PARIS.- The Musée d'Orsay has received an extraordinary donation from the Kan family: seventeen fans made by prominent artists, put on display to mark the museum's 40th anniversary.

The Kan collection, assembled over the last twenty years, is the largest ever collection of impressionist and post-impressionist fans. This donation is of an unprecedented scale and constitutes a significant expansion of the museum's collections in this area. Featuring the work of eight artists, from Jacques-Emile Blanche and Foujita to Georges de Feure, the donation includes a fan by Degas, one from Toulouse-Lautrec, four by Gauguin, and no less than seven by Pissarro – the impressionist painter who most often used this format.

The painted fan appeared in the 1850s at the Salon, and thirty years later became a very popular format among the impressionists. Up until now, the Musée d'Orsay fan collection featured several celebrated examples, such as Pissarro's Coteaux de Chaponval and Degas' Le Ballet, but it only painted a partial picture of this obsession with fans, a veritable phenomenon in art history.

The folding fan was invented in Japan in the 9th century and brought to Europe by the Portuguese in the 16th century. Its popularity soon spread, and fans could be seen everywhere in European capitals and in the colonies, before undergoing a remarkable transformation in France in the 1870s and 1880s. Initially a mainly feminine accessory associated with the applied arts and high society, the fan became a means of experimentation for artists such as Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Gauguin, who found it to be extraordinarily fertile ground for exploring new forms. Its half-moon shape was an invitation to make use of its curved lines and asymmetrical form to find a new approach to composition.

The painted fan was a triumph at the 4th impressionist exhibition, where Degas exhibited no fewer than five fans alongside six by Forain and twelve by Pissarro. There are several reasons behind the impressionists' fascination with painting on fans. Spanish culture was in very much in vogue in the mid-19th century, which led to renewed interest in the object itself, then Japanese culture became popular in the 1860s, favouring curved forms and unusual surfaces. At the time, the fan offered a way of escaping the rectangular framing typical of Western painting. It also allowed artists to attract more buyers: apart from the potential for experimentation and innovation, these fans made particularly attractive decorative objects. The fashion for impressionist fans is the product of a unique encounter between decorative traditions, influences from outside Europe, and exploration of form.

Although it occupied a relatively marginal place in the careers of the great painters, the fan, with its experimental qualities, is in a class of its own, and played a key role in the history of modern art. The popularity of this artistic format began to wane after 1880, but the fan had made a lasting impression on the aesthetic and social consciousness of the 19th century. It was taken up once again by the post-impressionists and the Nabis, as well as in Art Nouveau symbolism, as can be seen in the fan by Georges de Feure that features in the Kan collection.