Roses, oil, even beaver secretion: in recent years, French museums have been appealing to—and occasionally offending—visitors’ sense of smell in an attempt to create a more immersive exhibition experience.
The Musée national de la Marine last year opened a new permanent exhibition with various scents to be experienced throughout the visit. “Odours are never imposed on the public,” Delphine Rabat, an interior designer and the head of the Casson Mann agency, which contributed to the 2023 revamp, told France Culture. “Visitors are warned when smells may be a little disturbing.”
A section of the museum devoted to the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige in 2002 features two small chimneys like those of an ocean liner that release the scent of oil when visitors press a button. The goal here is to raise environmental awareness.
Meanwhile, for its 50th anniversary, Nice’s Musée national Marc Chagall last year invited creators from various disciplines to draw inspiration from its collections. Jean-Claude Ellena, formerly the in-house perfumer at Hermès, accordingly created five rose-dominated perfumes in response to Chagall’s Le Cantique des Cantiques (1957-66) series.
“Perfume-making is an art, and perfumers are artists,” says Grégory Couderc, the museum’s scientific manager. Chairs with cups of paper strips imbued with the different fragrances were placed in front each work so the public could sit down and smell how each work inspired Ellena.
But museums have not always achieved the desired result. Some visitors to the 2023 Éternel Mucha show at the Grand Palais Immersif found the flowery perfumes devised by TechnicoFlor to convey the affection of the Czech painter for the actress Sarah Bernhardt overpowering and irrelevant.
“I don’t see how a blend of rose, camellia and jasmine evokes their friendship,” said one French art critic. “I found it even more distressing to have to stick my nose into a hole drilled into the wall.”
The trend seems to have started at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Rochelle, which in 2016 displayed an “olfactory table” to help visually impaired visitors appreciate its exhibits. Then in 2017, Maison Cire Trudon created four scents to be diffused throughout the galleries of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. One of them, called Sentiment de la Licorne (unicorn scent), contained castoreum—a secretion that beavers combine with urine to mark their territories. Visitors reported, perhaps surprisingly, that it was more pleasant than repellent.
For the 2021 edition of the Nantes art festival, Jean Blaise, its then artistic director, had visitors choose between three tailor-made fragrances presented on a table in a room of the Château des ducs de Bretagne. Bertrand Duchaufour’s contribution, with touches of magnolia, citrus, pink berries, rum, patchouli and vetiver, won the public vote.
Smell seems to sell—the event attracted over 300,000 people. “I was more than happy to share this number with our local representatives to make them understand that art, whether visual, performative or olfactory, is essential,” Blaise says. The outdoor festival he founded has spawned a dozen similar events across France, including at Le Havre, Metz and Annecy.
At the Musée national de la Marine’s shop, stocks of stones soaked in the seaweed-rich Sillage de Mer (sea trail) fragrance conceived by the perfumer Nathalie Lorson are running low. “We wanted to give the public a taste for maritime history and a piece of the museum to bring back home,” says Thierry Gausseron, the museum’s director.
The trend seems unlikely to evaporate soon. Diptyque, a French fragrance brand known for collaborating with artists such as Joël Andrianomearisoa and Tatiana Trouvé, has launched a foundation whose mission includes collaborating with cultural institutions to “develop olfactory projects fostering a dialogue between art and nature,” says Laurence Semichon, the foundation’s president.
