridge to the Tuileries Gardens, where we have another museum connected to ours. It's the Orangerie. Imagine here you're standing in front of beautiful pictures, but each time you move on, you see another picture. In the Orangerie, you have two armchair rooms, and when you walk into them, you're not in front of the picture. You're right inside the picture. And on the wall, you have huge canvases, all this height. But imagine this is half of one canvas. We have 22 canvases, four meters, 25 large, and they're associated to eight ensembles. And every ensemble, every assemblage of canvases, shows you a different moment of the day. If you're stressed, don't take those. Come to us. And when you're in the Orangerie, you can sit down, just watch and think and meditate, and then you will come out and say, I don't need those. That's for sure. Would you now move on? We have almost finished our tour. It's frustrating. I just want to say one thing. Monet's art was almost abstract to the contemporaries, and Cézanne's pictures, well, they were awkward, because people could not understand how can this be a table in a kitchen? Our kitchen tables are parallel to the floor. Is it parallel? No way. Look at this basket. Too full, too heavy to be able to stand on the edge of the table. It should fall over. And now imagine for a second, I withdraw this table cloth from the table. You would see what is a little bit hidden behind the table cloth. You see, this part of the table doesn't connect that part. And our kids say, oh, the table has moved. No, tables can't move. We move. The artist moves around the table. And the artist, Cézanne, did something amazing for the time, because in changing point of view in one picture, he opened up to cubism. Cézanne died in 1906. One year later, Picasso went to see a big show discovering these pictures. And the same year, he painted his first cubist picture. So you see, this is really a bridge to modern art. Our museum opens up to modern art. And the impressionists themselves became predecessors of modern art. By the way, all these colors didn't exist before the idea came up that you could do it outside. As long as the artists only painted in their studios, the pictures stayed very dull, and the pure colors arrived with open air. But once these pure colors are on the canvases, now the painters, they can go back to the studio, do it indoors, but they use the same colors. And this will happen with Gauguin, with Van Gogh. We have them, but we have no time to see them all. And by the way, here he goes through the pointillism movement. We should say neo-impressionism. You see, this picture is painted by Signac. And you see how bright the colors are. And he had a good idea. He did the frame himself. And he painted the little dots instead of visible brushstrokes. Now, the inventor of this movement was a friend of Signac, a good friend. And he was greatly admired by Signac. His name was Sura. And Sura's circus shows a very colorful picture from a far distance. Coming close, we will discover there actually are only three colors. They're yellow, red, and blue, primary colors. Why do we see green, orange, and violet from a far distance? That's our eye that mixes them instead of the artist's brush. All expressionists, Matisse at the start, they used this technique before they came over to expressionism. So, you see, we're actually here at the edge of old art over to modern art. And have a look at this beautiful coffee shop or cafeterias, as we say. It was designed quite recently by two designers. They're Brazilians. They're called Campana. The French would say Campana. Never mind. And they had the idea of an aquatic sort of ambience. These lights are supposed to be jellyfish. You have the blue wall at the far end. It looks like Monet's wall tree surfaces with a reflection of light. And by the way, they love the water lilies so much that they called their chairs water lilies. And if you don't mind, I'm going to sit down now with you. And I'll be able to take off my mask. And then we can start a little conversation, because you're going to ask me a few questions. I just have to be careful taking this off. Great relief, as you say. It's necessary, but it's a bit awkward. You have to communicate with people and you have this in front of you. You did an absolutely fantastic job, Annette. That was such a wonderful tour. Our audience absolutely loved it. They've all just said that it was such a treat to visit the exhibition with such a knowledgeable guide. And they've got a ton of questions for you. So, I'm going to dive into them so that we can answer as many as possible. So, we've got a question from one of our audience members asking if you could meet any artist dead or alive for a day, who would it be and why? Now you're asking me about the artists I just showed to you and about them. I would hesitate between Mani and Mani, because Mani is really, he's not an impressionist. He tried to get in the official show because he said, I don't want to give in. I want to fight against the officials in an official way. And I want to break into the official exhibition, while the others gave up the fight and said, we'll do it on our own way. Now, it's a difficult question, because I would love to meet them all. You know, I would love to meet Renoir also. Renoir painted a lot of faces and they look alike. And he said, now that photography is there, we can show the people as we look at them. And some people, and I was part of them, I didn't like so much Renoir at the beginning, because my mom was a nurse and she got lots of chocolate boxes when I was a kid. And what was on top of the box, you know, a picture by Renoir. So, it gave me indigestion. Before I could eat the chocolate, I just said, oh, that's not my cup of tea. And when I arrived in Paris in 75 and saw real pictures by Renoir, I changed totally my mind. And I discovered that sometimes you have to look at a picture from, why don't I like it so much? Or why do I like it? And then you discover sometimes things about yourself that you ignore. I think art is there to open up our minds, not to close a bit. And so, I would have a problem with this question. I'm sorry. I'm perhaps thieving the audience. But another artist I really would like to meet is Picasso. And so is Matisse, you know. I would love them all. You have to have a dinner party with all of them. You couldn't just choose one. Now, you know what you can. Yes, sorry. No, go ahead. I just said, I wrote a book about Picasso and it was afterwards, it was just as if I had lived with him. And I did so with Matisse. And that's, again, an experience that makes us think we were in the story. And I recently did a book about the water lilies. And now I'm into Monet just as well. So, actually, if you want to meet an artist, you just dive into their work. And that is the best way to meet them. And you don't have to be an art historian to do that, you know. We had last year this exhibition of the black model. It was the idea of Denise Morel, who is an American, and she was in the finance, no connection to art history. And she had just a few lessons. And she saw in one of her lessons a reproduction of Manet's Olympia. And the teacher commented about the white model, saying Victorine Morel, the same that you saw in the picnic. And she didn't give any name to the black model. And Denise said, what about her? And the teacher couldn't answer. And then Denise started to do research. And she became an art historian. You see, you all could be art historians. You just have to have a little bit of passion and then dive into it. There's so many books, so many ways to actually have to see pictures life. That's one of the conditions. So, actually, I'm putting you under pressure because you have to come. And then you have to decide on your favourite artist. Sorry, they're questions I'm not answering. No, you're answering questions that I've asked and questions that I bet people didn't know they needed the answers to. And I think linked to that, someone has asked if there are particular days of the week that they can take their time visiting all of the floors in the Musee d'Oxtey in the evenings. So, I think the Louvre does that. There's one evening. It's Thursday evening, which is the long day. And it's supposed to open until 10 o'clock, but half an hour earlier, you're meant to move on towards the exit. But it's a good day to come in the evening, yeah, Thursday. Never come on a Monday. Mondays are closing days here while the Louvre is open and the Louvre is shut when we're open on Tuesday. Okay. And then can you tell me, one of our audience members has asked what the criteria is for something to be considered a masterpiece? Cabanel's picture used to be considered as a masterpiece. And everybody loved that kind of picture at the time, you know, very properly painted. Everything is perfect. No big lumps of color on the surface. And they didn't see that that picture was very Cabanel. The woman was not a real woman. She was a Barbie doll, sort of, because they all look alike at the time. All the goddesses, nymphs have the same sort of shape, like out of the mold. And the colors, well, you remember the bather in Manet's picture? She was very pale. They never sunbathed at the time. But the goddesses had to be pink and white, like Martin said, Zola. Now, that was what they considered as a masterpiece. And Cabanel was a clever artist because he knew what the doctor ordered. And all he did, he had talent, but he was weak. He wanted to earn money with it. And he got through. As soon as he died, his pictures were buried with him. That picture, the birth of Venus, was for a long time in the cellar of the Louvre. All art historians, when they go through their studies, they know about it because that was the picture that was the opposite of Manet. And actually, in our museum, you can say most of the artists really loved so much today. They didn't please the contemporaries because they went on trying to find new ways to say things. You see a picture, the subjects haven't changed. You can paint ordinary still lifes. You can paint a landscape. You can paint a daily life scene. Those subjects were down the bottom at the time. What they considered most was the official historical subjects. And they could be painted on huge canvases. And all these official artists, they did exactly what they were expected to do. And the ones who came out later, like the impressionists, post-impressionists, think about Van Gogh. He never, well, he sold one picture during his lifetime. Today, he's a superstar. Now, perhaps a real artist is not necessarily the most famous during his lifetime, but his pictures, above the fact that you might like them or dislike them, they have to bring something new. You see, the subjects, you can't change them, but the way to represent them, this is what you can bring in a personal way. They all have their special own way of doing it. And, well, it's a lot. We could discuss about that question for hours. I compare Cabanel a little bit with, I shouldn't say that, but I do. I will be frank with you. I think about Jeff Boons. Jeff Boons is earning millions. He's doing a good job. All his works are neat and proper and so well done. Actually, he has a whole, you know, crowd of people doing it for him now. But I wonder whether in a hundred years' time, we will still think that his sculptures are masterpieces. Okay, interesting. Right, I'm going to see if we can squeeze in one more question before we sign off. Yes, of course. A very popular question that's coming through is whether or not you do tours at the Musee d'Orsay more often. I think people have just thoroughly enjoyed your guidance, so we wondered if there are other opportunities to see you speak. Oh, you know, of course, you will see me probably on a Tuesday or on a Thursday or sometimes on a Saturday, but I have lots of colleagues, you know, much younger than I am now. I'm on the way out, you know. And each one of them will bring another point of view through. Following a guide is going through a filter, but I would say perhaps you will find it interesting to go through with a person who will point out a few things to you because it's impossible to see it all in one shot. And, you know, there is another big clock in the hall and children love it and I say to them, I hate that clock because I think it puts people under pressure when they say, I want to see it all in one hour. Actually, one of the kids said to me, isn't it a time machine? No, that's a good idea. You know, if you really want to enjoy this, go and follow kids. You would love it. I learn a lot from them. That is a lovely, lovely tip to end off with. Annette, just thank you so much. We really thoroughly enjoyed this. I can see our audience thoroughly enjoyed it too. To our audience, thank you for joining us for this Tickets Awakening Week virtual experience. If you guys are based in France, you can experience France Awakens in person and you can go to the Musée d'Orsay. If you want more information about Tickets Awakening Weeks, you can visit tickets.com forward slash blog forward slash Awakening Weeks and you can find information about France Awakens and about our other Awakening Weeks around the world. Once more, thank you so much, Annette, and thank you to everyone for joining us. Bye-bye, everyone. Bye-bye.