Cécile Debray

Cécile Debray, born November 20, 1966, is a French museum director, art historian and curator, specialist in modern and contemporary art in painting. Cécile Debray is general heritage curator, director of the Musée de l'Orangerie since 2017. She has been awarded the medal of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by France in 2018. Museum director, Cécile de Debray studied art history before entering the Institut national du patrimoine in 1996. Cécile Debray is the great-granddaughter of the academician writer Georges Duhamel and represents his heirs. She studied art history and history at Paris Nanterre University, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and at the University of Montreal, then, in 1996, joined the Institut national du patrimoine. Director of the museums of Châteauroux, from 1997 to 2000, she was curator at the Museum of Modern Art of Paris from 2000 to 2005, scientific advisor to the General Administrator of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Grand Palais des Champs -Élysées, in charge of the programming of the National Galleries of the Grand Palais, from 2005 to 2008. From 2008 to 2017, Cécile Debray was chief curator in charge of modern collections at the National Museum of Modern Art-Centre Pompidou. In 2009 she was co-curator with Camille Morineau of Elles@centrepompidou a female artists' exhibition, for which she was in charge of the travelling exhibition through the United States and Brazil with a selection of artworks focused on the American and Brazilian scenes. A specialist in Henri Matisse, in 2012, she revealed the conceptual dimension of Matisse's work through the exhibition Matisse, Pairs and series highlighting the repetitive exploration of the same subject, of the same motif, which allowed the artist to explore painting. In 2015, she designed the Marcel Duchamp monographic exhibition La peinture même. Cécile Debray shows the painting and the drawings which led the artist to the realization of the Grand Verre, La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, from 1910 to 1923.