Sylvain Amic, a former schoolteacher who as president of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris campaigned to broaden the public’s access to art, died on Sunday at his vacation home in southern France. He was 58.
The cause of death was heart failure, according to Rima Abdul Malak, a former French culture minister to whom Amic had served as an adviser.
President Emmanuel Macron of France described Amic’s death as a shock and said on X that the Musée d’Orsay leader had “striven to give everyone access to the wonders of art.” The current culture minister, Rachida Dati, described Amic as an “open and creative spirit” who believed that culture should be “open and accessible to all.”
Amic was appointed only 16 months ago to run the Musée d’Orsay, a converted train station on the banks of the Seine River, and its sister institution, the Musée de l’Orangerie. He had long coveted the Orsay job and applied for it unsuccessfully in 2017, losing out to Laurence des Cars, who is now the president of the Louvre.
Under Amic’s stewardship, the Orsay — whose world-class collection of masterpieces by the likes of van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Gauguin drew 3.7 million visitors last year — engaged in major outreach programs to engage with regional audiences and younger ones. This year, the museum organized a climate-themed tour of works from its collections across France.
Amic previously ran major regional museums including the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, and the Museums of Rouen, 11 institutions that he brought under a single management structure.
In a telephone interview, Abdul Malak, who appointed Amic as one of her advisers in 2022 and remained in close touch with him, recalled him as someone “humane, very considerate of others and very gentle,” who was hard-working yet also a team player.
“He wasn’t the kind of person who sought to walk all over people or take all of the credit,” she said.
Abdul Malak said she had first spotted Amic when she came across a program that he had drawn up for Françoise Nyssen, her predecessor as culture minister: a plan for France’s major national museums to circulate their collections across the country instead of keeping masterpieces in Paris, as was customary. He became one of her senior advisers.
Amic was born on April 26, 1967, in Dakar, Senegal. His parents, who were French, taught at French schools, and he went on to take that path, too. He taught at a French school in Banjul, Gambia, then became its headmaster.
Those formative years in sub-Saharan Africa made him particularly sensitive to the restitution by France of treasures that had been looted or taken from the continent in colonial times, Abdul Malak said.
He played a key role in the development of French laws calling for the restitution of treasures and human remains, she added.
In a January interview with Le Monde newspaper, he described the Musée d’Orsay as “a national asset that must be restored to the nation as a whole.”
“This means being capable of welcoming everyone, regardless of their background, and making it clear that the 19th century is the matrix of the contemporary world, whether in terms of the status of women, the relationship between cities and the countryside, scientific discoveries, cinema, photography,” he said.
Abdul Malak said that her final memory of Amic was a phone conversation last week in which he discussed a project to send a truck filled with artworks across France to share the treasures of Paris with the rest of the country.
“He told me that he had never been happier in his life,” she said, adding, “I am comforted by the fact that he fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming the head of Orsay, even if it was a dream that ended much too soon.”
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