The Art and Material exhibition at the Fabre museum.

-

N. Bonzom / Maxele Presse

  • In Perpignan, the mayor, Louis Aliot (RN), decided to reopen the municipal museums this Tuesday morning, despite the ban due to the Covid-19 epidemic.

  • For many months now, their closure has left art lovers orphans, far from being consoled by the many online collections offered by museums.

  • “When you talk to visitors, you can tell that they want to come back,” says Françoise Adamsbaum, director of the International Museum of Modest Arts located in Sète.

In Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales), the municipal museums reopened on Tuesday.

About ten people were waiting this morning in front of the Rigaud museum to see the exhibition

Portraits of queens of France

.

If the hasty decision of the mayor of the Catalan capital, Louis Aliot (RN), has a good chance of being challenged by the administrative court, it has allowed, in recent hours, to open the debate.

Because the closure of museums, to fight against the spread of Covid-19, has left many art lovers orphans for several months, whom remote visits have not really consoled.

"When you talk to visitors, you can tell that they want to come back," says Françoise Adamsbaum, director of the International Museum of Modest Arts (Miam), in Sète (Hérault).

As, with the epidemic, we have less contact with people, we need contact with works.

When you are in a video meeting, it's the same thing: nothing replaces human contact.

Proximity to works of art, especially at Le Miam, where there are many installations and scenographies, is essential.

Nothing replaces the physical presence in a museum.

"

"A social experiment"

Charles, a Montpellier enthusiast for exhibitions, confirms this need to be as close as possible to the works.

For this art lover, although many places have provided access to online collections since the spring, this "does not replace the museum as a physical experience".

“Moving around a place, being fully devoted to it, is not the same,” he testifies.

You cannot change pages in a museum, like on a computer.

And that saves us from a bad weather: distraction.

We also feel refocused there because museums are often magnificent places.

"

The golden age of painting in Naples, at the Fabre museum in Montpellier.

- N. Bonzom / Maxele Presse

And, continues the Montpellier resident, walking the corridors of the Fabre museum in Montpellier, the modest Arts museum in Sète, or the Romanité museum in Nîmes (Gard), is “a social experience”.

"We say to ourselves" Hey, he seems caught up in this photo ", we discreetly hear the comments of a guide in front of a painting, we follow a group, and presto, we find ourselves contemplating a work that we would have skipped, ”he confides.

"To be in contact with the work"

Brandon, crazy about Renaissance paintings, also feels a real lack since the museums have closed their doors.

"I liked to walk around, to discover things," confides this Montpellier student.

Be in direct contact with the work.

"For Alham, a student, used to visiting the Fabre museum in Montpellier for her studies in literature or the Carré Sainte-Anne," for fun, with friends "," the closure of museums really discourages going to the art ”.

"We are moving away," she regrets.

"Who does not remember a school visit to a museum, with this magical moment when you go from the excitement of a simple outing, to the one when you are seized by a painting, a sculpture ... And where you realize from the height of your 10 or 12 years the grandeur and the beauty made by hand, ”testifies Stéphanie, who has not stopped surveying museums since she was very young.

For this Hérault woman, who "miss" museums, looking at a work, without an intermediary, "is a bit of meditation, thoughts jostle and sometimes escape us.

I remember being surprised to think in a room of the Musée d'Orsay how I was going to be able to do to steal the white stallion of Géricault.

Yes, yes, steal it!

"

The digitization of collections "is not negligible"

If Michel Hilaire, the director of the Fabre museum, flagship of culture in Montpellier, recognizes that there is "a real impatience" to be able to visit exhibitions again, "as for all places of culture", the digitization of collections, to which many museums have worked, has played a real role in recent months, he says.

"We have implemented a lot of things on the Internet, the

Fabre

platform

in my sofa

, or the podcast on Frédéric Bazille, have been very successful," confides the curator.

It is not negligible.

Of course, this does not replace a presence in the museum, and we look forward to finding the public.

"

Our museum file

On Monday, the Minister of Culture, Roselyne Bachelot, reiterated that museums and monuments would be the first to reopen "when we have a decline" qualifying the opening of museums in Perpignan as "purely political initiatives".

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  • Languedoc-Roussillon

  • Covid 19

  • Coronavirus

  • Montpellier

  • epidemic

  • Sète

  • Perpignan

  • Culture

  • Museum