Seduced by Paris: the Hays collection in the Musée d’Orsay

The art collectors Spencer and Marlene Hays embody the American dream, although their true passion is Paris: the art of the Belle Époque, to which belong the more than 200 artworks exhibited in the French capital. 

Paris is the Americans’ golden myth, as it is a synonym of freedom and sophistication for them since Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway described the city during the Golden Twenties. This seduction left a mark in the United States, as Spencer and Marlene Hays prove. 

This couple from Nashville (Tennessee) started their collection during the seventies. Lovers of the French culture in general, their object of devotion wasn’t that literary Paris of the Lost Generation, but the previous one, not less crazy: that city of the Belle Époque and its mythical cabarets, so frequented by the artists who lived in the city. 

Between the last years of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth century, Paris lives the turmoil of determining artistic movements as, for example, the impressionist one. The Hays start their collection at this point. They love to remember thanks to their artworks, their walks in Paris and for being able to keep them, they build their mansion in Nashville emulating a Parisian mansion in Rúe Grenelle.

Spencer Hays is a clear example of a person who is living the American dream: of humble origin and thanks to the selling of books going door to door, he is today, one of the biggest fortunes of his country. The married couple owns an amazing collection that now is exhibited in the Museé d’Orsay in Paris – more than 200 artworks by Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Pissarro, Matisse, Fantin-Latour, Toulouse-Lautrec… 

In the eighties, they made a big discovery: The Nabis movement, which in 1890 is postulated as the substitute of the impressionist one, with an aesthetic proposal based on interpretations of the inner life, intimacy, dreams and the symbols. They purchased important pieces like the seventh panel of the Edouard Vuillard’s Public gardens or the most relevant youth work by Pierre Bonnard: a room divider that had been separated and that the collectors have reunited again, together with decorative panels by Maurice Denis and symbolist compositions by Odilon Redon.

The showing ends with the artwork Chaïm Soutine Portrait, painted by Amadeo Modigliani in the studio’s door of the merchant Léopold Sborowski in that Bohemian Paris of ramshackle garrets and starving artists that comes with the XXth century. 

More information: Musée d’Orsay Paris

Until August 18th, 2013