After Two Years, Christine Macel Is No Longer Director of Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs

Christine Macel, a closely watched French curator who organized the 2017 Venice Biennale, will reportedly no longer be director of Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Musée Nissim de Camondo roughly two years after stepping into the top role of both institutions.

According to the French-language Journal des Arts, which first reported the news, Macel will remain an adviser to the museums. But she will departure the directorship role, a decision that was done by “mutual agreement,” per the report.

Macel’s background is mainly in the field of contemporary art, and not design. That made her an unusual choice for the role when she was hired in 2022, but board president Johannes Huth said at the time that he wanted someone who would bring “a decidedly contemporary perspective” to the institutions.

She was known at the time for serving as chief curator of the Centre Pompidou for more than 20 years prior. Macel also curated Eric Duyckaerts’s Belgian Pavilion for the 2007 Venice Biennale and Anri Sala’s French Pavilion for the 2013 Venice Biennale. Her main exhibition for the 2017 Venice Biennale, “Viva Arte Viva,” received mixed reviews.

Her departure from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’s directorship role came after an audit into the “occupational health” of employees at the institution, according to the Journal des Arts.

In an interview with the Art Newspaper, Macel said her move to become an adviser to the museum was a “relief,” as “the situation had become untenable in what an audit has described as a ‘crisis of governance and organization’ at the museum.”

A Musée des Arts Décoratifs representative did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.