Claire Bernardi joins from the Musée d’Orsay
The French Ministry of Culture has announced Claire Bernardi as the next director of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, succeeding Cécile Debray who left to helm the Picasso Museum in October.
Bernardi joins from the Musée d’Orsay where she has been a curator since 2012. As director for the Musée de l’Orangerie, she will be tasked with developing a programme ‘aimed at offering contemporary reinterpretations of the museum’s collections’, featuring ninenteenth- and twentieth-century masterpieces including some of Claude Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’. Amongst the challenges facing the new director will be to revive attendance numbers by building a local audience, in order to compensate for the massive drop in international visitors since the start of the pandemic.
Prior to her role at Orsay, Bernardi looked after the modern art collections of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. Some of her most notable exhibitions include Gauguin the Alchemist (2017–18) at the Grand Palais, Picasso, Blue and Rose (2018) at the Musée d’Orsay, and the current cross-survey of Chaïm Soutine and Willem de Kooning at the Orangerie, cocurated with Simonetta Fraquelli, of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation.
