If a Parisian of 1880 had somehow managed to return to the Louvre in 1980, he would have noticed little if any change, at least externally. In the century between the fall of the Second Empire in 1870 and President François Mitterrand’s momentous decision to expand the museum in 1981, even alterations to the interior were limited in scope. On three occasions during this period the Louvre was so buffeted by adversities—during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870 and the two World Wars—that it was forced to shut its doors and evacuate its collections to distant parts of France. By the end of that long century, pieces of masonry were falling from the darkened façade of the Cour Napoléon, which had become little more than a dingy car park for the employees of the Ministry of Finance. And yet it was also during this period that the Louvre underwent a kind of transubstantiation: in a very real sense it became the Louvre. Following the stumbling, hesitant progress of its early years, it emerged as the institution that we know today, establishing its preeminence among the museums of the world.
France’s Second Empire came to an end at the Battle of Sedan in northern France on 2 September 1870. Over twenty years later Émile Zola devoted an entire novel to that defeat, simply titled La Débâcle. The results were so catastrophic that by evening, Napoleon III was a prisoner of the Prussian army. This was the first time that a French ruler had been captured on the field of battle since François I’s surrender at Pavia in 1525. Napoleon III would never see France again, dying in exile in England two years later.
The effects of this battle on Paris and especially on the Louvre were no less drastic. Napoleon III’s wife, the Empress Eugénie, had been made regent while he was in the field. When she learned, a month before Sedan, of the French defeats at Forbach and Reichshoffen, she hastened to the Tuileries and placed it, together with the rest of the newly completed Louvre, on a war footing. On 31 August, she ordered Émilien van Nieuwerkerke, the superintendent of the imperial museums, and the curator Frédéric de Reiset to begin evacuating paintings from the Louvre. Three hundred works, the cream of the collection, were sent by train to the Arsenal of Brest, the point on French soil farthest from the advancing Prussian army. In his journal on 2 September, Edmond de Goncourt recalls Reiset weeping before Raphael’s La Belle Jardinière. “In the evening, after dinner,” Goncourt wrote, “we went to the train station on the Rue d’Enfer; I saw seventeen crates containing the Antiope [of Correggio], the most beautiful Venetians etc.—those paintings that had seemed attached to the walls of the Louvre for all eternity and now are nothing more than luggage protected from the hazards of travel and displacement by the word fragile.”1 Even Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, the largest painting in the Louvre, was unceremoniously rolled up and carted away. Meanwhile, the sarcophagi of the Egyptian department served as repositories for jewels and papyrus, the Venus de Milo was relegated to the basement of a local police precinct, and the reliefs of Jean Goujon and David d’Angers on the façades overlooking the Cour Carrée were slathered in plaster to protect them from incoming fire.
The day after the Battle of Sedan, Napoleon III capitulated at Metz, and twenty-four hours later the Second Empire had been abolished and replaced by the government of the Défense Nationale. Nieuwerkerke fled to England, where in due course he managed to sell his personal art collection—including more than eight hundred medieval and Renaissance sculptures and ceramics, as well as fifteen suits of armor—to Sir Richard Wallace, who would make them the nucleus of his famed Wallace Collection. Just as Nieuwerkerke was making good his escape, an angry mob began to gather in the place du Carrousel, in front of the Tuileries Palace. The empress, who was inside, scarcely had time to collect a few heirlooms before hastening half a mile on foot, first south to the recently renovated (and soon to be destroyed) Pavillon de Flore, then east through the Grande Galerie and finally to the Colonnade, where a waiting carriage bore her away to safety and exile.
But the abdication of Napoleon III was only the beginning of the travails of France and especially Paris. In place of the empire, which had capitulated, the provisional government of the Défense Nationale was determined to continue fighting the Prussians. Because the most determined resistance came from Paris itself, on 19 September the Prussian invaders laid siege to the city, which was defended by the thirty-year-old Enceinte Thiers, a fortification that surrounded the city. For much of the siege, the armies of the garde nationale were encamped in the Tuileries Garden, while several sections of the Tuileries Palace and the Louvre were transformed into makeshift hospitals for the wounded. In the Grande Galerie itself, now void of paintings, industrial machinery was set up to manufacture firearms. Hoping to conclude the siege quickly, Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, pestered the generals to fire on the city, but they refused. Instead, as hunger set in with the onset of winter, they preferred to squeeze the citizens. But when the Parisians proved hardier than expected, Kaiser Wilhelm I himself ordered General Helmuth von Moltke to fire his large-caliber Krupp siege guns into the capital. Considerable damage was done to the outskirts of the city, but the Prussian ordnance couldn’t reach three miles into its center and so menace the Louvre.
Three days later, the city capitulated. After an armistice was signed on 26 January, the Prussians went home, winning Alsace Lorraine (by the Treaty of Frankfurt on 10 May) for the soon-to-be-united German state. But now a far graver danger emerged as civil strife broke out between the Défense Nationale, based in Versailles, and the new government in Paris, known as the Commune. This assortment of Communists, Socialists and anarchists assumed power on 18 March and promptly set up a revolutionary regime whose immediate measures included the separation of church and state, the prohibition of fines imposed on workers by their employers and, perhaps most discommoding of all to a Parisian, the abolition of night work in bakeries.
The painter Gustave Courbet, a leader in the Commune’s makeshift assembly, was chosen as president of the Fédération des artistes de Paris, an association that included more than four hundred artists, among them the painters Manet, Millet and Daumier and the sculptor Jules Dalou. In one of his first acts after he assumed power, Courbet passed a bill in the legislature to dismantle the column in the place Vendôme—crowned by a statue of Napoleon I—on the grounds that it was “a monument devoid of any and all artistic value.” (Once order was restored, Courbet was fined 330,000 francs for its destruction. Clearly unable to pay, he fled to Switzerland, where he died six years later). According to Edmond de Goncourt, writing in his journal on 18 April, “The staff of the Musée du Louvre are very nervous…. They are afraid that Courbet may be on the trail [of the Venus de Milo] and they fear—wrongly, I think—that this crazy modernist is capable of anything against that classical masterpiece.”2
Jules Dalou, who would become one of the finest sculptors of the Third Republic, took up residence in the Louvre with his family as its provisional administrator, and in that capacity he reopened the museum on 18 May. The Communards also occupied the Tuileries Palace, where they offered concerts and tours for fifty centimes a head—since few commoners had ever been admitted to the palace, it was predictably a subject of great interest—with the proceeds going to help the wounded and the orphans of the Franco-Prussian War. But such diversions were short-lived. Several days later the garde nationale, commanded by General Patrice de MacMahon, marched from Versailles and took up positions in the capital as they prepared to crush the Communards. Barricades arose throughout the city, especially along the rue de Rivoli on the north side of the Louvre. Dalou enlisted forty-seven of the Louvre’s guards to put up barricades around the museum as well, little suspecting that, within the week, he and his family would be fleeing to London. There, for the next decade, he would have to fight the unfounded claims of the new government that he had “threatened with death some forty-seven guards of the Louvre.”3
The rule of the Commune reached its violent conclusion during the so-called semaine sanglante, or Bloody Week, from 21 to 28 May 1871. It began when the forces of the garde nationale lobbed projectiles into the city: one of these landed on the roof of the Grande Galerie, without damaging any of the paintings, while another shattered some of the stuccos on the ceiling of the Rotonde de Mars. And yet, even amid such conflagrations, the museum somehow remained open, at least initially. One of the few curators to remain at his post, Barbet de Jouy, shut the museum down only on 23 May, by which time fighting had broken out in the streets of Paris.
That was also the day when one of the Commune’s military leaders, Jules Bergeret, resolved to set fire to the Tuileries Palace. He had taken steps to prepare for such an eventuality, stocking its central pavilion with oil, turpentine and alcohol. Around nine o’clock in the evening, he and his followers formed three groups of ten men and began to strew the floors and walls with bucketfuls of these highly flammable materials, which he then set on fire. At exactly that moment at various points around the city, similar teams were setting fire to other public buildings, among them the Hôtel de Ville in the place de Grèves. But the area around the Louvre sustained the greatest damage from this systematic vandalism. Within a matter of hours, the Ministry of Finance at the corner of the rue de Rivoli and the rue de Castiglione was totally gutted by flames. Soon the Palais-Royal was in flames as well, together with the Bibliothèque du Louvre, directly across the street. Although the Palais-Royal sustained relatively little damage, the Louvre’s library was completely destroyed, with incalculable loss of books and especially archival documents touching on the history of the Louvre: to this day, there are gaps in our understanding of the Louvre’s early evolution as a result of the violence of that night.
And then the Communards came for the Louvre itself, intending to attack les Grands Guichets, the magnificent southern entrance that had been completed only a few years earlier by Hector Lefuel. At this point the curator Barbet de Jouy, who has been called the savior of the Louvre, sprang into action, directing several dozen of the guards to protect the museum, aided by members of the 26th Battalion of chasseurs commanded by Martian Bernardy de Sigoyer. They thus managed to control the flames until the fire department could arrive. On the south side of the Grande Galerie, the Porte Barbet de Jouy has been named in recognition of this and other services that the curator rendered to the Louvre Museum.
When all the dust had settled the next morning, the Palais des Tuileries was a smoldering ruin, together with the pavilions on either side of it: the Pavillon de Flore at the western end of the Grande Galerie and the Pavillon de Marsan at the western end of the Aile Rivoli. A day later, on 25 May, the Commune collapsed and many of its leaders were rounded up and stood against a wall near the octagonal basin of the Jardin du Luxembourg. A plaque commemorates the spot were they were executed by firing squad. Bergeret himself escaped into exile, dying thirty-four years later in New York City.
Enough of the Tuileries remained standing, however, that many contemporaries hoped to restore it to its former glory. But when Hector Lefuel examined it a few days after the event, he determined that it could not be saved, and several years later this opinion was confirmed by Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera. Even so, the ruin of what had been one of the most sumptuous palaces in Europe remained standing in picturesque desolation for another twelve years. The rubble was finally carted away in 1883, thus flinging open the entire western limit of the Louvre. But for this fortuitous consequence of Bergeret’s vandalism, the Louvre today would feel closed off from the rest of Paris. The history of architecture may afford no greater irony than that the unification of the Louvre and the Tuileries, the ambition of almost every French ruler for three hundred years, lasted scarcely a decade.
The Tuileries Palace after it was destroyed by the Communards on 23 May, 1871, as seen from the Pavillon de Flore. The last of the wreckage was removed only 12 years later, in 1883.
But as so often in the history of architecture, there is something nearly indestructible about a building: parts of it almost always remain, enabling us—at least in thought—to reconstruct much that has vanished. Many elements of the Tuileries have survived, scattered throughout Paris and the rest of Europe. One of the arches that spanned the western façade of the palace can now be found near the southern terrace of the Tuileries Garden, while another occupies the Cour Marly in the Louvre itself. Several of the seventeenth-century allegorical figures that adorned the palace’s west-facing pediment stand in the vast shopping center underneath the place du Carrousel. Other fragments wound up in the École des Beaux-Arts in the Sixth Arrondissement and in the Square Georges-Cain in the Marais, while still others came to rest at the Château de la Punta in Ajaccio, Corsica, and in Babelsberg Palace near Berlin.
In the first decade of the Third Republic, a great deal of time, effort and money was spent in cleaning up the damage and debris left in the aftermath of the Commune. Today visitors who enter the grounds of the Louvre from the west are apt to be impressed by a general sense of harmony, symmetry and stylistic unity among its various parts. That impression is due to the fact that almost everything that meets the eye—or at least the surface of everything—was conceived in the third quarter of the nineteenth century by one man, Hector Lefuel. But a closer look immediately gives the lie to this initial impression and reveals hidden irregularities. The most glaring example occurs in the northern wing, the Aile Rivoli, about halfway between the Pavillon de Marsan at the western end and the Pavillon de Rohan next to the Nouveau Louvre. This northern pendant to the Grande Galerie, which Percier and Fontaine built for Napoleon I around 1810, is divided into two parts that differ so clamorously in height, width and surface treatment that at the point of their critical contact a bare, crudely built stone wall juts out. It is almost as though, amid the extravagant classicism of the surrounding Beaux-Arts style, the twelfth-century Louvre of Philippe Auguste has reasserted itself. Lefuel had planned to build here a structure identical to the Pavillon des Sessions in the Grande Galerie. But money proved scarce in the early days of the Third Republic and so that work was never carried out.
Over the ensuing century, from the founding of the Third Republic to the first stirrings, in 1981, of the Grand Louvre, the museum was gradually transformed into the great institution that we know today: it became the Louvre. Indeed, the very notion of the great national art museum—whether the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, the Hermitage or the Metropolitan Museum of Art—was only beginning to harden into the category that we now recognize as a fixture of our modern world. During this period the Louvre assumed its place as the foremost art museum on earth, occupying a position of uncontested primacy. But in physical and institutional terms, the transformations it underwent were gradual and incremental. The greatest changes came in the form of new acquisitions and in the adoption of a more modernist display of the art, in response to the great historical convulsions of the First and Second World Wars.
The main exterior differences between 1880 and 1980 were mostly a question of landscaping. Today, for example, there is a dramatic divide between the Tuileries Garden and the place du Carrousel to the east, and this division was even starker when the Tuileries Palace stood between them. But with the removal of the last vestiges of that palace in the 1880s, Edmond Guillaume, Lefuel’s successor as the main architect of the Louvre, had the idea to reproduce the patterns of the eastern third of the garden in the place du Carrousel, thus visually binding together two spaces that had stood apart for centuries. The effect was a stately extension of André Le Nôtre’s grand seventeenth-century garden and a more harmonious space than is found there today.
Continuing east into the Cour Napoléon, a visitor in 1900 would have encountered one of the most striking monuments of the Belle Époque, a tribute to Léon Gambetta, the statesman who distinguished himself during the Prussian invasion and the early days of the Third Republic. For well over half a century, this now forgotten monument greeted every visitor who entered the Louvre, and it must have been intimately associated in the minds of many Parisians with a visit to the museum. As pure stagecraft, its overall effect was surely greater than the indifferent quality of its individual parts. Designed by the architect Louis-Charles Boileau and sculpted by Jean-Paul Aubé, it rose nearly sixty feet, confronting the Arc du Carrousel on equal terms. It was erected in 1888, six years after Gambetta’s premature death, and it took the form of an obelisk. Thus, although the Egyptian associations of I. M. Pei’s Pyramide initially puzzled observers, in fact it was not the first large Egyptian-inspired structure in the Cour Napoléon. The Gambetta monument depicted the statesman in stone, striking the sort of oratorical pose that the age demanded, with a cannon and a crouching soldier at his feet. Lying across the pedestal were bronze female figures, nude, as the age also required, and representing such edifying abstractions as truth and force and, at the summit, democracy straddling a winged lion.
Since Gambetta was famously a defender of democracy and a foe of Germany, his statue did not survive the Nazi occupation, which began in 1940. Soon after the Germans arrived, it was removed and its bronzes were melted down into armaments—the dismal lot of so much bronze statuary in time of war. The rest of the monument was torn down in 1954, at a time when such unapologetically oratorical expressions had fallen out of favor, and the truncated remains of Gambetta’s likeness reside today in the Square Édouard-Vaillant in the Twentieth Arrondissement. Two other sculptures that long occupied the Cour Napoléon, Paul Landowski’s Rodinesque Sons of Cain and Paul Wayland Bartlett’s equestrian statue of Lafayette, remained there until 1984, when they too were removed to make way for I. M. Pei’s Pyramide.
Jean-Paul Aubé’s Monument to Léon Gambetta (1838–1882), a French statesman during the early years of the Third Republic. Before being dismantled in 1954, the monument stood in the Cour Napoléon.
Throughout the period between Lefuel’s death in 1880 and the hiring of I. M. Pei to design the Grand Louvre one century later, the museum had an architect on hand, even when little work was to be done. Still, small projects were always in the works, some of considerable importance to the institution. Before the First World War, this position of architecte du Louvre was held in succession by Edmond Guillaume, Paul Blondel, Gaston Redon, Charles Girault and Victor Blavette.
Because most of their work concerned the Louvre’s interior spaces and because each generation is apt to alter those spaces according to its changing tastes, the work carried out by these five men has left little or no trace. This is true even for the earliest of those architects, Edmond Guillaume, who nevertheless made several major contributions to the interior of the Louvre.
First, he completely reconceived the décor of the Salles des États in keeping with its new function of displaying art alone: unfortunately, the drab minimalism of its present state gives no idea of the gallant opulence it once possessed. Guillaume also completed the Escalier Daru, the enormous stairway that still leads the visitor from the antiquities in the Galerie Daru, on the ground floor, up to the Winged Victory of Samothrace and then to the Galerie d’Apollon on the left and the Salon Carré and Grande Galerie on the right. The version we see today, shorn of all ornament, dates to the 1930s and is very different in décor, but not in form or function, from Lefuel’s original design and from Guillaume’s revision of it. Guillaume’s stairway was covered with allegorical figures in mosaics, the only part of the museum—and one of the few monuments in France—to use this archaic medium. His version of the stairway was never popular, not only because of the general mediocrity of the mosaics, but also because that medium was felt to be foreign to French taste and out of place at the Louvre.
Still, the completion of the stairway furnished the museum with a stage fully equal to the display of one of its newest and greatest treasures, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. This masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture, first put on display in 1883, was installed one year later at the summit of the Escalier Daru and has remained there ever since. But the effect it has today, while still imposing, pales in comparison with the impression it made before the opening of the Grand Louvre in 1989. Today one enters the museum by descending into the Pyramide and proceeding to one of three pavilions: Denon, Sully or Richelieu. In the past, however, visitors entered on the ground floor of the Pavillon Denon: when they turned left to enter the galleries, virtually the first thing they saw was the Winged Victory, rising in majestic isolation at the summit of the Escalier Daru.
Guillaume’s other important contribution had to do with the Salle des Caryatides in the sixteenth-century Aile Lescot. The curators of the Louvre feared that the humidity in the chamber was putting the art in jeopardy. Guillaume accordingly undertook to hollow out the damp and porous earth beneath the floor. This required him to excavate the site in 1882, almost a generation after Adolphe Berty had begun his crucial excavations of the medieval remains in the Cour Carrée. In the course of this later dig, Guillaume discovered the so-called Chapel of Saint Louis from the mid-thirteenth century. But as with Berty’s excavations, this chamber was subsequently covered over and forgotten and would not be seen again for many years.
Although he was not nearly as active as Guillaume, Gaston Redon (the brother of the great symbolist painter Odilon Redon, thirteen years his senior), carried out two important projects in his capacity of architecte du Louvre. The most exhilarating of these projects has disappeared without a trace: in the western half of the Grande Galerie, Lefuel had created the Pavillon des Sessions, which still exists, bulging out from the rest of the structure, and originally intended for state gatherings during the Second Empire. But with the fall of Napoleon III, it was given to the museum itself for the display of art. Around 1900, Redon reconceived it in splendid fashion as the frame for Rubens’s vast Marie de Médicis cycle. This was one of the stateliest chambers in the entire Louvre, illuminated by a large opening in the coved and coffered ceiling. Each of Rubens’s paintings was framed by an elaborate architectural cartouche crowned with an escutcheon, or heraldic shield. The main entrance was a stately portal consisting of two Ionic columns flanked by Ionic pilasters leading eastward to the so-called Van Dyck Room. A narrow gallery displaying smaller Dutch and Flemish works stood on either side of the main gallery. Even though all twenty-four paintings by Rubens could not fit in the Pavillon des Sessions (several hung in the adjoining Van Dyck Room), this illustrious cycle had never been seen, and would never be seen again, to such advantage. In the postwar era the gallery was modernized and largely shorn of its magic, and with the removal of the Dutch and Flemish school to the Aile Richelieu after the creation of the Grand Louvre in the 1980s, it was brutalized even further, its grand Ionic entrance having been replaced by a pair of public toilets.
Only one work by Redon survives in the Louvre complex. The stately main entrance of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, with two tiers of balustraded boxes, seems like a cross between the boxes of Garnier’s Opera, half a mile to the north, and Mansart’s chapel at Versailles. Technically it is not part of the Louvre Museum (the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is an entirely autonomous entity that occupies the western part of the Louvre’s Aile Rivoli), but the museum, throughout its history, has been nothing if not changeful, and the day may well come when this noble gallery is assimilated into the Louvre.
In the aftermath of the Prussian siege and then the Commune, the museum reopened, but only gradually. Once Republican control was reasserted in late May 1871, three and a half years would pass before the museum became fully operational in November 1874. Around this time, several important changes were made that would streamline the administration of the Louvre and raise its professionalism for generations to come. The collections were divided into five distinct departments: 1. Greek and Roman Antiquities; 2. Egyptian Antiquities; 3. European Paintings and Drawings; 4. Sculptures and Art Objects of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Modern Times; and 5. Marine and Ethnology. This last department was a catch-all for whatever was not covered by the other four. The Musée de la Marine included model ships and other displays having to do with the French navy: its collection had been moved around the museum for generations and none of the curators or directors seemed especially happy to have it in their midst. Nevertheless, it remained part of the Louvre until 1937, when it finally moved to the brand new Palais de Chaillot in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. As for ethnology, this collection essentially comprised all manner of artifacts that were neither classical, Western European, Christian, nor ancient Egyptian.
Another important institutional development occurred in 1882, when Jules Ferry, the minster of education, founded the École du Louvre. Initially this academy occupied the Aile Mollien in the southwest wing of the Nouveau Louvre. With the creation of the Grand Louvre in the late 1980s, the École moved to the Aile de Flore at the western end of the Grande Galerie. Today it offers one of the most rigorous and prestigious courses of art historical instruction in the world, and from among its 1,600 students it provides curators not only to the Louvre, but to a hundred other museums that make up the Réunion des Musées Nationaux. This latter entity was formed in 1895 to finance the acquisition of new works of art, a procedure that had previously been stymied by an excess of red tape. In this ambition the Réunion was aided by the creation, two years later, of the Société des Amis du Louvre, which today also oversees annual memberships to the museum. Together these two entities procured, in a more orderly fashion than previously, the funds necessary to make the purchases that remained, as before, under the jurisdiction of the Louvre’s curatorial staff.
To facilitate purchases even further, some of the curators began to discuss a radical idea: charging admission. Until then, the Louvre had never charged anything, and many in the French government were determined to keep it that way. When the collector Charles Mannheim first broached the idea in 1884, the critic Louis Gonse responded, “The principle of absolutely free entry and of democratic welcome is the very essence of our national museums and their singular honor in the eyes of foreigners.”4 Gonse was thinking of the British, who at the time certainly did charge admission. For some of the curators, however, charging admission had less to do with raising funds than with keeping out undesirables who, it seemed, were coming to the museum during the winter to take advantage of the newly installed heating systems. In the event, the Louvre would have to wait until 1922 before being allowed by law to charge the public to enter.
The Louvre’s collections did indeed continue to grow, but they now relied as much on donations and archaeological digs as on purchases. By the end of the nineteenth century, the freewheeling archaeological excursions that had yielded the Winged Victory of Samothrace were drying up. The local authorities in Italy, Greece and Egypt, ever more keenly aware of their national identities and the value of what lay buried in the earth, increasingly hesitated to grant French, German and British archaeologists the liberties they had enjoyed a generation earlier. Nevertheless, the collections of the Louvre were enriched by Ernest de Sarzec’s excavations in Mesopotamia and by Olivier Rayet’s in Miletus, both carried out in the 1870s.
Each object that entered the Louvre in this period called for a curatorial decision on whether or not to acquire the work that was presented for sale or as a gift. In either case there were notable hits and misses. In 1888, for example, some twenty years after the museum had acquired Rembrandt’s masterful Boeuf Écorché for five thousand francs, the curator Georges Lafenestre purchased Alexandre Decamps’s highly detailed Bulldog and Scottish Terrier for more than three times the price. At the same time, Ingres’s great Portrait of Comtesse d’Haussonville of 1845 was judged to be of no interest to the Louvre. It is now one of the most admired paintings in the Frick Collection in New York. That said, Ingres’s masterpiece La Baigneuse de Valpinçon (the Valpinçon Bather) did meet the exacting standards of the curators, as did Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, Pisanello’s Portrait of a Princess of the House of Este and Botticelli’s Lemmi cycle, whose two frescoes are now set into the walls of the Salles Percier and Fontaine, between the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Salon Carré.
In the first fifty years of the Third Republic, from its creation in 1871 to the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War, the Louvre was the beneficiary of fully 1,137 charitable donations5 that varied considerably in size and quality. In 1880, the estate of Adolphe Thiers, the second president of the Third Republic, was offered to the museum with the onerous stipulation—common to gifts of this sort—that all of its 1,470 objects be kept together, despite the fact that most of the objects were not of sufficient quality to be displayed in the museum. Speaking of this deshonneur du Louvre, Georges Clemenceau, the future prime minister, inveighed against Thiers, “that awful little bourgeois who—not content to murder Parisians while he lived [in the last days of the Commune]—presumes to grace them eternally after his death with the spectacle of his dinner plates and chamber pots!”6 In fact the collection also included a preparatory drawing for Verrocchio’s Angels and a female head, in majolica, by Luca della Robbia, among other Louvre-worthy objects. Sometimes such stipulations made perfect sense, for example with respect to Edmond James de Rothschild’s excavations from Miletus. At other times, however, compliance taxed the ingenuity of the museum’s curators: in 1911, when the will of Count Isaac de Camondo stipulated that his renowned but uneven collection be displayed together in a dedicated room for at least fifty years, it was discretely placed on the top floor of the Aile Mollien, where it was almost certain never to be seen.
At the same time, there was continued resistance to modernism, specifically the art of the impressionists. These painters found acceptance in England and especially America long before they appealed to their compatriots—one of the reasons why the Metropolitan Museum’s impressionist holdings rival those of any French collection, including the Musée d’Orsay. Thus, when Monet and several friends pooled their resources to purchase and donate Manet’s scandalous Olympia—representing a naked female form with none of the consoling layers of mythology that contemporary French taste demanded—the critic Georges Lafenestre wrote to the director that the work was not worthy of the Louvre. And although he was ultimately overridden by a vote of eight to three, the work landed in the Luxembourg Gallery (the usual venue for contemporary art) rather than the Louvre itself. Still, Monet’s eagerness for the painting to enter the Louvre implicitly confirmed that institution’s authority to confer or withhold canonic status for the art in question. Only in 1907 did the painting enter the museum, when no less a personage than Clemenceau, once again, pressured the Louvre to display it in the Salle des États, beside Ingres’s Grande Odalisque. Oddly enough, when the painter Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, ten years earlier, had offered the museum Manet’s even more scandalous Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, it was accepted without incident. If both paintings are now across the Seine in the Musée d’Orsay, that is only because, with a few insignificant exceptions, the Louvre no longer displays the impressionists, since this essential subchapter of French art was felt to deserve a museum unto itself.
The greatest example of the Louvre’s power to anoint a work of art is surely the Mona Lisa. Although Leonardo da Vinci painted his masterpiece in the first decade of the sixteenth century, in a very real sense the icon that we know today was born in the galleries of the Louvre sometime during the Third Republic. If it is difficult today to think of the Louvre without the Mona Lisa, it is just as difficult to imagine the Mona Lisa (or La Joconde, as it is usually called in French) outside of the context of the Louvre. If the painting had been in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna or the Prado in Madrid it would still be famous and would still work its magic in drawing crowds to those institutions. But it would not be the Mona Lisa. Only Leonardo da Vinci could have created this masterpiece, but only the Louvre could have conferred upon it the transcendent status that it enjoys today as the nec plus ultra of Western art and culture. For the Louvre stands at the center of Paris, and Paris, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, was the undisputed center of Western art.
Many first-time visitors to the Louvre come largely if not exclusively to see this one painting. The exhilaration they feel in encountering a celebrity, and the peace they experience in knowing that they can check a particular item off their bucket list, are apt to be among the main satisfactions of a visit to the Louvre. At the same time, although few will admit it, the experience is almost certain to be disappointing: visitors are unlikely to come within sixty feet of what is, after all, a rather small painting, and even if they do get closer, the slightly greenish tint of the bulletproof glass is sufficiently distorting that they are no longer quite seeing the painting and just as surely will find little aesthetic pleasure in their inspection. Such was not always the case. Until the early 1980s, if you saw the painting toward closing time on a weekday, you could linger before it in luxurious isolation and savor every detail. Today that is all but impossible. When the film version of The Da Vinci Code appeared in 2006, the museum literally had to reroute the entire circulation of its southern half to accommodate the crowds struggling to catch a glimpse of this masterpiece.
But the main impediment to appreciating the Mona Lisa, oddly, is our constant exposure to it. Most people become familiar with it—perhaps uniquely among old master paintings—long before developing the capacity to appreciate it. And at such time as that capacity is acquired, the painting has been experientially flattened to an icon: like a dollar bill or an American flag, it is so familiar that we no longer see it and are therefore likely to misunderstand it completely. Today the Mona Lisa stands as a classic of art, as the four-square embodiment of beauty or truth or something of the sort: in fact, it is one of the strangest paintings ever made, and it was this very strangeness that transfixed the public one hundred years ago, before the masterpiece had been branded through millions of posters and postcards.
Old master portraiture is designed to convey one thing at a time: usually power in men and beauty in women. In this sense, the Mona Lisa conforms to the type, since the sitter is obviously a beautiful woman. But before 1900, when it was still possible to view the painting with fresh eyes, no sooner had visitors assimilated the fact of her beauty than they were jolted by the realization that she also seemed touched with sadness. There were surely depictions of sorrow among the works of the old masters, but almost never in portraits, whose whole point was to project, in a general way, some enviable condition in life. But no sooner had one perceived that sadness than a third and far stranger impression followed fast upon it: the sitter looked menacing, even cruel. “Like the vampire,” wrote the nineteenth-century British essayist Walter Pater, “she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.”7 His French contemporary Jules Michelet wrote that “this canvas attracts me, entices me, invades me and absorbs me. And I go to her in spite of myself, as the bird to the snake.”8 This feeling is enhanced by the twilit, grayish-green background before which she rises. If one considers the matter, it makes absolutely no sense that this beautiful, well-born young woman—perhaps alone among the sitters of the age—should inhabit the crepuscular, almost subaquatic world that surrounds her.
But if such considerations account for what makes the Mona Lisa unique, they still do not explain how or why this one work became the most famous painting in the world, rather than, say, Raphael’s equally magnificent portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, hanging some two hundred feet to the southwest in the Grande Galerie, or Ingres’s equally magnificent portrait of Louis-François Bertin, hanging some two hundred feet to the northeast in the Salle Daru. In fact, the fame of the Mona Lisa has a great deal to do with one of the greatest heists in the history of art, when the painting was mysteriously removed from the walls of the Salle des États on 21 August 1911. For weeks, even months, all the major newspapers of the world were fixated on its disappearance, as they would be on the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby a generation later. On 22 August, the academic painter Louis Béroud arrived at the museum and went looking for the work, only to find it missing. Initially the guards informed him that it was in the museum’s photo studio, but eventually they became alarmed when they discovered that it was not being photographed, and so they alerted the police, who soon found its discarded glass covering elsewhere in the museum. Although they were able to extract fingerprints from the glass, they could find no match among the museum’s 257 employees.
The first consequence of the theft was that the Louvre’s director, Théophile Homolle, was fired. Then the poet Guillaume Apollinaire was briefly imprisoned because once, in an excess of vanguardist enthusiasm, he had called on contemporaries to burn down the Louvre. This suspicion of guilt was not as idiotic as it might first appear, since Apollinaire had employed a Belgian, Géry Pieret, who had already stolen several Phoenician masks and statuettes from the Louvre. More importantly, one week after the theft of the Mona Lisa, Pieret called the daily Paris-Journal to say that he himself had taken the painting and was now demanding the 150,000-franc reward for its return. Since Pieret had also sold some of the purloined masks to Pablo Picasso, the young Spaniard was also interrogated, but was soon let go.
In the event, the thief turned out to be one Vincenzo Peruggia, a glazier by trade whom the Louvre had employed to provide glass coverings for some of the more important paintings in the collection. For two years he kept the masterpiece in a valise under his bed, and it might have remained in his possession much longer had he not tried to sell it to the Florentine antiquary Alfredo Geri. This man feigned interest, luring Peruggia to Florence even as he alerted the police, who promptly intercepted the thief in his hotel room. Peruggia was condemned to one and a half years in prison, but was let go after only seven months. Long afterwards, many Italians continued to view him as a national hero in the mistaken belief that he was bravely seeking to repatriate a work that had been plundered by Napoleon, whereas, in fact, Leonardo da Vinci had sold it directly to François I in 1518. The drama ended when the painting, after being briefly displayed in Florence and then in Rome, returned to Paris on 4 January 1914 in a chartered first-class train.
The theft exponentially enhanced the fame of the painting: before the theft it was surely admired and almost universally known, but after the theft it became, as it has remained, the most famous painting in the world.
Although the First World War did not pose any existential threat to the Louvre or to Paris, as did the Franco-Prussian War and the Second World War, the risks involved in that conflict were taken very seriously by the Louvre’s directors, and the museum was largely, if not entirely shut down for the duration of the war. On 2 August 1914, the day after France declared a general mobilization of all able-bodied men, the government ordered the Louvre’s directors to make provisions for protecting all the art in their possession. A few weeks later, however, as German troops advanced toward the border, 770 of the most valuable works, including the Venus de Milo, were sent to the church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, one of the largest and most solid churches in medieval Christendom. With the French army’s successes in the war, parts of the Louvre’s medieval and modern collection remained on view for most of 1916 and roughly half of the following year. But when, in spring 1918, two shells from a Krupp howitzer exploded in the gardens of Louvre, the directors decided to disperse parts of the collection around the capital and its environs, including in the basement of the Panthéon and the Palace of Fontainebleau. Not until a month after the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918 did convoys of objects begin to return from Toulouse, and a month after that, on 17 January 1919, the museum was finally, if still partially, reopened to the public.
If the First World War did not change Western culture and society quite as fundamentally as its successor would, the implications of that earlier conflict were nevertheless considerable. In the aftermath of the war, modernity first began to permeate Western civilization in a way that was pervasive and unavoidable. This shift was expressed in the lengths of women’s skirts no less than in the planning of the cities of the West. And it was equally evident in the galleries of the Louvre. “Il faut être de son temps,” Daumier had said several generations before—“We must be up to date”—and the direction of the Louvre was determined to act upon that precept.
One of the first steps taken on reopening the Louvre was to increase the hours of public access to the collections. Although the museum was now open to the public more than one day a week, as had originally been the case, still it was more apt to be closed than otherwise. In remedying this deficiency, the directors also took the momentous step to begin charging an admission fee of one franc, a measure made necessary by the dire financial conditions that confronted the museum after the war. Even then, however, it remained free on Sundays and holidays, as well as on Thursday afternoons, when school was out. At the same time, in response to the spirit of populism that defined the new age, the directors experimented with novel ways to engage a larger public, through paid lectures and walking tours, Louvre-centric cultural programs over the radio, and, for the very first time, a gift shop.
All of these measures were tentative steps toward recognizing what was fast becoming the most salient fact of Western society in the aftermath of the First World War: with the emergence of radio and movies and the eight-hour work day, which vastly increased the leisure to enjoy these new media, a mass culture was being born that was more unified and also more widely disseminated than anything witnessed in earlier human history. By the end of the 1920s, half a million visitors a year were paying their franc to visit the Louvre.
The man most responsible for hauling the Louvre into the modern world was Henri Verne, who was the museum’s director from 1926 to 1940 and the author of the so-called Plan Verne, which formalized that modernization. For the first time the museum developed a department for public education. In this it was taking a page from American museums, from Benjamin Gilman at the Museum of Fines Arts in Boston, Charles Hutchinson at the Art Institute in Chicago, and Alfred H. Barr Jr. at the newly created Museum of Modern Art in New York City, all three pioneers of such outreach.
Several features of museum experience that we take for granted today were introduced during this period. The most important, perhaps, was the revolutionary concept of the focused loan exhibition. Before 1900, the duty of a museum was largely thought to begin and end with the upkeep and display of the objects in its possession; commercial galleries might mount small-scale special exhibitions, but museums generally did not. In the years following the Great War, however, such notions fell away. Suddenly objects were traversing continents and even oceans with such regularity that the special exhibition came to equal, and in some cases to surpass, the permanent collection in its power to draw the public into the museum. One of the pioneers of the temporary exhibition was a young curator of the Louvre, René Huyghe, who in 1930 mounted an exhibition of Eugène Delacroix in the Salle des États. Given that most of the Louvre’s galleries were already spoken for, however, such exhibitions were usually sent to the Musée de l’Orangerie in the southwest corner of the Tuileries Garden. In the first six years of the 1930s, this venue offered retrospectives of Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Manet, Chassériau, Renoir, Hubert Robert, Daumier, Corot and Cézanne, among others. Each of these shows, of course, gave inveterate visitors to the Louvre a good reason to return, while generating an interest in the museum among the broader public. And the shows tended to be well received: 72,000 visitors paid to see Manet in 1932, and three years later, 97,400 visitors came to admire an exhibition of Flemish masters from Jan Van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel.9
For the first time, Verne found space for the impressionists and symbolists. More surprisingly, perhaps, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Alexandre Cabanel and Carolus-Duran, the fading stars of nineteenth-century academic art, were also exhibited, since no stigma attached to them as yet, as it would after the Second World War. At the same time, the museum finally rejected the Salon style of stacking paintings four high, all the way to the ceiling: henceforth, although two paintings were occasionally displayed one atop the other, usually there was only one, as remains the policy to this day. Verne also established the main entrance to the museum in the Vestibule Denon. Located on the ground floor of the southern half of the Nouveau Louvre, the Vestibule Denon was equipped with a ticket booth and a small shop: and for more than sixty years, generations of Parisians and foreigners in their millions entered the Louvre through this relatively unprepossessing space.
Also at this time, the Escalier Daru assumed the form that we encounter today. These steps are far more than a simple stairway: they are stagecraft on the grandest scale. One thinks of Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face flying down them in a resplendent red gown, her arms aloft in imitation of the Winged Victory at her back. Here, Anna Karina and the two rivals for her affection concluded their sprint through the Louvre in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace atop the Escalier Daru, as redesigned by Albert Ferran in 1934.
In 1934, fifty years after it was first completed, Albert Ferran, the reigning architecte du Louvre, preserved the general form of the Escalier Daru even as he recast it in a very different language. All of its original ornaments, and especially the neo-Byzantine mosaics, were stripped away. As we see it today, it has been reconceived in the so-called moderne style, contemporary with art deco and similar in some respects. This was the style that created whole stretches of Paris, especially in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Such was this style’s popularity that Ferran used it to good effect in the Louvre’s Assyrian Gallery and Palmyra Gallery, as well in as the Cour du Sphinx, just to the right of the Escalier Daru.
Contemporary visitors to the Louvre were surely impressed, as they are today, by the sight of a single building stretching, along its northern and southern sides, nearly half a mile from end to end. But in fact only about a third of that vast structure was available for the display of art. The rest was allocated to the Ministry of Finance, the museum’s curatorial and conservation departments, and the École du Louvre. This was the case despite the enormous growth of the museum during this period. If the museum had 650 paintings and sculptures when it opened in 1793, one and a quarter centuries later that number had grown, by Henri Verne’s estimate, to more than 173,000 objects.10 And through donations and purchases, it was growing larger every day.
With the end of the war, archaeological digs could resume, and those at Arslan Tash in Syria, at Tello in Iraq and at Susa in Iran—where the newly installed Shah Reza Pahlavi welcomed Western archaeologists—greatly enriched the museum. Even the old masters, the spiritual core of the collection, were enhanced when some of the most emblematic early French paintings entered the collection, among them Jean Cousin’s Eva Prima Pandora in 1922 and the anonymous Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters in 1937, all through purchases made possible by the Amis du Louvre. Dürer’s early Self-Portrait with a Thistle was acquired in 1922 for 300,000 francs, as was Delacroix’s famous Death of Sardanapalus in 1925 for 610,000 francs. Around the same time the great provincial French master of the Baroque, Georges de La Tour, entered the collections of the Louvre with The Adoration of the Shepherds and Saint Jerome Reading, acquired respectively in 1926 and 1935.
By the late 1930s, the Louvre’s staff became increasingly aware that a new war might break out at any moment. As early as 21 October 1938, gas masks were distributed to the museum’s personnel. Nine months before the Nazis marched into Paris on 14 June 1940, indeed before the Second World War had formally begun with Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Mona Lisa was on the move again, for the third time in seventy years. On 28 August 1939, the portrait departed the museum to begin an exile that would last six years. It was accompanied at least part of the way by the crown jewels from the Galerie d’Apollon and by Watteau’s great Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère. Like some member of the Resistance restlessly staying one step ahead of her pursuers, the Mona Lisa was sent first to Chambord, the château on the Loire, then northeast to the Château de Louvigny in the Moselle, then south to the Loc-Dieu Abbey in the Aveyron, before heading east to the Musée Ingres in Montauban, and finally north again to the Château de Montal in the Lot region.
This time the sense of urgency was even greater than during the two previous evacuations of the Louvre. While Paris emerged from the Second World War largely unscathed, no one could have predicted that outcome at the beginning of the conflict, or that General Dietrich von Choltitz, the last German governor of Paris, would simply refuse to carry out Hitler’s order, in the final days of the occupation, to burn the city to the ground. Even before fighting began, everyone could see that the destructive power of modern warfare far surpassed anything seen in the two earlier conflicts. The curators of the Louvre were keenly aware of the aerial bombardments of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, just three years earlier, and this new menace—which had scarcely existed in 1918—was feared most of all.
And so, much of 1939 was spent in preparation: a triage of paintings was carried out in the Salle des Caryatides and of sculptures in the Galerie Daru and the former stables beside the Cour Visconti. So many precious objects had to be wrapped up that the museum enlisted the aid of the employees of two famous nearby department stores, La Samaritaine and the Magasin du Louvre, both on the rue de Rivoli. Meanwhile, Albert Ferran designed a scaffold of hoists and planks by which the Winged Victory was eased down the perilous length of the Escalier Daru, on its way, together with the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s two Slaves, to the Château de Valençay in central France. These were only a few of the treasures that, between September and December of 1939, were borne away to safety in thirty-seven truck convoys. For especially large paintings like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and David’s Coronation of Napoleon, the curators requisitioned from the neighboring Comedie Française a trailer that, in better times, had transferred stage sets around Paris. Not all of the art left the capital. Some works were stored in the Banque de France, situated in the Hôtel de Toulouse a few blocks from the Louvre, while others remained hidden in the remoter depths of the Louvre itself. But while the museum was closed and the art dispersed, its staff was by no means idle, dutifully restoring the paintings and sculptures in their various places of exile. The removal of the works, however, did not always go off without a hitch. In his autobiographical Souvenirs de l’exode du Louvre (Memories of the Exodus from the Louvre), Germain Bazin, an art historian and Louvre curator who would figure prominently in the postwar museum, recalls visiting one of the depots stocked with works waiting to be shipped south. A curator from the department of medieval sculpture, Pierre Pradel, who was charged with overseeing the site, had fled with his family, leaving entirely unguarded Titian’s Portrait of François I, Holbein’s Portrait of Anne of Cleves and da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronnière.11
A famous photograph was taken in the autumn of 1939, looking west down the endless corridor of the Grande Galerie toward the Pavillon des Sessions. This image brings to life the chilling consequences of all those preparations. Even in broad daylight the place seems haunted, the more so because its denuded walls still bear the traces of the paintings that were recently hanging there, while their empty, discarded frames lie flat across the scuffed floors. Seeing this image, one is reminded of Hubert Robert’s fanciful painting of 1796, in which he reimagined this very gallery as a ruin and a desolation. But if there was something charming in the way nature reasserted itself amid the ruins of that earlier work, no such consolation could be found now.
The Grande Galerie in September, 1939, some nine months before the Nazis occupied Paris.
When the war came, Henri Verne, the Louvre’s long-standing and transformative director, was no longer in charge. He had been dismissed on 12 June 1939, when Watteau’s l’Indifférent was stolen off the walls of the museum. Despite the fact that it was returned two months later, the much-publicized theft revealed, yet again, the inadequacies of the museum’s security apparatus. And so it would fall to another man, Jacques Jaujard, as director of the Musées Nationaux and the École du Louvre, to guide the museum through the perils of the Second World War. Originally a journalist, Jaujard became general secretary of the Musées Nationaux in 1925. Because he had been instrumental in protecting the Prado’s collections during the aerial assaults of the Spanish Civil War, he seemed uniquely prepared—to the extent to which anyone could be—for the troubles ahead.
But even if the Louvre and many of the other museums in Paris had been emptied of their treasures, their doors would not remain shuttered for long. It was very much the policy of the German occupiers to signal a return to “business as usual.” And so the Louvre, such as it was after being closed for a year, reopened on 29 September 1940, one week after the Orangerie reopened and two weeks after the Musée de l’Homme, the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée Cernuschi. The German official in charge of these proceedings, Franz von Wolff-Metternich, was the director of the Wehrmacht’s Kunstschutz (literally, art protection unit) from 1940 to 1942. He was a trained art historian and curator, and there is plausible evidence that he stood in the way of Nazi aggressions against the Louvre and other French museums. Twelve years later, in 1952, at the suggestion of Jaujard himself, General de Gaulle acknowledged the contributions of Wolff-Metternich by making him a chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. During the war, however, Jaujard resisted calls from the Germans to bring back the collections, using the clever dodge that it was not yet safe to do so, since the British Royal Air force might decide to attack Paris. Only two parts of the museum’s collections remained on view: medieval sculptures, on the ground floor of the Pavillon des Sessions, and a few items of ancient art around the Cour Carrée. Most Parisians, in any case, stayed away and the German soldiers and nurses who showed up were themselves few and far between.
In a general way, the Germans were acutely aware of the public relations aspect of their roles. Remembering the bombardment of Reims Cathedral in the early days of the First World War and the lasting damage it caused to Germany’s reputation as a “civilized nation,” they were careful, at least for now, to avoid any such reproach. At the same time, their collective memory extended far enough back to recall how, nearly one and a half centuries before, the French revolutionary armies had hauled entire collections out of Germany to enhance the Louvre, even though restitution had long since been completed. Jaujard was able to deter the Germans from seizing Boucher’s Diane Sortant du Bain, but had to cede Gregor Erhart’s polychrome statue of Saint Mary Magdalene, which Hermann Goering very much wanted for his personal collection. At the same time, to curry favor with Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, the Germans removed Murillo’s Immaculate Conception from the Louvre and sent it to Spain, together with six Visigothic crowns from the Musée de Cluny.
For the most part, however, the Nazis left France’s public collections untouched. Their well-known and well-documented plundering was mostly limited to the private property of Jewish collectors who had fled or been sent to concentration camps. Through the diligence of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, or ERR—named for Alfred Rosenberg, a prominent Nazi ideologue), as many as twenty thousand works of art were thus processed in the Jeu de Paume, in the northwest corner of the Jardin des Tuileries, although three rooms on the ground floor of the Cour Carrée’s southern wing were also occasionally used to this end.
In the war’s later phases, the countryside, with its arable land, was generally better provisioned than the great cities, especially Paris. By 1943, many of the green spaces of the capital were turned into vegetable gardens, and so the two landscaped parterres on either side of the Pavillon de Marengo, between the Cour Carrée and the rue de Rivoli, became vast plantations for the cultivation of leeks, while carrots grew in the Jardin de l’Infante and the gardens before the Colonnade.
Toward the end of the war, as the most extreme and desperate elements took control of the German high command, they insisted on bringing east the art that had been dispersed throughout France. This measure was presumably designed to facilitate the art’s eventual removal to Germany. Jaujard did all he could to stall the implementation of these measures. At the same time, in expectation of an eventual Allied aerial assault of the countryside, Germain Bazin went to the Château de Sourches and several other depots and constructed twenty-foot-tall wooden letters that were set flat upon the ground and spelled out MUSÉE LOUVRE to alert the Allied bombers to spare the site. Those bombers came soon enough, and in the days leading up to the liberation of Paris, from 19 to 25 August 1944, armed skirmishes broke out in the Jardin des Tuileries. By the time the fighting ended, the Cour Carrée had become a makeshift detention camp for captured German soldiers. Less than two months later, the Salle des Antiques had reopened, but the dispersed treasures of the Louvre did not return to the capital until Germany formally capitulated on 8 May of the following year.
Entering the Antichambre Henri II on the main floor of the Aile Lescot, one’s glance is drawn, even in spite of itself, toward the ceiling, that tour de force of Renaissance woodcarving by Scibec de Carpi. What arrests attention, however, is not this canopy of fretted gold so much as the paintings of birds set into a rectangular frame and two smaller oval frames on either side. These schematic black raptors, contoured in white against a bluish ground, are the work of Georges Braque, whom Georges Salles, the museum’s enterprising new director, had commissioned to paint them. They were formally unveiled on 20 April 1953.
The Second World War was a multidimensional conflict that admits of many readings. In cultural terms, however, and at the risk of simplification, we can see it as a battle between conservative traditionalism, allied to the established orders of the Right, and vanguardism, allied to the Left and especially, in France, to the Resistance. And precisely because, in France, the partisans of the Resistance won the political and military part of the conflict, they also won the cultural battle that accompanied it. For the next three decades and more, until the rise of postmodernism and the Grand Louvre of François Mitterrand, this attitude of cultural vanguardism would, in a general way, dominate museums throughout the developed world, inspiring everything from the look of the galleries of the Louvre to the very exhibitions that the museum mounted. The postwar museum, in spirit and to some degree in form, cannot be understood without addressing this pervasive, if often implicit, triumphalism, of which Braque’s ceiling is one of the most striking illustrations.
There was, however, an obvious problem with this new tendency, at least as it regarded the Louvre. Throughout its history, certainly since the days of Louis XIV, the Louvre’s political and aesthetic mission—first as a palace and then as a museum—was to project and exalt power, while implicitly encouraging obedience to centralized authority. Indeed, the entire aesthetic mission of France, for three hundred years, was expressed in this passion for mastery and unyielding symmetry. Now, however, that very projection of power had become suspect, even despised, by the newest generation of curators and architects. Braque’s birds, with their intentionally crude asymmetries, declared open war on such conventions, and they won the cultural war, at least for the space of several generations. It was a victory that sought to disrupt the prim symmetry of Henri II’s ceiling, which could never assimilate such modern intrusions or conciliate them to what was already there.
This new spirit was largely embodied in the transformative person of Georges Salles, who, as director of the Musées Nationaux for most of the fifties, was also in charge of the Louvre. Together with such slightly younger curators as René Huyghe and Germain Picon, Salles, a specialist in Asian art, had been raised in the context of a positivist approach to art history, with its rigorous, almost scientific inquiry into the past. But writings like Salles’s Le Regard (The Glance) of 1939, as well as Huyghe’s Formes et forces from a generation later, advocate a different approach to art in general and to the Louvre’s collections in specific, an approach that is radically personal and subjective. “In order,” Salles wrote, “for a free exchange to exist between the work of art and our eye, it is necessary for us to have silenced the chatter of our rational faculties in the interests of obscurer faculties. There has emerged a reversal of our normal equilibrium: our clear memory, that of facts and ideas, of images that have been identified and localized, has been shut down.”12 Silencing the chatter of our rational faculties, reversing our normal equilibrium, shutting down facts and ideas: certain poets, besotted by absinthe or hashish, might have talked like that in earlier days, but now it had become the semiofficial policy of the curators of the Louvre and the inspiration behind Salles’ commissioning Braque to paint his birds. Implicit in Salles’ words and in Braque’s birds was a rejection of the oppressive order of the prewar world, of a rigor and symmetry that were now tarnished by their association with Fascism. Suddenly enchanted by its reborn freedom, Western culture chose to reject most of what it had been before the war.
This new spirit of change would find material expression in the museum’s revamped galleries, designed by Jean-Jacques Haffner, who replaced Albert Ferran as the main architecte du Louvre. In these spaces, a distinctly modernist idiom began to replace the moderne style of the prewar years, even if it was a mediated modernism that aspired, through its pared-down forms, to preserve some sense of an older elegance and refinement. The results were not always admirable. An aesthetic of functionality and almost proletarian simplicity could not coexist successfully with the extravagant opulence—implicitly princely and certainly plutocratic—of the Louvre of Napoleon III. Neither Haffner nor the curators were so far gone as to do any violence to the actual architecture of the Louvre: there was no equivalent here to Le Corbusier’s infamous Plan Voisin, in which that archmodernist advocated replacing much of the Marais—which even Haussmann had spared—with two square miles of cruciform towers in a park. But the interior spaces of the museum did not fare as well. The décor of the Salon Carré and the Salle des États was brutally repudiated. Although the ceiling of the Salon Carré was left largely intact, its walls were covered in dull gray fabric where they were not eliminated altogether. At the same time, low-lying partitions divided up the gallery in flowing and unclassical ways. By the end of this process, all of the magic and alchemy of Félix Duban’s décor of a century before had been systematically excised, never to be restored.
The Salle des États suffered an even worse fate. Few galleries in the Louvre could rival the opulence of this space as reconceived by Edmond Guillaume in the 1880s. From the phalanx of stucco deities prancing across the ceiling to its Corinthian pilasters and dark wooden wainscotings, with no lateral light from without, this chamber, the holy of holies of the international cult of art, had been stripped bare of all adornments. Even the Salon Carré had been allowed to keep its ceiling intact. And the masterpieces of Titian and Veronese, though still suffered to remain in their gilded frames, were henceforth to be seen against drably neutral walls.
Space was added to the museum, in 1954, when it was allowed to expand into the Pavillon de Flore all the way at the western end of the Grand Galerie, such that the museum now occupied the entire southern half of the Louvre, as well as the Cour Carrée. But there was still no dedicated space for special exhibitions, beyond the relatively small Cabinet des Dessins, and so they continued to be relegated to the Orangerie. On rare occasions, the Grande Galerie itself was commandeered, resulting in the unwelcome displacement of the permanent collection. In 1952 the curators staged the Hommage à Léonard de Vinci to celebrate the quincentennial of the artist’s birth. The center of the exhibition, of course, was the Mona Lisa, raised on a three-tiered pedestal before a curtain of green velvet. Behind it a white silk curtain curved round the Corinthian columns of one of the Serlian screens that have punctuated the Grande Galerie since the time of Napoleon. The display, with all its silk and velvet flourishes, represented an attempt, only partially successful, to find some middle ground between prewar tradition and postwar modernity.
This fragile pact would be tested even further when, on 10 April 1957, the new British monarch, Elizabeth II, visited Paris and was given les honneurs du Louvre, an official tour followed by a state dinner. In this respect, she was following in the footsteps of her ancestor Queen Victoria almost exactly a century before, when that monarch crossed the channel to view the Exposition Universelle of 1855. On that occasion, as protocol appears to have demanded, Victoria moved through the museum in a wheelchair during ordinary hours, but returned after it had closed to visit on her own two feet. Such protocols were no longer in force a century later. Elizabeth, accompanied by Prince Philip, met the president of the Republic, René Coty, in the Pavillon Denon before passing through the Galerie Daru, up the inevitable Escalier Daru, then down again, through a few of the salles des antiquités, to the Salle des Caryatides. There, facing the caryatides themselves, the royal couple and three thousand guests listened to a concert of Lully and Rameau and supped on fare brought from makeshift kitchens in the Pavillon de l’Horloge (the Pavillon Sully). Afterwards, Elizabeth and some of the more exalted guests repaired to the gallery that displays the Venus de Milo. For this occasion, however, the museum’s carpenters had transformed the space into an oval chamber from whose makeshift walls hung Vermeer’s Lacemaker, Raphael’s Saint Michael and Watteau’s Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère.
In 1958, France’s short-lived Fourth Republic collapsed, giving rise to the Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle. And just as this new president wielded far more power than the figurehead presidents of the previous dispensation, so did André Malraux, his newly minted minister of cultural affairs, exercise far greater authority than any previous (or subsequent) director of the Louvre. Malraux’s predecessors had been, almost to a man, eminent scholars who were respected in their profession but little known beyond it. Malraux, however, had been a cultural powerhouse for decades, as a novelist, art critic, filmmaker and Resistance fighter. A born showman as well as a somewhat nervous and spasmodic figure—he was thought to have a mild form of Tourette syndrome—he seemed to consume all the oxygen of any room he entered and he dominated France’s cultural landscape from 1959 to 1969. His goal, with regard to the Louvre and to French culture in general, was not only frankly nationalist, but also an affirmation of the new role that mass culture played in the cultural life of France. He stated his wish “to make accessible the foremost works of humanity, and first of all those of France, to the largest number of Frenchmen, [and also] to ensure the largest audience for our national patrimony.”13
Like de Gaulle, his new minister held powerful ideas about French culture. Every step Malraux took at the Louvre and at all the other museums over which he exerted his control, to say nothing of such related fields as literature and the performing arts, was intended to advance France’s cultural hegemony through the world. But there was a paradox at the heart of the new cultural policy that he so ably articulated and enforced. Twenty years before, nobody in his position—if such a position had existed at the time—would have felt that French culture needed to be defended or promoted. Its primacy in art, literature and much besides was implicit and unchallenged, as was its military and economic prestige. But just as the postwar years vastly expanded mass participation in culture, they also represented a drastic diminution in France’s role on the world stage. Despite its continued eminence, it had become, as England had become, one great nation among a number of great nations, but largely shorn of its former political and economic preeminence. This reduced status was due to the rise of the United States, but also of Russia and of China. Even with respect to culture, no perceptive observer could fail to note that the world and France as well were now more apt to look to the United States for cultural guidance and innovation than to any one European nation.
André Malraux (1901–1976), who, as Minister of State for Cultural Affairs under Charles de Gaulle from 1959 to 1969, greatly raised the Louvre’s international profile.
It is perhaps suggestive of the cultural condition of postwar France that two of its most emblematic moments were funerals, the very public ones for Georges Braque in front of the Colonnade of the Louvre in 1963 and for Le Corbusier in the Cour Carrée two years later. On both occasions, the mass media broadcast the image and words of the master of ceremonies, Malraux himself, his voice quavering with feeling as he delivered one of his baroque funeral orations. Such ceremonies had been staged in part to send the message that the Louvre was the center of Paris, that Paris was the center of France, and that France was the center of the world. It was also seen as an act of signal honor to these men to be thus solemnized in or near the Cour Carrée, the heart of the original Louvre. Doubtless Picasso as well would have been so honored had he not died in 1973, four years after Malraux had returned to private life, together with his patron de Gaulle. Still, it could not have escaped the notice of perceptive viewers that something had changed in France’s cultural stature, and that France was the worse for it.
Malraux, however, never seemed to be aware of that fact. In furtherance of his nationalistic mission to promote French culture—or at least culture in France—the Mona Lisa was destined to play an essential role. On a trip to Washington, DC, in 1962, Malraux visited the National Gallery together with its director, John Walker, and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. On that occasion Mrs. Kennedy expressed the wish that La Jioconde should be exhibited in the United States. Such a request would be unthinkable today and it was almost unthinkable half a century ago. Still, it was duly considered and, after an examination of the poplar wood panel on which the work was painted, the curator Germain Picon, the restorer Jean-Gabriel Goulinat and the head of the Louvre’s conservation laboratory, Magdalene Hours, concluded that it was in sufficiently good condition to make the trip. Sent by air in a climate-controlled casing, the painting arrived in Washington, where it was displayed at the National Gallery from 8 January to 3 February of 1963, before traveling to New York City, where, from 7 February to 4 March, it was on view at the Metropolitan Museum. Malraux came with it and used the occasion to deliver yet another of his orations, in which, standing beside President Kennedy, he invoked America’s role in the Normandy invasion eighteen years before. “Here then,” he said, “is the most famous painting in the world…. Some have spoken of the risks that this painting took in leaving the Louvre. Those risks are real, but exaggerated. But the risks taken by the boys who landed one day in Arromanches [on the Normandy coast] were far greater. To the humblest among them who might hear me, I feel bound to say … that the masterpiece to which you pay homage this evening, Mr. President, is a painting that he has saved.”14
The exhibition was a tremendous success, at a time when the American museum-going public was far smaller than it is today. Fully 623,000 visitors came to see it in Washington, DC, and well over a million in New York City. A decade later the painting traveled to Tokyo for nearly two months in the spring of 1974, where more than one and a half million visitors clamored to see it. On the flight back, the Louvre agreed, almost as an afterthought, to display it in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow for four weeks. Nearly half a century has passed since then, during which the painting has not left the museum, and it is not easy to see under what conditions it might ever do so again.
By all accounts Malraux enjoyed his perch at the Louvre. Like Louis XIV and the two Napoleons, he would stop by on a daily basis to examine the works that he had commissioned, even if they were relatively minor, and to confer with his architects, Jean Trouvelot and Olivier Lahalle. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the Louvre centered on the Cour Carrée, whose exteriors he ordered to be thoroughly scrubbed for the first time in centuries. From this decision emerged the so-called Malraux’s Law, which stipulated, among other things, that the façades of Paris’s public buildings be cleaned every thirty years. Also under his watch, all four sides of the second floor of the Cour Carrée were allocated to the display of the Louvre’s collection of French old masters. Other than that, Malraux’s most lasting mark on the physical Louvre was the controversial (some might say pointless) decision in 1964 to excavate the moat in front of the Colonnade. This had been designed and then suppressed by Louis Le Vau three centuries before. As it happens, these excavations did indeed yield certain archaeological discoveries, among them a number of old wells and parts of the Petit-Bourbon palace, which had stood just east of the original Louvre and was demolished when Louis XIV completed the enlargement of the Cour Carrée in the 1660s. But beyond that, this pet project of Malraux yielded few benefits, and to this day the moat is little more than a storage facility for construction equipment.
A more welcome intervention occurred at the other end of the Louvre. The destruction of the Tuileries Palace in 1871 led, around 1900, to Edmond Guillaume’s radical redesign of the adjoining place du Carrousel, which was then colonized by an abundance of sculptures in the bombastic pompier style that the age admired. By 1960, however, this style had fallen into utter, if occasionally underserved, disrepute. Malraux, who fully shared in the dominant taste of his time, removed the offending statues and replaced them with the female nudes of Aristide Maillol, who pioneered a neoclassical moderne style that achieved an expressive compromise between tradition and modernity. With the creation of the Grand Louvre in the late 1980s, even though this part of the museum’s grounds was fundamentally reconceived, those sculptures remained.
Malraux’s time at the Louvre and at the head of the Musées Nationaux ended in June of 1969, shortly after the resignation of de Gaulle, as an indirect and delayed consequence of the student uprisings of May 1968. During that upheaval, the directors of the museum, reminded of the Communards a century before, shut its doors for an entire month. And when Malraux himself died in 1976, his passing was solemnized by the display in the Cour Carrée of a bronze cat from the nearby Egyptian collections, encased in Plexiglas and accompanied by a guard (Malraux liked cats).
In truth the postwar years were a somewhat dreary time for Parisian urbanism in general and for the Louvre in specific. In a halfhearted attempt to remain up to date, the musty old furnishings of the galleries were removed, to be replaced by the mod insipidities of Pierre Paulin, many of which, unfortunately, remain to this day and look no better for half a century of wear. “The aesthetic had changed,” according to Genevieve Bresc-Bautier. “One returned to a discreet modernism: lightly colored walls of pale brown and muffled pink, floors of sandstone and parquet.”15 Opinions differ regarding these changes, but to some observers it seems quite evident that they contributed to a general banalization of the museum.
Much the same could have been observed on a far larger scale at a site across the street from the recently excavated Colonnade, beside the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. Few visitors to the Louvre ever see it, and even the Parisians who pass it each day on the rue de l’Amiral de Coligny are apt to overlook it. It is the unassuming entrance to an underground parking lot, built at the instigation of Malraux himself, that can accommodate four hundred vehicles. This infrastructural enhancement would seem entirely unimportant except that it was originally intended as part of a far larger transformation of the Louvre. Like so many mid-century cities—like London and especially like New York under Robert Moses—Paris had to come to terms with the car culture that dominated urbanist thinking in the postwar period. And although the French capital has generally been spared the worst of these effects—its main highway, the Periphérique, was relegated to the circumference of the city in 1958—still, car culture has largely ruined four of its greatest focal points, the places de l’Étoile, de la Concorde, de la Nation and de la Bastille, from which pedestrians are effectively banned. And there was talk of altering the Louvre as well to serve the dominant car culture. One proposal advocated building a parking lot for eight hundred cars under the Tuileries and the place du Carrousel. Another called for a garage under the gardens north of the Cour Carrée (where, a generation earlier, the makeshift leek plantation had stood). This garage was to be part of a vast underground city—similar, no doubt, to what was built a decade later, to such dismal effect, under les Halles half a mile away. There was also talk of a submerged road under the rue de Rivoli, stretching from the Colonnade to the place de la Concorde, similar to what was built on the southern side of the Louvre, with the Voie Georges Pompidou and Voie Léopold Senghor. As for the underground city, something along those lines did indeed come to pass with the creation of the Carrousel du Louvre, one generation later, but with far greater sensitivity and charm, surely, than would have been possible in the 1960s.