A new major institution in the Parisian cultural landscape is changing face: Ophélie Ferlier Bouat will take up her position as director of the Museum of Fine Arts of the City of Paris on September 1st. The appointment, announced on June 22 by the City of Paris and Paris Musées, follows the departure of Annick Lemoine at the head of the Orsay and Orangerie Museums.
Ophélie Ferlier Bouat has been directing the Bourdelle Museum for five years, where she accompanied the renovation phase. Before that, the specialist in 19th and 20th century sculpture had worked for nine years at the Musée d’Orsay, as curator of sculptures from 1880 to 1914. There she created the exhibitions “In the Land of Monsters. Léopold Chauveau” in 2020 and “Félicie de Fauveau, the amazon of sculpture” in 2013. She also organized an exhibition at the Grand Palais on Paul Gauguin in 2017, as well as at the Orangerie, on the Italian sculptor Adolfo Wildt in 2015. At the Bourdelle museum, she is at the origin of “Rodin / Bourdelle, corps à corps” in 2024, which retraced the relationship between the master and his student through a rich selection, but also an important monograph dedicated in France to Magdalena Abakanowicz, a committed Polish sculptor and textile artist, in 2025.
At the Petit Palais, Ophélie Ferlier Bouat intends to continue this exhibition policy. The spotlighting of little-known artists and the representation of creators from foreign scenes will be the guidelines for programming that aims to be more inclusive. As for the permanent collections, she plans to modify their presentation in order to highlight the presence of women artists.
This appointment is part of a reorganization at the head of several major Parisian museums, opened both by the death of Sylvain Amic at Orsay and by the resignation of Laurence des Cars at the Louvre.
It is an ascension in the career of Ophélie Ferlier Bouat, who inherits responsibility for a collection rich in 45,000 pieces, including some masterpieces. Paintings by Rembrandt, Ingres, Courbet and Cézanne and 19th century sculptures by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Louis Ernest Barrias attracted nearly a million and a half visitors in 2025. The Petit Palais has thus established itself as the most visited municipal museum in Paris, ahead of the Carnavalet Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.
