While he began working last summer on his record, "The next hundred years", Orsay contacted Albin de la Simone.

"The museum offered me to be their guest of honor - which I found quite classy - for the Manet/Degas exhibition (until July 23), asking me to think about what we could do," the singer-songwriter told AFP.

Diving into the future exhibition via the catalogue "influenced the tone of the album, perhaps in the overall coherence," he agrees. Not to mention a title, "Mireille 1972" inspired by two works, "Dans un café", also known as "L'absinthe", by Degas, and "La Prune", by Manet.

"I kept coming back to +La Prune+ and +L'absinthe+, two portraits of women, women who intrigued me a lot, I wondered why they were so melancholic," says the musician.

Albin de la Simone does not tell the subtext of the paintings in this song but was inspired by the eyes of the protagonists to imagine another story, "of illegal, clandestine abortion". By seeking to "be explicit without pronouncing a word from the lexical field of this subject".

"A living place"

"The next hundred years" was released at the beginning of March and Albin de la Simone defended it on stage three nights at the beginning of April in the auditorium of Orsay.

Two musical visits, on May 15 and 22, for a small group of visitors, will allow him to link music and works of his choice. An experience that this former student of visual arts had already conducted at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

Singer-songwriter Albin de la Simone in concert at the Printemps de Bourges, April 21, 2022 © GUILLAUME SOUVANT / Guillaume SOUVANT / AFP / Archives

Albin de la Simone and his guests will also have carte blanche on June 29 for a nocturne, with concerts on the footbridge under the large clock at the heart of the collections in Orsay.

"The desire of Orsay is to make the museum a living place, not just a place of conservation of works, any artist can appropriate the works either through music, dance or any other discipline," Antonine Fulla, director of cultural programming, told AFP.

"Painters, poets, sculptors or musicians, they were some three hundred artists to know the privilege of being able to live in the Louvre to create: two centuries later, the museum revives this history", writes for its part the Louvre in its argument around Fire! Insulating tape.

"Raiders of the Lost Ark"

The literate rock band settled "for a two-month residency", with a studio set up for him.

This installation will be brightened up by "nomadic concerts with guests" (such as the electro artist Arnaud Rebotini) during the Friday nocturnes in April, a master class in May and a residency outing with three concerts at the end of May.

The French rock band Feu! Chatterton in concert at the 37th Victoires de la Musique at the Seine Musicale, February 11, 2022 in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris © BERTRAND GUAY / AFP/Archives

The Phoenix group had published at the end of 2022 "Alpha Zulu", an album concocted in the midst of a health crisis at the Museum of Decorative Arts, in a wing of the Louvre Palace in Paris.

"Each record, we want to do it in a new place and by a crazy coincidence an old friend became director of this museum and she was looking to do artist residencies, the dream came true," Laurent Brancowitz, one of Phoenix's guitarists, told AFP.

"What I found most inspiring was that our studio was also used to store objects, works, as at the end of +Raiders of the Lost Ark+, it was alive, far from a frozen museum," recalled singer Thomas Mars. "It's similar to the way we make music, with samples that range from Monteverdi (Italian composer of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries) to the latest thing out of software," he said.

© 2023 AFP