“I said, ‘I want to take some air.’ I took some air, and now I want to be back,” says Guy Cogeval. After eight years in Canada, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, the 52-year-old museum chief has returned to his native Paris to take up his “dream” post: director of the Musée d’Orsay, the prestigious state institution dedicated to 19th- and early 20th-century art that is home to the city’s impressive collection of Impressionism. He began his career there in 1985 as a young curator before moving on to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Louvre and then the Musée National des Monuments Français.

Cogeval, a confirmed 19th-century advocate with a specialty in Édouard Vuillard, the sometimes-staid museum establishment. The daring 2001 show “Picasso Érotique,” which caused more furor in the U.S., where it wasn’t shown, than in Montreal, where it was, and the blockbusters “Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences,” in 2000–01, and “Once Upon a Time Walt Disney,” in 2007, provide clues to the innovations Cogeval is planning for Paris.

Extending the mix of art and sculpture to embrace theater, cinema and opera is one aesthetic goal. “I love music almost more than painting, so I’d love to devote an exhibition to Verdi,” says Cogeval. And although he’s willing to continue the institution’s occasional displays of contemporary works, he states that his “most important aim is to demonstrate what the art of the 19th century—the century of modernism—brings to us today.” To that end, he hopes to unite the museum’s Symbolist holdings in one spacious room.

Cogeval’s North American adventure inspired another aim for the Musée d’Orsay: to create a friends group in the U.S. “The lure of Impressionism is very high,” he says, “and it is very important to have a door open to American collectors, to say, ‘Hey, you have a friendly museum in Paris.’ ”

"Home Again" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.