Sylvain Amic, the director of Paris’s Musée d'Orsay, has died suddenly at the age of 58. His death was announced on Sunday by the French Culture Minister Rachida Dati. According to a source quoted by the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, he died of natural causes while on holiday in a village in the Gard in the south of France.
In a message posted on X, the French President Emmanuel Macron, who appointed Amic as the head of the museum in 2024, expressed his “shock” at the curator's death. He added: “Sylvain Amic wanted everyone to be able to access the marvels of art, from Manet to Soulages. He understood the force of universal emancipation of our culture.”
In her own tribute to Amic, Dati: said “With an open spirit, Sylvain Amic was a warm man, attentive to the others, who believed in opening culture to everyone and every place. Art loses one of his best connoisseurs and a great servant of the state.”
Amic said previously that becoming the head of the Musée d'Orsay had always been “his dream”. He was a candidate for the post in 2017, but the president chose Laurence des Cars, now the director of the Louvre instead. However, in April 2024, when Christophe Léribault left the museum after less than three years to become the chair of the château de Versailles, Amic was selected to replace him.
However, he did not have time to accomplish his main mission: rehanging the collection after the completion of major works on the entrance hall and the square in front of the museum. The director was said to be conscious of the need to improve the visiting conditions of a museum, which has obtained record entry figures since the Covid 19 pandemic, reaching 4.9 million in 2024. He also sought to attract more young visitors and, like many of his colleagues, struggled with budget cuts.
Politically savvy, Amic was a relaxed and smiling character who was well liked by his colleagues. His appointment marked a change in France, where the directorships of national museums are traditionally reserved for a Parisian elite of high level curators. Amic, however, had built a career as curator in provincial city museums.
Born in 1967 in Dakar, Senegal, where his parents were teachers, Amic first became a teacher himself. Then, at the age of 33, he joined the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, southern France, where he managed the 19th and 20th century collections. Between 2008 and 2012 he curated two major shows at the Grand Palais, an Emil Nolde retrospective in 2008, and an exhibition entitled Bohèmes in 2012.
For more than ten years beginning in 2011 Amic headed the Rouen museum in Normandy, known for its Impressionist collection, where he staged several exhibitions. Then, in 2022, he joined the central administration and became an adviser on museums to the former Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak, for whom he prepared sensitive laws for the restitution of human remains and looted art.