Parisian pride is prodigious. Lately, however, while New York has been gloating over its apparent conquest of cultural, political, and economic hegemony in the Western world, the French capital has seemed spiritually, intellectually, creatively to have fallen onto rather despondent times. Something indeed prodigious has clearly been needed to do the city proud once again as a center of civilization second to none. A rudimentary attempt to satisfy this need brought into being a decade ago the Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture, the riposte of Paris to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It was hideous and pretentious, a fiasco. The Pompidou Center is a public toy like the Eiffel Tower, not a select abode for art. What was wanted instead was something audacious but sure, something nobody else could achieve but everybody in the world must want to see, something superlative but simple, miraculously imaginative but serenely self-evident and nicely controversial though not overtly contentious. It would have to embody a vision, crystallize an idea, and vindicate an ideal. What it could do for Paris, therefore, would have to be just that little bit better than everything which Paris, even in all its glory, could do for it. What was wanted was a prodigy, in short, prodigiously Parisian. The Musée d’Orsay is it.

The International Exposition of 1900 took place in the City of Light. Celebrating the conclusive victory and plutocracy of the Industrial Revolution, while giving rather short shrift to concomitant political disturbances,