“When he had crossed the bridge, the ghosts came to see him. » President of the Musée d’Orsay from 2008 to 2017, Guy Cogeval liked to repeat this sentence, taken from the film Nosferatu the vampire by Murnau (1922). Today, it sounds like an epitaph: he died on Thursday, November 13, in Paris, at the age of 70, after acute pneumonia.
Born in Paris in 1955, libertarian and slow, often premature, this man with an eagle profile stood out in a staid conservative world with his intelligence, his flashy ties and his candor. Mad lovers of the 19th centurye century but just as comfortable in the 21st centuryeloves opera and techno, he hates blandness and monotony.
At 17, Guy Cogeval dreamed of theater. Before getting caught up in art history. After a stay at the Villa Medici, in Rome, where he wrote a thesis on the history of scenography between 1870 and 1914, the young curator trained at the Musée d’Orsay in the cinema department, before joining the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon which later became the culture department of the Musée du Louvre, in Paris.
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