Christine Macel Out as Director of MusÉe des Arts DÉcoratifs

French art historian Christine Macel has been reassigned from her position asdirectorof Paris’s Les Arts Décoratifs, which she has held since 2022. The organization—where Macel helmed theMusée des Arts Décoratifsand the Musée Nissim de Camondo—revealed that, by mutual agreement, beginning October 15 she will continue on in an advisory capacity through October 2025, when her contract expires. Macel told theArt Newspaperthat stepping into the newly created role of scientific and artistic adviser to board chair Johannes Huth would be “a relief,” noting that “the situation had become untenable in what an audit has described as a ‘crisis of governance and organization’ at the museum.”

Macelarrivedto Les Arts Décoratifs from Paris’s Centre Pompidou, of which she had been chief curator since 2000. The curator of the 2017 Venice Biennale and an expert on the art of the Middle East, North Africa, and the former Eastern Bloc, she was viewed as an anomalous choice to lead the design- and heritage-focused institutions, but embodied Huth’s expressed desire for a director who would bring “a decidedly contemporary perspective” to the institutions. French dailyLe Journal des Artsreports that her reassignment comes in the wake of a workplace investigation, spurred by the resignation of an unusually high number of staffers, that found “social and psychological” problems in the work environment.

Les Arts Décoratifs, which additionally operates a library and two schools, the École Camondo and the Ateliers du Carrousel, is a notoriously complex organization and has seen other high-level shakeups in the past decade or so, including the 2022 departure of Macel’s immediate predecessor, Olivier Gabet, after a single contract term, and the 2013 resignation of former culture minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon from the position of board chair after just six months.