Over thirty years have passed since the opening of the Grand Louvre. In a sense, the story of the museum, as a structure and an institution, has now been told. In another sense, of course, the Louvre is still evolving and, presumably, will continue to do so for centuries to come.
The contemporary Louvre—which has been guided by such able directors as Michel Laclotte, Pierre Rosenberg and Jean-Luc Martinez—comprises eight curatorial departments, including, as of 2012, the arts of Islam. In what is surely the largest architectural intervention to date in the Grand Louvre, (notwithstanding the renovation of the Musée Charles X in 1997 and of the Galerie d’Apollon in 2004), this newest department occupies the entire surface of the Cour Visconti in the Aile Denon. It lies beneath a winnowing golden roof designed, by the architects Rudy Riciotti, Mario Bellini and Renaud Piérard, to suggest a Bedouin tent.
Perhaps the most striking change to come over the Louvre in the past thirty years has been a threefold increase in attendance: under three million in 1988, that number swelled to nearly nine million in 2011 and has remained above eight million in each year since. As a consequence of that success, the Louvre is already in need of more space: the thirty-six thousand works now on view in its galleries represent less than one-tenth of the entire collection. There has been talk of turning the bloated mansard roofs of the pavilions, which for the past four centuries have served a purely ornamental function, into exhibition space. It seems more likely, however, that very soon the curators will start to gaze hungrily at the two parts of the Louvre complex that remain beyond their jurisdiction: the Pavillon de Flore at the southern limit of the Grande Galerie, which now houses the École du Louvre, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (including le Musée de la Mode et du Textile) in the Pavillon de Marsan. Only when those two spaces have been claimed by the museum will every part of the Louvre complex, for the first time in its history, serve the museum alone.
If the museum is growing in terms of attendance, it is also growing through the acquisition of ever more objects. But over the past thirty years, its experience in this regard has mirrored that of many other museums around the world, at least those devoted to the arts of antiquity and premodern Europe. Now that most of the great old master paintings, once in private hands, have come to safe harbor in the museums of Europe and the United States, new acquisitions tend on the whole to be smaller and more modest than in the past. It is true that, in recent years, the Louvre has acquired Ribera’s Saint John the Evangelist, Cranach’s Three Graces and Jean Malouel’s late fourteenth-century Christ de Pitié, and these, without question, are substantial acquisitions. But as a measure of how prohibitively expensive such major works of art have become, relative to the museum’s budget, in 2004 Ingres’s portrait of the Duc d’Orléans was purchased for twelve million euros, while Houdon’s sculpture of the Standing Vestal cost just under ten million. These, as well, were major works of art. Most recent acquisitions, however, have been far more modest. Typical of these are the nine panels of rustic diversions painted by the eighteenth-century master Jean-Baptiste Oudry: acquired in 2002, they are surely pleasant, but they fall far short of the sort of work that the museum could regularly afford a century ago.
Although the Louvre generally has little to do with contemporary painting and sculpture, nevertheless, like many other museums devoted to older art, it has been enticed in recent years by the energy and interest that attach to newer forms of visual culture, and so it has tactically included examples at various points in its galleries. The model for such interventions was Georges Salles’s commission, in 1953, of Braque’s amorphous Birds on the ceiling of the Salle Henri II. For half a century, that rather unsuccessful experiment had no sequel, but in the early years of the new millennium, the idea was revisited on three occasions. The first of these resulted in a commission awarded to Anselm Kiefer, the German neoexpressionist, in which he depicts a prostrate body, apparently a self-portrait, formed from a viscous mix of paint and soil, as so often with this artist. Thirty feet high and fifteen feet wide, the painting occupies the stairway that Percier and Fontaine designed in 1808 in the northern corner of the Colonnade. On either side is a sculpture depicting sunflowers and more soil.
One year later, the French conceptual artist François Morellet intervened in a far more discrete fashion in the Escalier Lefuel in the Aile Richelieu by redesigning the iron frames of the windows. The work, however, is so subtle and self-effacing that few visitors to this underserved section of the museum are likely to be aware of his subversion in the first place.
Finally, in 2010, the biggest intervention of all occurred when Cy Twombly, the renowned American abstract painter, covered all 3,800 square feet of the ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes, just north of Braque’s birds, with a deep-blue field scored with circles and the names, spelled out in Greek letters, of the ancient sculptors Polyclitus, Praxiteles, Lysippus, Myron, Phidias, Scopas and Cephisodotus. Since none of these sculptors is displayed in the room in question, the artist’s point, here as well, is apt to elude visitors. But Twombly seems, in a general way, to respect the formal mood of the chamber and his painting has done little to disturb it.
The most publicized development at the Louvre in the past decade has been the opening of two succursales, or franchises—the Louvre-Lens in the Pas-de-Calais region of Northern France (2012), and the Louvre Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (2017). These new museums, designed respectively by the Japanese firm of SANAA and by Jean Nouvel, include objects from the Louvre’s collection that are on temporary loan. In the case of Abu Dhabi, the connection to the Louvre is for only a thirty-year period, while the museum of Lens, although affiliated with the Parisian institution, is funded entirely by the local government of Pas-de-Calais. Both of these museums are essentially autonomous and separate from the Louvre and they have emerged through two very different impulses. Louvre-Lens was a response to a widespread feeling, in parts of France far removed from Paris, that the capital received an outsized share of the national budget for culture. Louvre Abu Dhabi, by contrast, is the latest manifestation of the national government’s desire to propagate and export French culture, exactly as André Malraux tried to do half a century ago when he allowed the Mona Lisa to tour the United States.
The future of the Louvre surely is not in doubt: everything we have learned over the past century suggests that the almost idolatrous regard for the authentic art object is likely to persist and grow ever stronger. And since that appetite can be satisfied by nothing less than standing in direct physical proximity to the real thing, it is certain that the crowds will continue to pour into the Salle des États to bear witness to the Mona Lisa and the treasures of the Italian Renaissance. But it is an open question what exactly these works of art will mean to subsequent generations. Doubtless the objects will continue to be admired by many visitors for their obvious beauty and skill, while other visitors will feel drawn to them through a sense of their fame and monetary value. But ever fewer visitors, one suspects, will go to them, as earlier generations did, as to a temple of culture whose Greco-Roman antiquities and old master paintings defined the Western canon.
Since its creation in 1793, the Louvre Museum has always been oriented toward the past, but its relation to that past has proved highly changeful. During the French Revolution, the paintings and sculptures in the Louvre were mostly older works, but were seen, crucially, as having a vital bearing on the life and art of the latest generation of humanity. A quarter of a century later, with the rise of historicism, it was the pastness of the objects in the Louvre, the pastness of the past itself, that exerted a powerful spell on the newest generation, even as the direct influence of older art on newer art began to fade. This sentiment in turn yielded, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to an almost scientific view of the past, which presumed to value the object for its form and meaning, rather than for its effect on living art or for what it explained about the genesis of contemporary European society. That point of view endured for nearly a century and a half and it largely continues to define the intentions of the curators of the Louvre and the interests of many visitors to the museum. But although it would be wrong to say that society as a whole has rejected such interests, clearly a major shift has occurred in the collective mentality of the West: as a society, we have turned away from the past as such and toward the contemporary as such. This shift as well may be a temporary, passing fad; but for now, the energy of the art market—which reflects and shapes important currents in society itself—has largely been redirected from Greek and Roman antiquities, old master paintings and impressionism to what is being created now. In consequence, the Louvre and comparable institutions will still be of great value to our culture, but perhaps in slightly different ways, and perhaps to a slightly diminished degree, compared to earlier generations.
Nonetheless, standing apart from such fluctuations of fashion, the Louvre itself rises up, both in its physical dimensions and as a glorious abstraction. Like all things created by human beings, from an Upper Paleolithic arrowhead or a Sumerian cylinder seal to a palace nearly half a mile from end to end, there is something at once presumptuous and miraculous in its emergence out of nothing, out of the brute materiality of nature. The territory on which the Louvre now stands beside the waters of the Seine was once grass and clay and stone outcroppings. Perhaps in ten thousand or ten million years, it will revert to something like that earlier condition. But the Louvre, both in its physical immensity and in its role as the largest repository of humanity’s finest artifacts, takes on a certain paradigmatic status beyond all the other institutions of the world that were created to serve the same function. It represents, as Henry James said of the Galerie d’Apollon, “not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world, in fine, raised to the richest and noblest expression.”
Hotel Brighton, Paris
2 October, 2018