Student’s decolletage offends home of nudes

A Paris student has received an apology from the Musee d’Orsay after guards denied her entry because her dress showed too much of her bosom.

The incident at the home of some of France’s most famous nude artworks earned rapid online celebrity for the student named Jeanne, 22, after she posted a letter of complaint on Twitter. She also posted a photograph of herself in the dress, taken just before the incident.

A female employee stopped her at the entrance and stared at her decolletage, she said, then told her: ‘‘Oh no, that’s not going to be possible, that’s not allowed, that is not acceptable.’’ Security guards confirmed that her dress broke the rules, she added. ‘‘At no time does anyone say my cleavage is a problem, they’re manifestly staring at my breasts, referring to them as ‘that’.’’

A crowd gathered, causing her embarrassment. ‘‘I was ashamed. I had the feeling that everyone was looking at my breasts,’’ she said. ‘‘I was reduced to my breasts. I was a woman whom they were sexualising.’’ She agreed to put on a jacket and went in to admire ‘‘the paintings of naked women, sculptures of naked women’’. She noticed other visitors in skimpy tops ‘‘but all of them thin with very small breasts’’.

Jeanne said that her dress had caused no problem when she had lunch at the Meurice hotel, one of the grandest in Paris, before going on to the museum.

After the letter provoked a squall on social media, mainly poking fun at the museum, its management replied, saying: ‘‘We deeply regret it and apologise to the person involved.’’

Jeanne received a telephone call from Arnaud Oseredczuk, director of the museum. ‘‘They assured me that what I endured was not normal and did not correspond to their policy.’’

The museum said that the staff who barred her were employed by an outside contractor.

The museum displays two of the world’s most famous nude paintings, Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World, a graphic portrait of a woman’s genitals.

– The Times