Museum Opening of 2021: Carnavalet Paris

The Apollo Awards have been celebrated since 1992 with fine ceremonies. It’s still as important as ever to celebrate outstand­ing ach­ieve­ments in the museum world. Yet senior museum com­m­entators warn­ed that mus­eum culture may not endure with its cur­rent sense of purp­ose; funding for both national and regional instit­utions being squeez­ed still further. Thus the awards proclaim the museums have set the standards to which others should aspire.

Carnavalet Paris

C16th Renaissance architecture

Urban Sider

Each year, in selecting Museum Opening of the Year, Apollo Magazine judges created a shortlist of six museums. In 2021, the following museums were shortlisted.

1. Casa Balla Rome, opened June 2021. From 1929 til he died in 1958, Giacomo Balla lived in this Roman flat Via Oslavia. Having been left to his daught­ers, the flat was a living laboratory for the Futurist’s work, its walls, furniture and utensils one big canvas. Casa Balla was opened to the public for the first time.

2. Denver Art Museum, re-opened Oct 2021. Its display space greatly improved with the re­furbishment & expansion of Gio Ponti’s fortress-like building, first opened 50 years ago. It gained a Welcome Cent­re & new conservation studios. And its galleries have been rehung to reflect asp­ec­ts of DAM’s holdings, from Latin American art to Alaskan art.

3. Humboldt Forum Berlin, opened July 2021. After long delays and a cost of c€644m, this reconstruct­ion of the C18th Berlin Palace, damaged by the Soviets after WW2, finally op­ened. Now there is a permanent display of the coll­ections of the former Eth­nologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiat­ische Kunst.

4. Kunsthaus Zürich, re-opened Oct 2021. After 12 years of planning, construction and £163m spent, David Chipperfield’s extension to Kunsthaus Zürich has doubled its space for showing art made since 1960. And note the works by Monet, Degas and Van Gogh from the collection of Emil Georg Bührle. It’s now the largest art museum in Switzerland!

5. Musée Carnavalet Paris, re-opened May 2021. At Baron Haussmann's urging, his hôtel particul­ier in the Marais housed a 1880 museum dedicated to Paris’ his­tory. Af­ter a expensive (€50m) five-year redesign, Car­n­avalet displaying more of its collection, rangeing from C18th interiors to burning Notre-Dame 2019

The ceiling, Salons La Riviere by Charles Le Brun,

Carnavalet

6. Santa Barbara Museum Art, re-opened 2021. This West Coast museum celebrated its 80th birthday with a 6-year $50m renovation. The 1912 building was updated to bet­ter meet the needs of a modern museum, the project providing new space for its permanent collection, from Roman antiquities to modern art.

The Museum Opening of the Year winner in 2021 was announced.  Carnavalet Museum was always an impressive Parisian museum, full of anti­quarian clutter. Its atmosphere is insep­arable from its history, as the unexpected by-product of Baron Hauss­mann’s tough levelling of swathes of the city. Out of that de­struction arose the desire to conserve, albeit somewhat haphazardly.

Carnavalet’s collections were shaped by its donors’ eccen­tric­ities, whose relics of French history took many forms. Since it opened to the public in 1880, the museum’s holdings have rap­idly grown, unsystematically. Every Carnav­al­et fan has a favourite corner of the museum eg the miniature ivory Guillot­ines, crammed into the Revolutionary Memorabilia annex.

Carnavalet gallery

The reopened museum created a more accessible vis­it­or experience with­out sacrificing the sense of discovery. Enter via a hall full of shop signs from over the cen­turies, a vibrant record of historic Par­isian trades. The  museum's chronological scope has been ex­panded; a visit that used to begin in the C16th now goes into a basement with relics of Neolithic Paris. And the museum pushes into the cont­emp­orary, with exhibits linked to the recent terrorist attacks and the fire of Notre-Dame.

Wendel Ballroom

Carnavalet

The vast renovation allows a larger portion of the collect­ions to be visible and not stored away. So the curators worked hard to make the whole museum more logical through new exhibition rooms, stream­lined displays, an easier circulation through the galleries and elegant access points with sp­iral staircases. Old favourites are among the exhibits eg Proust’s bed. The period rooms have never looked more opulent, a monument to the style and grace of former resident Madame de Sévigné. Carnavalet is Paris’ ultimate palimpsest, an enthralling city museum. Thanks to the Lonely Planet for the photos.

Museum Opening of the Year – Apollo Awards 2023: Sydney Modern, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Apollo's Museum Opening of the Year, 2024: Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse