MUSEE D’ORSAY TRACKS 19TH CENTURY

As crowds of Parisians line up every day to enter the Museum D’Orsay, the new museum has already been hailed by French television and newspapers as one of the great art museums of Paris. But its collections will probably surprise and perhaps even confuse foreign visitors.

The museum opened its doors to the public for the first time on Dec. 9. It is safe to assume that its main attraction, especially for foreign visitors, is its incredible store of Impressionist paintings and pastels, the works of painters like Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, who are surely now the most popular of all French artists. Most foreigners know little about the rest of 19th-Century French art.

The Impressionist works had been displayed in the old Jeu de Paume museum until it closed last August. Foreigners and French would wait for several hours outside the Jeu de Paume, in the Tuileries gardens just off the Place de la Concorde, for a chance to pack into its little rooms and see these great paintings crowded together in poor lighting. Despite these conditions, almost everyone looked on the Jeu de Paume as a jewel of Paris.

Many foreign visitors coming to the new Museum D’Orsay for the first time may simply expect to find a grand and colossal version of the old Jeu de Paume. But the Museum D’Orsay is not an enormous temple of Impressionist art. It has been dedicated instead to the 19th Century--actually, all the art produced between the republican uprisings of 1848 and the beginning of World War I in 1914--and the curators have taken the assignment seriously.

In general, a visitor must pass through a good deal of unfamiliar 19th-Century French art before reaching most of the coveted Impressionists. No one can be sure yet whether this will open rewarding new vistas or simply get in the way. But there will be no way for a visitor to ignore the rest of the 19th Century while heading toward the Impressionists.

This is ensured by the entrance to the museum itself. A visitor enters an enormous hall 450 feet long, 130 feet wide and 105 feet high that acts as a kind of monumental window on 19th-Century art. The immediate sweep and beauty are breathtaking.

The size and scope come from the origins of the new museum. The Museum D’Orsay has been fashioned from the old Gare D’Orsay railroad station, on the bank of the Seine across from the Tuileries and the Louvre. This station, designed by Victor Laloux and completed in 1900, is regarded as a distinguished work of 19th-Century French architecture. A great clock on one wall and the curving ceiling of iron ribs and glass retain the old, spacious atmosphere of the railroad station.

Italian architect Gae Aulenti has created exhibition rooms by separating them from the hall with great slabs. These slabs still leave a great deal of space in the hall, and the curators have filled it with some of the typical large sculptures of the mid-19th Century, many of which were disdained then--and still are--by intellectuals.

The exhibition rooms off the great hall are devoted mainly to painting before 1870. A visitor will find some striking and familiar favorites, especially the work of Manet but including as well that of Henri Fantin-Latour, James McNeill Whistler (the portrait of his mother), Gustave Courbet, Honore Daumier and Jean-Baptiste Corot. A visitor may also feel a sense of discovery when coming upon works like the landscape paintings of Jean Francois Millet, Theodore Rousseau and the rest of the Barbizon school, their works long neglected in the dark and little-known rooms of the upper reaches of the Louvre. These have prime exhibition space now, just off the great hall.

Evidently for historical reasons, almost as much exhibition space is devoted to artists who made a great splash in the 19th Century by winning the prizes at the annual salons but who lost their standing long ago. Some of it has long been derided as pompier, or fireman, art--pretentious and pompous work in a classical style that got its name from its penchant for depicting nude mythological figures with metal helmets like those worn by French firemen. The early Impressionists rebelled against such artists.

To reach the bulk of the Impressionists, a visitor must take an elevator, escalator or staircase to the highest floor of the building and its series of galleries apart from the spectacular hall of the museum. These galleries have been built into a large passageway that once ran across the top of the station and into the top of the adjoining luxurious Hotel D’Orsay.

One art critic, Philippe Dagen of Le Monde, France’s most influential newspaper, has found it symbolic that the curators would want a visitor to mount to the highest floor of the museum to find its treasure, its pinnacle--the great Impressionist works. Yet Dagen was not pleased when he got there. “It disappoints,” he wrote. “Worse: it bores.” He insisted that the Museum D’Orsay has simply put too many Impressionist paintings on its upstairs walls.

But Dagen is in the minority. Other critics have been dazzled by room after room of the great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Renoir, Monet, Paul Cezanne, Degas, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin and many others. Under conditions far different from that of the Jeu de Paume, they are hung on spacious walls under a combination of sunlight and artificial light. And a visitor can rest for a moment or two by walking out on the adjoining terrace for a magnificent view of Paris across the river.

A final floor at mid-level, rimming the great hall, completes the exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection. This is devoted mainly to sculpture and to decorative arts like furniture from the Art Nouveau period around the turn of the century. Not least among its delights is its vantage over the great hall that once housed trains and locomotives and is now probably the most distinctive feature of the museum.

In all, according to the curators, the Museum D’Orsay collection consists of 2,300 paintings, 250 pastels, 1,500 sculptures, 1,100 pieces of furniture and other art objects, 15,000 photographs and a large number of architectural models and plans.