A Microhistory of Heritage Creation Processes: The Impressionists Exhibited at the Orangerie (1930-1937)

International audienceAfter isolated examples at the end of the nineteenth century, the temporary exhibition asserted itself at the dawn of the twentieth century as a canonical apparatus of the museum, a pillar of its economy, and a tool of the early politics of the public sphere. 1 The genesis and wide development of temporary exhibitions led to profound transformations of the museum as an institution, of its representations, and the professions traditionally associated with it. While the rise of exhibitions-paid events requiring a wide deployment of advertising resources-introduces a new logic of profitability in establishments with mostly free access, it also induces a structural evolution of the museum's functions. As art history is being founded as a discipline in Europe and the United States, the temporary exhibition permits the serialized gathering and comparison of usually dispersed works of art. It configures an ephemeral form of historical narrative, an alternative to exclusively printed commentaries, and one based on a close interaction between the written word, the visual, and the materiality o