Paris's Musée d’Orsay Hires Its First Instagram Artist-in-Residence

Instagram has become an important marketing tool and creative outlet for contemporary artists, and now Paris’s Musée d’Orsay is using the platform to help visitors engage with artists of the past. The museum has announced painter, illustrator, and writer Jean-Philippe Delhomme as its first Instagram artist in residence. Delhomme, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, and British and French Vogue, will imagine an Instagram post from a famous artist or cultural figure, which will be shared to the museum’s 831,000 followers each Monday in 2020.

Delhomme’s first post debuted on January 6 and depicted a post by art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans thanking French Impressionist artist Jean-Louis Forain for his portrait. The post is liked by Forain (@JL.Forain) as well as Edgar Degas (@degas), an artist whose work was championed by Huysmans. Delhomme also added a comment from Henri Gervex (@gervex), who writes “No mean criticism this time?” (Huysmans wrote a defense of Gervex’s Rolla, which was excluded from the Paris Salon of 1878.)

The post promotes the museum’s current exhibition Huysmans Art Critic: From Degas to Grünewald, in the Eye of Francesco Vezzoli, which celebrates his contributions to criticism and his role in the aesthetic debates of the period. Delhomme’s illustrations may feature other subjects of future exhibitions, as well as artists in the museum’s collection.

This is not Delhomme’s first venture into the feeds of the masters. His 2019 book, Artists' Instagrams: The Never Seen Instagrams of the Greatest Artists, depicted witty takes on imagined posts by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, and Piet Mondrian, while playing with the realities of the Instagram age, from #sponcon to #travelporn (the latter courtesy of Gaugin, naturally.)

The initiative is just one way the Museé d’Orsay is using modern platforms to share its collection. The museum’s head of contemporary programs, Donatien Grau, told The Art Newspaper, “[Our strategy] aims to go from scholarship to Instagram, and involves every part of the museum; just look at the multiplicity of people we've invited for Une oeuvre, un regard, our weekly program, with over half a million views to date.” Une Oeuvre, un regard invites a contemporary figure to discuss a classic work. The videos, which have featured artist Alex Katz, architect India Mahdavi, and fashion designer Agnès B., are shared on the museum’s Facebook and YouTube pages.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest