Musée d'Orsay imagines Impressionists on Instagram with weekly sketches

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris has launched a year-long social media project for 2020, posting weekly illustrated sketches on its Instagram account @museeorsay that imagine historical artists and writers as contemporary social media users. French illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme (born 1959 in Nanterre) creates the sketches, which appear every Monday under the premise of being posts by fin-de-siècle figures. The first post featured decadent writer Huysmans thanking Jean-Louis Forain for a portrait. The project is part of a larger editorial work by Delhomme titled "Artists' Instagram, The Never Seen Instagrams of the Greatest Artists," which uses hashtags and witty comments to tell art history in bite-sized form. Examples include Picasso collaborating with a car brand and comparing follower counts with Braque, Mondrian painting his IKEA kitchen, and Gauguin sharing travel photos of Polynesian nudes. Other artists featured include Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. Musée d'Orsay director Laurence des Cars told Le Figaro that the goal is to bring 19th-century artists closer to contemporary audiences by imagining their interaction with modern languages, not to profane the works but to draw attention to specific biographical moments, themes, or innovations in paintings, and through fictional comments evoke the praise or criticism they originally received.