Guy Cogeval, who was director of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay from 2008 to 2017, died on November 13 at the age of 70. His death, after a long illness, was reported by Le Monde on November 17.
An iconoclastic, and at times controversial figure in the museum world, Cogeval was an impassioned scholar of 19th-century art whose specialty was the Nabis, a group of French Post-Impressionist painters active in the late 1800s.
Born in Paris in 1955, Cogeval graduated from the Paris Institute of Political studies in 1977. In 1982 he earned a master’s degree in art history, and in 1985 he passed France’s competitive entrance exam for training as a curator.
He began his curatorial career as an intern in the Orsay’s film department. He later worked as an assistant curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon and then as deputy director of cultural affairs at the Louvre.
Between 1992 and 1998, Cogeval was director of the National Museum of French Monuments in Paris, where he curated “Italian Renaissance Architecture, from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo” in 1994. The show subsequently traveled to the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Altes Museum in Berlin.
In 1998, Cogeval was appointed director general of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. While there, he organized a number of exhibitions that later traveled to Paris, including “Hitchcock and Art” (2000), “Erotic Picasso” (2001), and the much lauded “Édouard Vuillard, Master of Post-Impressionism” (2003).
Following his arrival at the Musée d’Orsay in 2008, Cogeval implemented major changes to the institution. As president of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, he merged the two museums into a single establishment. He also oversaw a major remodeling of 80 percent of the Orsay’s galleries and a rehang of almost all its collection.
Cogeval mounted important traveling exhibitions of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings during his tenure at the Orsay, which is known for holding the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. More eclectic shows, often organized with or by guest curators, included exhibitions devoted to crime and punishment, the male nude, and Impressionism and fashion.
But even as Cogeval garnered high marks for his curating and for his fiscal oversight of the institution, he was increasingly criticized for his management style. In 2017, just one year into his third term as director, he was replaced by Laurence des Cars, who is now director of the Musée du Louvre.
Since that time, Cogeval had been continuing his research into the Nabis and Symbolism.
