16/2/23 - Appointment - Besançon, Museums - After six fruitful years at the head of the Besançon museums, Nicolas Surlapierre took over the direction of the Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine last October, following the departure of Alexia Fabre for the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. At the end of January, her successor was appointed. Laurence Madeline, 57, is preparing to leave the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, where she is responsible for the photographic collections, to join the museums of Besançon, where she will take up her post on 3 April.
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- Laurence Madeline
Photo : Dominique Dugay - See the image in its page
A graduate of the Institut national du patrimoine in 2000, the chief curator began her career at the Picasso Museum in Paris, where she was in charge of the digital inventory of Picasso’s extensive personal archives before briefly taking over as director of the Musée Léon-Dierx in Saint-Denis de La Réunion in 2006-2007. She then joined the Musée d’Orsay where, as head of the cultural department, she curated several exhibitions, including the "James Ensor" retrospective in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in New York (see article). In 2011, she was appointed head of the fine arts department of the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire of the City of Geneva, which she left in 2017, chaotically if we are to believe the article of our colleague Étienne Dumont recently published on the website of the Swiss newspaper Bilan. After a few years at the Service des musées de France, she joined the Musée Guimet in 2021.
She is a specialist in the avant-garde of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and particularly in the work of Picasso, to whom she has devoted regular exhibitions and publications over the past two decades - the latest exhibition, "Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds", which has just opened at the Mint Museum Uptown in Charlotte, North Carolina, as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death - Laurence Madeline inherits two museums in Besançon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie and the Musée du Temps, where modern art is at best a secondary area of the collections. If the international profile of the curator seems to have seduced the City of Besançon, which intends, as it mentions in its press release, "to open the city’s museums even more to the outside world by conquering new audiences and developing new practices", let’s hope that the specificities of the latter will not suffer in any way...
As we wrote in the article we devoted to its very successful reopening (see article) - a reopening that was followed last June by that of the Musée du Temps - the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, after years of great discretion, is once again among the great French museums, with remarkable exhibitions, "La Chine rêvée de François Boucher" (see the article) or "Just Becquet", and acquisitions, Les Anges by Simon Vouet (see the news item of 10/11/21) or the sheets by Palma Giovane (see the news item of 24/4/18) and Van der Meulen (see the news item of 10/2/22). Let us hope that the appointment of this new director, who in 2014 devoted an exhibition to Gustave Courbet, an illustrious figure from Besançon, at the Musée Rath in Geneva (see article), will enable her to continue along this path. It should be noted, however, that many connoisseurs are dubious, even worried.