Obituary: Sylvain Amic, Musée d’Orsay director who achieved his life’s dream

Sylvain Amic said it had been “his dream” to be appointed as its seventh director in April 2024, especially to be handling the conclusion of the six-year Orsay Grand Ouvert project to mark its 40th anniversary. His death from heart failure last week at 58 means he did not fulfil his mission of rehanging a familiar cast of characters that includes Degas’ chorus singers, Millet’s gleaners, Boudin’s bathers, Renoir’s Montmartre dancers and – a rare American interloper – Whistler’s mother.

The collection also includes sculptures by Rodin and Gauguin, Van Gogh’s Starry Night and a choice of déjeuners sur l’herbe, depending whether you want your guests naked (Manet) or clothed (Monet). Almost 5 million visitors last year went to the Orsay and its sister gallery, the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens, which Amic also ran, and which holds Monet’s Water Lilies.

“The Musée d’Orsay is a republican museum, a national asset that must be restored to the nation as a whole,” he told Le Monde last year. Emmanuel Macron, who appointed him, said that Amic “wanted everyone to be able to access the marvels of art, from Manet to Soulages”. The president added that Amic “knew the universal emancipatory power of our culture”. Rachida Dati, the minister of culture, described him as “a warm man, attentive to others, who believed in opening culture to everyone”.

Amic made an unorthodox ascent to such a prestigious role, having previously been curator in provincial museums. He was born in 1967 in Dakar, Senegal, where his parents were teachers, and entered the same profession, becoming a headteacher in Banjul, the capital of the Gambia, before seeking a career change in his late 30s when he was accepted to study at the National Institute of Cultural Heritage in Paris.

Aged 33, he joined the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, where he curated the 19th- and 20th-century collections and presented exhibitions on Gustave Courbet, the realist painter, and Pierre Soulages’ stained-glass windows for Conques Abbey. In 2008, he organised a major show at the Grand Palais in Paris featuring 90 works by Emil Nolde, a German expressionist, and returned in 2012 for one on bohemians. Amic burnished his reputation over 10 years in Rouen, where he brought the Normandy city’s 11 museums under one umbrella and arranged exhibitions to showcase less well-known works in their collections. He organised shows on impressionism and the history of cathedrals and, in 2021, created a cultural programme for the bicentenary of the birth in the city of the writer Gustave Flaubert.

This brought him to the attention of Rima Abdul Malak, the Beirut-born former minister of culture, who in 2022 appointed him as her advisor on museums, crafts, design and fashion. She told the New York Times how his background in sub-Saharan Africa made him sensitive to France’s colonial past, helping in the preparation of laws for the restitution of human remains and looted art.

With his floppy hair and wry smile, Abdul Malak said she found him to be “humane, considerate and very gentle”, and she appreciated his focus on the 19th century as “the matrix of the contemporary world, whether in terms of the status of women, the relationship between cities and the countryside, scientific discoveries, cinema and photography”.

Amic had applied to run the Orsay in 2017 when Guy Cogeval’s term ended, but François Hollande instead appointed Laurence des Cars, who later became the Louvre’s first female director. She was succeeded in 2021 by Christophe Leribault, and when he left to become president of the Palace of Versailles, Amic got his chance. Leribault praised his successor as “an engaged, dynamic and warm personality”. They had worked together before his departure on two exhibitions at the Orsay on impressionism in 1874 and the painter Gustave Caillebotte.

Dati said Amic had been chosen because of his strong support for regional culture and his work in promoting the “democratisation” of art through “multidisciplinary initiatives”. While in Montpellier, he had helped to create the first website for Frame, a bilateral collaboration between French and American collections. In Rouen, he had staged digital exhibitions on slavery and Jewish refugees in the second world war.

With the restoration of the Orsay’s entrance hall and a new research centre due to open next year, he next intended to take some of the collection around France with a mobile museum. An exhibition on John Singer Sargent opens this month, with one on Renoir coming in March. One of his top priorities, though, was to welcome more children from an early age through a “Petits M’O” programme of music, film, storytelling and art classes. “It will invite them to push the door of the art world in a fun and joyful way,” he said.

After Amic’s early death, Dati said: “Art has lost one of its best connoisseurs and a great servant of the state.”

Sylvain Amic, curator and art historian, was born on 26 April, 1967, and died on 31 August, 2025, aged 58

Photograph by Axelle de Russé