ALL ABOARD FOR OPENING OF PARIS ART MUSEUM

Fifteen years after its escape from demolition, the transformed Gare d’Orsay railroad station was inaugurated Monday by President Francois Mitterrand as the new Musee d’Orsay, a lavish and enormous museum dedicated to the 19th Century and displaying, among many other works, the largest collection of Impressionist art in France.

President Mitterrand, flanked by former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Premier Jacques Chirac, flicked aside a white cloth that covered the inaugural stone and led a large group of politicians on a tour of the museum, which houses 2,300 paintings, 250 pastels, 1,500 sculptures, 1,100 pieces of furniture, jewelry and other art objects, and 15,000 photographs.

The president made no speech, but in an earlier television interview from the museum he described the project as the product of three successive presidential administrations and as “a beautiful example of aesthetic continuity.”

The late President Georges Pompidou stopped the impending demolition of the railroad station, Giscard started the transformation into a museum, and Mitterrand increased the budget and settled on the focal period--from the republican uprisings of 1848 to the beginning of World War I in 1914.

The station and an adjoining hotel, which were designed by architect Victor Laloux and completed in 1900, were regarded as outstanding examples of the architecture of the period.

When the station was almost finished, painter Edouard Detaille said, as a kind of joking compliment, “The station is superb and has the air of a palace of fine arts. I propose that Laloux make the change if there is still time.”

The transformation of the station into a palace of fine arts eight decades later took eight years of work at a cost of 1.3 billion francs ($200 million).

The museum keeps much of the open atmosphere of a great train station, and a visitor enters a tremendous hall that is 450 feet long, 130 feet wide and 105 feet high. To fill these spaces, French curators have displayed a large number of monumental 19th-Century statues that are often disdained these days by art critics.

Italian architect Gae Aulenti, who designed the interior of the museum, has set off from the great hall, by means of huge slabs, a large number of exhibition rooms. Many paintings from the mid-19th Century, especially the works of Edouard Manet, are displayed in these rooms.

The best-known Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, most of which came from the old and overcrowded Jeu de Paume Museum that was closed at the end of last summer, are displayed in rooms on the upper level of the museum that are shut off from the old station and lead into the old luxury hotel.

These rooms, which include the works of Pierre-August Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, look out on a terrace with a magnificent view of the Louvre just across the Seine River and of Montmartre in the distance.

Although the museum was inaugurated Monday, it will not be open to the public until next Tuesday.