—Alexandra Grabbe, French Graffiti
HELEN DUDAR
The Hungry Museum
Cézanne said, “The Louvre is the book from which we learn to read.”
THE WIDOW LADY FROM TROY, NEW YORK, WAS OFFENDED, INDEED seriously shocked. For some months of 1830–31, Emma Willard was in residence in Paris. She had, of course, toured the Louvre Museum—or perhaps only as much of it as a virtuous person could endure. As her journal would report, the place was an offense against decency, its walls crowded with works more suitable to dens of iniquity than to a public collection of art. Now, Emma Willard was an early feminist, a pioneer educator of women; don’t even ask how she could have known anything about the decor of iniquitous dens. It is likely that she was shaken by images of naked creatures celebrating a few of life’s pleasures. Even more offensive was the cavalier way in which sacred and profane works were allowed to mingle. In Mrs. Willard’s eyes, the morality of all Paris was imperiled.
Sixteen decades later, the relentlessly modernized Louvre is not so much a shock as a bombardment of surprises. One recent season, a devotee of vintage monster films could take in King Kong and Godzilla in a single sitting or spend an entire day listening to expert discussions of the iconoclastic American architect Frank Gehry, perhaps hoping for a gorilla to appear. In the fairly new, immense underground-entrance space below I. M. Pei’s celebrated glass pyramid, dedicated shoppers roamed through boutiques crammed with expensive knickknackery and shawls priced at $300. There were not only cafés for light bites but a gourmet restaurant where, at last, a finicky diner could encounter what national standards currently consider a “correct meal;” there were concerts and art lectures and a post office handy for mailing souvenir cards; there were stacks of videocassettes on Louvre masterworks turned out with Hollywoodian finesse by a new department of cultural affairs.
And borrowing a leaf from enterprising American museums, the Louvre was now available for private parties. On Tuesdays, when the museum is closed, the same subterranean entrance area known as the Cour Napoleon, which displays no art that might be endangered by revelers, may be rented for dinners for a maximum of 1,000 persons. The price: $50,000 to $100,000.
If there is any trauma in the renewal of this storied institution, it is to be suffered in its acreage—miles of hard flooring to be traversed by a serious visitor bent on exploring riches beyond the Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory. Ten years into what has, without exaggeration, been called the Grand Louvre project—at a cost that has so far scaled the $1 billion mark—the place is bigger than ever and still growing.
After spending countless hours in the Louvre and other august institutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are in desperate need of a Sleep Program, whereby one could, for a fee, sleep on a cot before a great work of art. Sleep fundraisers, done selectively, would not only augment the coffers of perennially fund-hungry institutions, but provide culture lovers with a unique way to worship, to study, and to dream. (Of course, tests would first need to be conducted on the effects of morning breath and gas on the most delicate works of art.)
—James O’Reilly,
“Sleeping with Giants”
In November of 1993 the museum at last became the sole occupant of the rambling old palace it calls home. It occupied and opened the Richelieu Wing, the long arm of the building on the north side of the grounds. A shabby warren of offices that housed the French Ministry of Finance for more than a century had been gutted and transformed into an elegant sprawl of spaces for art—more than 100 rooms. With the 39 others opened last year in another wing, the museum has doubled its exhibition space.
And there is still more. Inaugurated simultaneously with the Richelieu was an immense underground facility wearing the imposing title of the Carrousel du Louvre. For years now, at the western end of the museum grounds, workmen have been burrowing under the gardens known as the Carrousel. The place was a mess, a perpetual chaos of noise and dirt and disorder, embellished with hopeful signs promising an up-to-date array of amenities. The completed space has its own access to a Métro station and several museum necessities—a laboratory, an amphitheater—but its main purpose was to alleviate burdensome traffic problems.
Until this year, the busy thoroughfare along the Seine River on the south side of the Louvre has been cluttered with parked and double-parked tour buses, the vehicles that shepherd fully one-third of the daily visitors to the museum. Now, at last, underground parking space has been provided for 80 buses and 600 cars. And significantly, there is also space for 60 new shops. Because neither the city nor the state would come up with sufficient funds to pay for a parking installation, rent money from the boutiques, when they are fully leased, will eventually cover the high cost of building underground.
There is no progress without pain. In the quiet of cramped curatorial offices—17th-century rooms equipped with up-to-date computers—staff people sit worrying about the kind of unwelcome visitors this new shoppers’ paradise is apt to attract. Not far from the Louvre is a similar underground mall, the Forum des Halles, which replaced the legendary wholesale food markets of Paris. It seems to house a floating population of voyous, young and vaguely menacing layabouts from the suburbs who spend hours just hanging around.
In its long, checkered history, the Louvre has survived worse, including the demanding tastes of twenty monarchs, most of whom lived elsewhere; the dictates of at least fifteen architects who built, tore down and rebuilt segments of the palace for eight centuries; a few revolutions; several names, one of which was Palace of the People; serious fires; the untidy housekeeping of artists allowed to work there; and the greed of the Nazi invaders. In World War II, the Louvre’s cherished contents were packed up and trucked to hiding places in châteaux scattered throughout the countryside.
The inauguration of two new major installations was timed to coincide with a significant anniversary—the bicentennial of the birth of the Louvre as a public institution. It formally opened November 18, 1793, at the end of the French Revolution, as the Central Museum of the Arts, with a collection of 538 works, most of them acquired by generations of French royalty. These were augmented by art that had lately been confiscated from cathedrals and the great homes of members of the nobility who had either fled or been parted from their heads. For a long time, the premises were primarily devoted to a small army of copyists—spiritual ancestors of the needy artists who today can still be found turning out clumsy replicas of great paintings. In the early years they were the only people allowed in daily; the general public could visit every ten days. Not long after the opening, the name was changed to the Napoleon Museum; the collection had been brilliantly enlarged by a conqueror who knew a thing or two about looting.
Neither the name nor Napoleon’s booty would survive Waterloo. In an effort to savor all the stolen art before it was retrieved by the prior owners, in the summer of 1815 an English miniaturist named Andrew Robertson scooped up his spare cash and rushed to Paris. As he recounted in his journal, Robertson haunted the museum, hoping to see everything before the Italians, Prussians, Austrians, Spanish, and Dutch, in turn, arrived and packed up their national treasures. To the French, their claims were a cultural insult. As one outraged Parisian insisted to the visiting artist, “France was the garden and cradle of the arts—the only place where these things ought to be....” Actually, the repatriation efforts were not entirely completed. The Italians accepted a boring Charles Lebrun and left behind a first-rate Veronese; they took back inlaid marble tables and did not bother with so-called primitive works, which tastemakers of the period rejected as “barbarous.” Over time, bequests, purchases, and astute explorations would fill empty spaces and crowd basement storage rooms. The Vénus de Milo, found by French archaeologists digging around the Mediterranean basin, arrived in 1821. For much of the 19th century, the French burrowed through ancient sites in the Middle East, shipping home masterworks of great pre-Islamic civilizations. The result is perhaps the largest and most divers
e assemblage of art in the world.
Housing the works and showing them in improved surroundings proved to be a major priority for the President, François Mitterrand; the Grand Louvre project was the subject of his first press conference on taking office in 1981. It is invariably perceived as part of Mitterrand’s “edifice complex”—he launched a good number of building projects. On the other hand, the professionals who occupy the Louvre had been wringing their hands over space problems for half a century. As the museum’s director, Michel Laclotte, puts it, “It was a dream for generations, from the 1930s on, to have the Richelieu”—the wing occupied until now by the Ministry of Finance.
It would take some time to persuade the ministry to relocate to new headquarters on the edge of Paris. For one two-year period, while the bureaucrats managed to delay their departure, construction work could be pursued only during the night hours, at great expense and inconvenience.
As urgently needed as the Richelieu Wing was a central reception area. There were a half-dozen ways into the Louvre but no suitable gathering place for the large classes of chattering children and the big tour groups shepherded into the museum all day long; there was no auditorium for film, lecture and music programs; and there were hardly any of the merchandising facilities that today’s museums thrive on. To find a workable solution and to oversee the platoon of architects who would eventually take on assignments for parts of the huge project, Mitterrand chose I. M. Pei, one of America’s most distinguished architects, whose best-known design was probably the masterly East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Great space for new facilities was to be found only underground. For a time it looked as if nothing at all would rise on the surface of the court, but Pei felt that a marker of some kind was needed, a structure that could also bring daylight into the installation. He thought of domes, he toyed with cubes; he chose a pyramid, a 71-foot-high structure made with panes of clear glass that would reflect the ornate facades surrounding it and the ever-changing sky above. To say that the reaction was hostile scarcely describes the explosion of abuse that greeted his design. “Fit only for Disneyland!” and “The Luna Park of the Louvre!” the critics cried.
To this day, some Parisians insist the opposition was not wholly esthetic. Some of the anger was focused on the fact that Mitterrand had chosen his chief architect without competition (Pei does not participate in competitions).There was, as well, the automatic resistance of conservatives to a Socialist president’s building ambitions. As one Parisian woman involved in the arts recalled, the opposition view was: “How dare Mitterrand touch the Louvre? How dare a Socialist do this?”
In Paris a building is never just a building. New public architecture gets served up as a gourmand’s feast of allegory and national politics. I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre is not just a new entrance to an old museum but a central eye for all of Paris, regenerating all that is old, redefining the entire city around its single glass point like a magic crystal in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
—Alastair Gordon,
Architecture View
In Pei’s New York office, the published insults are preserved in a foot-thick file. A man of resolute high spirits, Pei now says with a laugh, “I was hurt but not mortally so.” He had the firm support not only of the Mitterrand government but, eventually, of the entire Louvre staff. Still, in the early days, during frequent business trips to Paris, he could sense the public hostility even in casual encounters. Some of the animosity abated after a full-scale prototype, without glass, went up on the site in 1985, conveying a sense of what the courtyard would look like with this large, spare addition. And after the 1989 opening, public opinion was swiftly transformed. “People stopped me on the street and thanked me,” Pei recalls. He would repeat himself brilliantly in the design for the Carrousel du Louvre. Daylight pours into that underground space through another big pyramid, this one inverted so that its point becomes a beacon in a great space.
Pyramid bashing has now faded, to be replaced by agitation over the Tuileries. The Grand Louvre project includes restoration of those splendid formal gardens that stretch from the museum grounds as far as the Place de la Concorde. One citizens’ group organized a protest, enlisting American support and contributions, with flyers that instructed the public on “How to Stop the Massacre.” The victim of the massacre, in their eyes, was a piece of history—Le Notre’s incomparable 17th-century gardens—and the means was their growing commercialization. In recent years, garden space has been rented out for three-week street fairs, a giant bookseller’s exhibition and what seemed to be the last straw—a skating rink.
As one architect involved in the project sums it up, the conflict is a battle between two groups: the functionaries who oversee the Tuileries and who, to support the gardens, will rent a plot to any entrepreneur able to pay congenial sums of francs for the privilege; and on the other side, the strict preservationists who don’t want to see anyone even walking on the grass. The resolution will likely be a compromise. The street fairs, popular events for children, have already been reduced from two a year to one.
Whatever pride Parisians take in the Louvre is hardly translated into a notable local presence in its galleries. Since the pyramid reception hall opened, the number of visitors has gone from three million a year to more than five million. The majority are foreign, and about one-seventh of all visitors are North American; the proportion from the city and suburbs is said to have risen from a sparse 31 percent to 36 percent. Even so, people in the businesses and professions of the arts insist that although they are often at the Louvre, their friends never go. Among knowledgeable residents there is an amiably cynical rule that residents of this culture-ridden city turn up at the pyramid in large numbers, lunch in the gourmet restaurant, take in a lecture or film, pause to inspect the glorious bookshop and go home without ever having stopped to inspect a work of art.
Apparently many do not even wander beyond the great entrance hall for the short walk to one of the newest—and oldest—works on display. Even before digging began, French archaeologists told Pei and the builders that they would find vestiges of the first royal dwelling on the grounds. What the excavation actually uncovered were substantial sections of walls, towers and wells of the austere 12th-century fortified castle that was the first Louvre—an impressive and strangely touching remnant of the city’s early history.
In the 12th century, Paris was France’s largest city, but the royal court was in neighboring Senlis. In 1180, this was to change when a young boy of fifteen became King Philippe-Auguste of France. From the very first years of his reign, Philippe took it upon himself to transform Paris into the finest city in the western world. He had the streets paved, laid the groundwork for the creation of the University of Paris, and, upon leaving for the Crusades, gave the order to build a fortress to protect his beloved Paris from invaders.
A castle called the Louvre was built on the most vulnerable site in Paris. It was a massive square structure with a central tower topped with a pointed roof. It housed royal prisoners, the crown jewels, and the kingdom’s charters.
—France Today
Recent innovations trouble some Louvre professionals. Without prompting, a curator suddenly offers an explanation for an unexpected detail on the Louvre’s one-page map. Published in six languages and color-coded to help tourists find their way through confusing spaces, it provides the precise location of six masterworks that many first-time visitors feel it is crucial to see—among them, the Mona Lisa, the Vénus de Milo and the Winged Victory. No museum is happy to encourage tourists to proceed through the building at a gallop primarily or exclusively in order to stand before a half-dozen celebrated pieces. But something had to be done for the peace of mind of those staff members who preside over the information desk: they were bored beyond endurance by the number of tourists wanting directions to those works.
In fact, the museum administration appears to be singularly attentive to the comforts of its
1,300 employees. Michel Laclotte, a small, brisk, unpretentious man, is the first scholar ever to head the museum, and one would expect his interests to focus chiefly on the art inventory and its proper display. Nevertheless, since his arrival the Louvre has found room for an employee health club complete with weight machines, a lending library and a part-time social worker available to help staff members with financial or domestic problems.
Of the six stellar pieces listed on the map, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is not only a point of pride but a source of torment. Posing the question as “one of the crucial issues” confronting the museum, his words edged in irony, Pierre Rosenberg, the Louvre’s curator of paintings, asks, “What are we to do with the terrible Mona Lisa?” With her faint cryptic smile and her sly eyes, this 16th-century portrait is an object of great beauty and greater fame, rendered even more famous by theft. In 1911 it was stolen and kept hidden for two years by an Italian workman who thought it belonged back home where its model had lived.
In order to make culture a game, my wife and I buy postcards and catalogs of pieces of art and encourage our daughters to find as many as they can in a given museum. And so I mil always remember the Mona Lisa this way: armed with a catalog, my three-year old Mary disappeared, munchkin-like, into a herd of grownups swarming the fabled painting. Soon I heard a shriek from the front of the crowd, “Daddy! I found her!”
—James O’Reilly, “On and Off the Autoroute”
In high tourist season, when the noise level and the crowds in the pyramid reception hall resemble the Miami airport on Christmas travel days, the groups of guided tourists rooted before the painting create day-long bottlenecks. Their presence makes it a chore to move through the Grand Gallery and nearly impossible to approach the art on neighboring walls. In fact, one of the few depressing sights in the Louvre is to observe visitors gazing raptly at the portrait and scarcely casting a glance at two splendid Leonardo paintings that hang nearby, the Virgin of the Rocks and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
Travelers' Tales Paris Page 8
