<i> MUSEE D’ORSAY--LE GRAND</i> HOOT

Since December three subjects have dominated conversation in the French capital--terrorism, AIDS and the Musee d’Orsay, or so says one Parisian wit. By now the world knows that an immense former railroad depot designed by Victor Laloux and opened in 1900 on the left bank of the Seine has been recycled as a museum for Post-Romantic 19th-Century art. For most people the new museum is significant because it provides spacious quarters for beloved French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. The old building, the Jeu de Paume museum, was charming and in exactly the right scale for such masterpieces as Edouard Manet’s once-shocking “Olympia,” but the crush of pilgrims finally rendered it unworkable.

The idea of the Musee d’Orsay is both to provide breathing space for the world’s most popular painting style and--to the consternation of more than a few cognoscenti--reintegrate the work with art from the academic salon of the time. Several generations of aesthetes were nurtured on the notion that these official pompiers were a lot of genteel and bombastic hacks cranking out erotikitsch posing as high-minded Neo-Classicism to satisfy the vulgar taste of the epoch of Napoleon III. Thus, the very idea of the museum was positioned for controversy.

All the same, the opening was greeted with almost universal critical enthusiasm in the popular press. The respected French critic Pierre Schneider’s blessing was echoed by his colleagues. American publications waxed ecstatic. Newsweek called it a triumph and Time deemed it the finest museum of its kind.

Not surprisingly, it is a huge popular success. Long queues form daily--even on Mondays until prospective visitors realize the museum is closed. Turnstiles click between 1,200 to 1,500 times a day. That means more than a quarter-million souls have already ogled the new art palace, a figure that begins to rival that of the Pompidou Center or the Eiffel Tower.

Ah, the Eiffel Tower. Ah, Beaubourg. The French hated them in the beginning and, true to form, a backlash has built up against the Orsay among French artists and intellectuals. In printed reports, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss denounced its elaborate decor and echoed the common complaint that the place gives him a migraine. Painter Pierre Soulages worried that great innovative works by Cezanne and others are trivialized in the company of official art. Kinetic sculptor Pol Bury compared the yawning architectural space to those mythical mothers who devour their children and accused the whole scheme of pandering to popular taste and forces of the art market.

A prominent Parisian dealer cheerfully acknowledged that prices for once obscure official art have climbed precipitously since the Orsay opened, while a leading collector of Symbolist art wondered grumblingly why today’s audience has to be subjected to art considered third-rate even in its heyday.

So what is all this? Today’s modernist pompiers feeling threatened by the erosion of their aesthetic gospel? A predictable manifestation of France’s masochistic talent for self-criticism?

After two full days of tramping the grandiose spaces of the Orsay, the first-time visitor has enough contradictory thoughts to reduce his brain to a bowl of neutral gray porridge. Well, this is real nice, but that’s not so good, but maybe it doesn’t really matter.

This kind of equivocation is almost predictable when faced with a large and complex phenomenon, but none of it cancels the overwhelming impression of the first five minutes in the place.

Even the most cosmopolitan of Saudi sheiks knows he is not in Kansas when faced by the immense arch of the Orsay. Thanks to the iron-girder construction invented in the 19th Century, the structure bridges some five stories of interrupted area. The horizontal axis tunnels into space precipitously and one has no trouble imagining the 200 trains a day that used to come and go from here while wondering idly how many soccer matches could be played on the floor without bumping into each other. Four? Five?

Sheik, sultan and citizen alike are reduced to goggling hayseeds. “Holy cow! Martha, would ya look at that?”

One is impressed, but what is the impression? Does it have to do with the majesty of history as one might expect from a place designed to allow chronology rather than selectivity to determine artistic value?

The vast span could only be modern. Its metal ribs and acres of skylight are so hangar-like the Graf Zeppelin could materialize in it and not disturb a thing. At the same time, the coffers of gold and olive that supply the solid walls are like restorations of ancient Roman public baths. What time is it?

The Italian architect in charge of designing the interior, Gae Aulenti, organized the space by imposing two-story stone ramps along the sides with a processional aisle rising in slow stages down the center. With its side-aisle crypts that sanctify and entomb such masterpieces as Monet’s garden paintings, it resembles nothing so much as an Egyptian New Kingdom royal temple-tomb from the Valley of the Kings at Thebes. The longitudinal axis culminates in two vertical blank block towers that look to some detractors like the work of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer.

But what time is it?

We find out, at last, looking back from the towers to the other end of the station where hangs an ornate gold-and-black clock that must be the Mt. Rushmore of timepieces. According to the symbolism of the building, it is running at once forward and backward.

It’s Post-Modern time, folks.

History is confounded and the great epochs are shuffled like a pack of cards. The heritage of architecture is whipped into a smorgasbord of gorgeous canapes intended to dazzle the tourist and amuse the gourmet.

Only a dyspeptic academician would insist that it isn’t fun. Architecturally, the Musee d’Orsay is a magnificent hoot and one would no more come back to Paris without seeing it again than miss a ride on one’s favorite roller coaster, even if the experience is a little queasy.

But what does such an ambiance do to the art it envelopes? Well, the symbolism of the museum and its mute subtext give pride of place to the academic art that professionals hold in perverse affection as a source of camp humor. The main ceremonial aisle is lined with white marble statues of nubile nudes pretending to be Hope or Charity. The first painting encountered is Thomas Couture’s elephantine “The Romans of the Decadence,” which used to serve as art history professors’ favorite example of Just How Bad academic art could get. The alternate favorite example was Alexandre Cabanel’s “The Birth of Venus,” prominently displayed nearby.

Toward the end of the Grand Concourse stands a trio of busts by Charles Cordier. Their exotic subjects of two blacks and an Arab are skillfully rendered in a combination of bronze and onyx that somehow looks at if it might be a blend of Godiva chocolate and Haagen-Dazs ice cream.

Now we get it. Suddenly the Musee d’Orsay looks like nothing so much as a vast shopping mall in Dallas or Houston. It is the ultimate yuppie museum presenting art as a luxury consumer item valuable for the status and prestige it confers upon those whose skill at manipulating the rules of social conformity have brought them to the pinnacle of conventional success, and no questions asked about how you got there if you’ve got Cezannes to match your Rolls.

It is the vivid opposite of the Bohemian belief that art represents the achievement of flinty individual effort working to push the poetics of the human spirit beyond convention even at the risk of obscurity and ridicule.

At this point, one is ready to flee this temple of Mammon before--like Pinocchio at Pleasure Island--its seductive blandishments turn him into a braying jackass.

“Hold on. Wait a minute. Aren’t you being a little too sensitive here? You may be right about the Orsay’s subtext, but the trouble with you artniks is that you think people are so dumb, they can’t discriminate, and that works of art are so delicate, they can’t hold their own anywhere outside an empty antiseptic white room. If you really believe that quality is ultimately self-evident, then why not let it assert itself here? After all, much of this work originally shone in little paint dealers’ shops or makeshift exhibitions hung as thick as pigeons on a piazza.”

It is true that the dynamic of this mix of work produces fascinating chemistry. Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” only looks tougher and more daring amid surrounding hypocrisies. So does the somber socialism of Courbet’s “Funeral at Ornans,” but his famous bit of heroic exhibitionism, “The Artist in His Studio,” is closer in spirit to Couture than we had thought.

It is clear that the radical artists of the time were often only a hair’s breadth different from their conventional colleagues and often the line fuzzed. Here the academic sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux looks wonderfully light and energetic while J.A.D. Ingres’ nude, “The Spring,” barely retains enough dignity to escape academic Lolita-ism.

Speaking of Ingres, the Orsay would be a far better and more sensible museum if it began with the revolutionary Neo-Classicism of Jacques Louis David and took in Delacroix and the Romantics as well as Ingres’ art-for-art’s-sake. Understandably, the Louvre did not want to give up its magnificent 19th-Century masterpieces. It is not a great loss for the viewer, who can make up the gap by a five-minute walk across the Seine, but for the Orsay it is a near-tragic loss. Festooned with David’s “Oath of the Horatii” and Delacroix’s “The Death of Sardanapalus,” the Orsay would be an unqualified triumph.

Hello, what’s this?

Like any good mall, the Orsay has elevators (not to mention two attractive restaurants). Now we understand that odd impression of floating bodies silhouetted behind the translucent glass of the end walls. They are the shadows of souls escalated aloft to the Impressionist galleries on high. (For a complicated building, the traffic circulation is remarkably well-planned.)

Well, here we are. Fourth level: Gucci watches, designer lingerie, Impressionist paintings from $40 million.

Anyone who was ever lucky enough to have these pictures all to himself on a winter’s day in the cozy Jeu de Paume is never going to love this warren of galleries. Well-scaled to the paintings, they nonetheless feel makeshift, like badly converted industrial spaces. Works are hung on ropes suspended from a row of quarter-size holes that seem to have been punctured by a particularly neat machine gun.

The dull, uniform hanging sorely tries one’s belief in the ability of art to triumph over installation. The crowd, however, is oblivious. If the rest of the museum is packed, these galleries are thronged and visitors have the blissful serenity of young lovers. Such is the power of the reality and myth of Impressionism.

Old friends abound from Renoir’s “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette” to Cezanne’s rock-like “Woman With a Coffee Pot.” And thanks to more space, we see wonders that either escaped notice in the old days or were brought here from elsewhere. Gauguin’s ceramics and wood carvings often surpass his paintings and here they are, albeit in a claustrophobic niche behind iron columns. Odilon Redon’s powdery pastels flourish in a crepuscular room. Three tiny Seurat studies of a nude make you wonder why art ever needs to be large. Downstairs a room of Vuillards make us understand why he was a friend of Marcel Proust and an underrated artist.

Oops, another escalator. Going down: furniture, architecture, photography, old newspapers, weird sculpture.

pichar

The galleries atop Mme. Aulenti’s crypt have marvelous arched side aisles dramatized by Y-shaped entrances. One longs for them to contain better art, but slowly what is here begins to speak to this moment. A grotesque bronze by Jean Leon Gerome has the same science-fiction, Darth Vader sense of sensational entertainment and narcissistic ambition as a piece by contemporary American Robert Longo currently in West Germany’s Documenta exhibit. Ernest Barrais’ life-size “Alligator Hunters” has the same trashy love of apocalyptic exoticism as Robert Morris’ current work. Ditto for borderline Expressionist painting by the likes of Cormon, Gay and Delville.

It is as if Orsay director Francois Cachin and her curators were trying to tell us that the 19th Century had its own version of Post-Modernism with its spectacular, obvious art all based on past models and intended for a mass audience. The point is furthered in a wonderful swath of Art Nouveau furniture echoing our current passion for the easy blandishments of design and craftsmanship.

Well, France has done it again. Her obsession with centralization, chic and grand gestures has produced another overwhelming museum to go with the Louvre and the Pompidou Center.

The Orsay’s message is clear and convincing. They were us. The pompiers were Post-Modern and the gimlet-eyed salon audience was upward mobile. The feeling that Donald Trump would approve this museum is chillingly right on. Pray that our Manets, Monets, Cezannes and Van Goghs are out there somewhere struggling for excellence.