The significant Georgel donation to La Piscine in Roubaix

Granted in 2023, Chantal and Pierre Georgel’s donation of more than 600 works to La Piscine in Roubaix is the largest ever received by the museum, which has been shaped since its inception by significant bequests. It was the subject of an exhibition, Compagnons d’une vie: une donation à La Piscine (Companions for life: a donation to La Piscine), in the spring of 2024, on the eve of the retirement of its emblematic director Bruno Gaudichon (see the news item of 2/5/24). It was followed a few months later by a publication, which is both an exhibition catalogue and a summary catalogue. The substantial work reproduces, in the order of the seven thematic sections chosen for the exhibition, the some 400 works that were presented, while the entire donation is exhaustively listed in the appendices. Around forty objects considered representative of the collection are accompanied by detailed descriptions written by a wide range of art historians, brought together at the end of the book under the title "Morceaux choisis".

This is all the more valuable given that most of the works in this vast donation had never been seen before. The exemplary nature of the inventory, study - which led to several proposals for the attribution of previously anonymous 19th-century drawings, detailed in an essay by Dominique Lobstein - and presentation carried out by Pierre Georgel, curator and director of the publication, should be highlighted here. The Georgels also donated their extensive art history library, built up over their respective careers as curators, mainly at the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Musée d’Orsay.

As the donors explain in the introduction to the catalogue, there is no local connection behind their choice of La Piscine, which they selected out of a long-standing affinity for its programming, its museography and its collection, which shares many characteristics with their own. Built up over half a century, in their own humble words a casually formed labour of love, it is…