Guy Cogeval, an art historian, curator and museum director whose boundary-breaking approach drew thousands to exhibitions at one of France’s flagship cultural institutions, the Musée d’Orsay, which he led from 2008 to 2017, died on Nov. 13 in Paris. He was 70.
His death from pneumonia, in a hospital, was announced by the museum.
Mr. Cogeval was a curator who broke norms and shattered expectations with blockbuster exhibitions at the Orsay, which opened in 1986 in a cavernous converted rail station on the Left Bank in Paris.
During his tenure as director of the museum, which mainly holds French art from the mid-19th century to the early 20th, Mr. Cogeval was credited with doubling the number of visitors and adding for historical context photographs, long-overlooked academic (or “pompier”) paintings, and texts accompanying the exhibits that delved into sociology and psychology.
He used the building’s irregular configuration to its best advantage, setting pictures against dark backgrounds in its crannies and sharpening the lighting, and he stretched the museum’s purview back into the 18th century and forward toward modernism.
He often pressed the theme of sex, centering exhibitions around pleasure, pain, the Marquis de Sade and the “industry of sexual imagery” (as the newspaper Le Monde put it), prostitution in the 19th century, and the male nude, among others.
This led some French critics to accuse him of putting visitors — and their money — before the traditional aims of museums, like pedagogy and enlightenment. He was merely “trolling” for customers, the critic Philippe Dagen wrote in Le Monde in 2015.
In a country with a reverential approach to its artistic heritage, the flamboyant Mr. Cogeval — “deceptively reserved and genuinely eccentric,” according to Le Figaro newspaper — was a subversive figure. He was unconcerned, even pleased, by the criticism.
“I try to move the lines,” he told the radio station France Culture in a 2014 interview. “To introduce a bit more psychoanalysis, a bit more sociology. I try to respond more to contemporary preoccupations in these exhibits.”
“You can’t move lines and just be about rearranging teddy bears,” he added.
He often proclaimed his ambition to illuminate whole epochs through art, going beyond reiterating the achievements of single artists through retrospectives.
“It’s the spirit of the times that interests me,” he told France Inter radio in 2013. “This leads to more interesting exhibitions.”
To his critics, Mr. Cogeval’s efforts to capture that spirit, often through the prism of sexuality, were misguided.
“If there is an axis along which run successive exhibits at the Musée d’Orsay, it is in the form of a phallus,” Mr. Dagen wrote, adding that “this organ, hero of ‘Masculin/Masculin’” in 2013, “also ruled over ‘Sade: Attacking the Sun’ a year later” and reappeared in “Splendors and Miseries: Images of Prostitution, 1850-1910” in 2015.
Yet “Masculin/Masculin,” subtitled “The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day,” with its heterogeneous mix of artists like Arno Breker, a German sculptor with close ties to the Nazi regime, and Antoine Bourdelle, a student of Rodin — and, above all, its unabashed celebration of men’s bodies — was immensely popular.
More than 4,500 people came each day, three times the number for an exhibit the previous year during the same period. It was “one of the season’s most coveted tickets,” the journalist Doreen Carvajal wrote in The New York Times.
Mr. Dagen complained that “Masculin/Masculin” was “confused,” but other critics, particularly outside France, took a more sympathetic view of Mr. Cogeval’s eclectic approach.
The prostitution exhibition in 2015 brought together masterpieces by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Munch, van Gogh and Picasso with police reports, photographs and pornography, an approach that again drew crowds.
That penchant for juxtaposing artworks with historical objects illuminating them had long been one of Mr. Cogeval’s trademarks.
“By following the path of mere resemblance, the most unlikely objects are brought into contact with one another,” Geoffrey O’Brien wrote of “Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences,” which Mr. Cogeval curated with Dominique Païni in 2000.
Mr. Cogeval had made his impatience with traditional museum curating plain: “Single-themed exhibits where you just line up the pictures on the wall, that annoys the hell out of me,” Mr. Cogeval said. “It’s a crime against our profession.”
Guy Louis Antonio Cogeval was born in Paris on Oct. 13, 1955, the son of Georges Cogeval, a real estate agent, and Rosalba Mino, who worked as a translator from Italian.
He grew up in Italy and also in Paris, where he graduated from the Institut d’Études Politiques in 1977 with a degree in public service. He received an advanced degree in art history from the Sorbonne in 1982, won a coveted place at the French Academy in Rome from 1982 to 1984 and came in first in the state’s competitive examination for museum curators in 1985.
After working at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and at the Louvre, he became director of the Musée des Monuments Français in Paris in 1992. It is one of the lesser-known museums in the French capital, with a collection of casts of sculptures and parts of buildings, but Mr. Cogeval made good use of its treasures, significantly increasing attendance.
From 1998 to 2006, he was the director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, where he caused a stir with the 2001 exhibition “Picasso Érotique,” which sought to highlight the underlying sexuality in much of the artist’s work.
Hired to run the Musée d’Orsay in 2008, his tenure was sometimes contested internally because of what was criticized as his abrupt management style. He was reappointed in 2016 but only for one year instead of the expected three.
“It was hard at the Musée d’Orsay,” he told France Inter. “The curators were used to living in their chosen spaces. I have the idea of a 19th century that doesn’t end,” meaning that, in his view, the heritage of the 19th century stretched well into the 20th.
Mr. Cogeval was an authority on the painters of the Nabis school, which flourished in France after Impressionism, particularly Édouard Vuillard, about whom he wrote books and exhibition catalogues.
He leaves no immediate survivors.
“Cogeval divided people,” the arts critic Eric Biétry-Rivierre wrote in Le Figaro after the curator’s death. “For the better and for the worse, but at least he rocked the boat.”
He quoted Mr. Cogeval saying, “The hanging of any painting always means taking a position.”
Daphné Anglès contributed reporting.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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