France’s Bonnat-Helleu museum reopens after 14-year renovation with new discoveries and 2,500 loans from the Louvre – The Art Newspaper

The Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne, described by the artwork critic Pierre Rosenberg as housing “probably the most stunning assortment between Paris and Madrid”, is because of reopen on 26 November after a 14-year enlargement and renovation.

The museum closed in 2011 as its constructing now not complied with security and accessibility laws. Quickly after, the French architectural agency BLP was entrusted with renovating it and bringing pure gentle again into the unique three-story constructing, designed in an eclectic fashion by the architect Charles Planckaert. The concept “was to open it to town and make it extra accessible to the general public”, says the museum’s head of collections Hélène Ferron. The central patio’s glass roof has been restored and a mosaic by Giandomenico Facchina that lay behind layers of plaster has been uncovered.

BLP Architects additionally transformed an adjoining faculty, which town relocated in 2018, into an extension of the museum. Behind its preserved façade, there are actually a café, a store, storage areas, a restoration studio, workplaces, just a few exhibition rooms, a analysis centre, and a school room for drawings. “Emotion is essential to our museum expertise, we would like it to really feel welcoming, not intimidating,” Ferron says. This intention interprets into thematic sections—on the illustration of the human physique, or on what it means to gather—and accessible wall texts.

The three,000 sq. m. show space has doubled in dimension. The go to begins on the bottom and first flooring of the historic constructing, however the grand staircase now results in an middleman stage with three galleries within the extension, together with a two-storey loft with work tightly hung from ground to ceiling in a method harking back to the Paris Salon.

The mezzanine supplies entry to the second stage of the unique museum constructing, the place the Bayonne artists Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), Antonin Personnaz (1854-1936), and Paul Helleu (1859-1927) take delight of place. “There may be an art-free room, a ‘area of nothing’ on every ground, the place the general public can catch their breath and replicate on what they’ve seen,” Ferron says.

The renovation undertaking was budgeted at €29m, with €14m funded by town of Bayonne and the rest by patrons, the area, the division and the French state. One other €4m was spent on restoring 1,300 works. Whereas Jean-Dominique Ingres’s La Baigneuse has regained its brilliance, there have additionally been discoveries together with autographs in El Greco work and pentimenti and overpaintings in Simon Vouet’s Roman Charity (1620s).

Based in 1891, the Musée Bonnat-Helleu was named after the 2 painters whose bequests of their works and collections between 1922 and 2011 laid the muse for a philanthropic custom enriched by the collections of Antonin Personnaz in 1936, and Jacques Petithory in 1992. The museum is now house to some 7,000 works, spanning from Antiquity to the twentieth century. Round 2,500 works are on long-term mortgage from the Musée du Louvre, together with the 1st-2nd-century Hermaphrodite often showcased within the Grande Galerie in Paris.

With greater than 3,500 works on paper by artists together with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ingres, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Paolo Veronese, the museum’s graphic arts assortment is likely one of the finest on this planet. A number of 50 might be on view and rotated quarterly, together with the lacking a part of a three-piece portrait of a warrior by Théodore Géricault acquired in 2023.

The museum is deeply rooted within the metropolis of Bayonne, which spawned a brand new technology of artists within the late nineteenth century, a lot of them skilled by Bonnat. Amongst them was Marie Garay, whose portrait of Bonnat will dangle on the bottom ground. “Feminine artists are amongst our priorities for future acquisitions,” Ferron says.