What Would Monet Post? The Musée d’Orsay Hired an Instagram Artist-in-Residence to Imagine the Social Media Accounts of Impressionist Masters

The Musée d’Orsay is launching a
new project to bring more visibility to its centuries-old artists
via the ‘gram. 

The Paris museum, which boasts
an unrivaled collection of Impressionist paintings, has named
illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme as its inaugural Instagram artist in
residence. For the job, Delhomme will take over the Orsay’s account
every Monday in 2020 to post an illustration depicting the museum’s
artists as if they were alive and exhibiting today.

The first drawing, published
yesterday, assumes the imaginary profile of French novelist and art critic Joris-Karl
Huysmans, who posts a portrait of himself supposedly done by the
painter Jean-Louis Forain in 1978. “Thank you @JL.Forain for
my portrait,” reads the caption accompanying the post, which is
“liked” by @degas and 14 others. (Huysmans is the subject of a
new exhibition at the
museum, on view through
March 1.)

“The aim [of the residency] is
to bring these artists of the second half of the 19th century
closer by enrolling them in today’s interactions,” Orsay president
Laurence des Cars told Le
Figaro. “The idea is
not to desecrate works, but rather to draw attention to a
particular moment in an artist’s biography, the issues or the
novelty of a painting, and through contemporary commentaries
fictitious or not, to evoke the adhesions or antagonisms
aroused.”

Delhomme, who splits his time
between the US and France, has published his witty sketches in
the New Yorker, Vogue, and W,
among many others since the late 1980s. He famously illustrated
Glenn O’Brien’s GQ column “The Style Guy” for a
decade.  

Delhomme’s Musée d’Orsay
residency is an extension of a larger book project, Artists’
Instagrams, The Never Seen Instagrams of the Greatest
Artists, published
last year by August Editions. In the book he imagines the profiles
of some of the world’s all-time greats: Mondrian
(@mondrian.piet) brags about the rectilinearity of his new Ikea
kitchen, while
Giacometti (@a_giacometti) invents the “felt
cute might delete later” meme and Gauguin (@gauguin) goes full thirst trap in
the form of a nude
portrait of women with
the caption “About last night…” 

The post What Would Monet Post? The Musée d’Orsay Hired an
Instagram Artist-in-Residence to Imagine the Social Media Accounts
of Impressionist Masters appeared first on artnet
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