After weeks of speculation, the decision is finally in: Annick Lemoine, 57, will take over as president of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie, France’s Culture Ministry announced in a press release on Wednesday, February 25. The director of the Petit Palais in Paris, who will take up her new post on March 19, succeeds Sylvain Amic, who died suddenly in August 2025. “It is an immense joy and an honor,” Lemoine told Le Monde. “The Musée d’Orsay is the ultimate for any art historian, one of the most beautiful museums in the world where anything is possible, with extremely knowledgeable, dynamic and enthusiastic teams who carried on their work after the death of Sylvain, whom I greatly admired.”
The heritage curator, a specialist in the school of Caravaggio and author of a 2004 thesis on the painter Nicolas Régnier, has held several key positions in French cultural institutions. In 2009, the art historian worked for then culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand as an adviser for arts and cultural education and for the democratization of culture.
She went on to lead, from 2010 to 2015, the department of art history, collections and heritage at the French Academy in Rome, where she herself had been a resident. She then spent three years as scientific director of the Art History Festival, organized by France’s National Institute for Art History and the Château de Fontainebleau. In 2018, Lemoine was appointed director of the Musée Cognacq-Jay, a museum run by the City of Paris dedicated to 18th-century art, before taking over the Petit Palais in 2021.
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