Move over,
Mona Lisa. You may be about to have competition as
the most talked-about woman in the
Louvre.
اضافة اعلان
For the first time since its creation in 1783 in the wake of
the French Revolution, the Musée du Louvre will be headed by a woman, Laurence des
Cars, the current head of the Musée d’Orsay and the much smaller Musée de l’Orangerie.
Des Cars, 54, was appointed Wednesday as the museum’s
president-director by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.
“Four years at the Orsay gave me this confidence, this crazy
idea that I could be the next president of the Louvre,” des Cars said in an
hourlong telephone interview. “The president probably saw that I was ready for
the job and that I am somehow serene. I am not overanxious. I have to stay very
calm.”
On September 1, des Cars will replace the museum’s leader of
eight years, Jean-Luc Martinez, who had waged an intense media campaign to stay
on for a new five-year term.
The two museum directors could not be more different. Both
studied art history at the École du Louvre, the museum’s prestigious school.
But the Louvre has traditionally been run by upper-class art historians, and
Martinez, a trained archaeologist with little expertise in painting, was the
son of a postman from a working-class suburb of Paris. Des Cars, a specialist
in 19th- and early-20th-century painting, is descended from a French noble
family of writers.
Des Cars will take over the museum — which belongs to the French
state and has an annual budget of about 240 million euros (or $291 million) and
more than 2,000 employees — at a difficult time. The pandemic has put a brake
on international tourism, which accounted for 70 percent of its visitors.
Before it hit last year, the Louvre was getting about 10 million annual
visitors, making it the most visited museum in the world.
“This very long lockdown and closure of museums has been very
painful,” des Cars said. “What I fear most is that there will be a temptation
for people to close in on themselves, that people will be so insecure they will
be afraid of the outside. I want to open the windows and open the doors and
make connections so that people will see there is a whole wild world to
discover.”
Des Cars’ confidence stems in part from the role she played as
scientific director of the development of Louvre Abu Dhabi, a museum in the
United Arab Emirates that leases the Louvre’s brand and which opened in 2017.
She became director of the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2014,
followed by the Musée d’Orsay in 2017, where she has been praised for
exhibitions made in collaboration with partners such as the Metropolitan Museum
of Art. The 2019 show “Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” which focused
on previously overlooked Black figures in French art and was developed with the
Wallach Art Gallery in New York, is considered a landmark of her tenure. In
March, the Orsay was also the first French museum to voluntarily return a
painting looted by the Nazis.
She already has plans for big changes. She pledged to extend the
Louvre’s opening hours into the evening, to attract younger visitors. “Young
active people can come for one hour after work, have dinner at the Louvre, have
the pleasure of getting lost in the Louvre,” she said.
She hopes to expand international partnerships, particularly in
vulnerable war zones and sites like Sudan that suffer from looting. The Louvre
has long conducted archaeological excavations around the world and is working
with the Smithsonian to rebuild the museum in Mosul in Iraq, for example.
She plans to create another department for Byzantium and eastern
Christianity, which she said is “lost” in the Louvre, and open another entrance
to relieve the congestion at I.M. Pei’s pyramid.
Asked what it means to be a woman running the most visited and
largest museum in the world, she replied, “Things are really changing for women
in the museum world. Of the 70 curators in the Louvre, more than half of them
are women. More women are heading museums, especially in Europe. And younger
women are much more confident these days.”
A few months ago, it was assumed that Martinez, the Louvre’s
president since 2013, was assured a third term. Under his tenure, the Louvre
grew past 10 million visitors for the first time. Its Leonardo exhibition,
which ended a few weeks before France went into a nationwide lockdown last
year, drew rave reviews and a record 1 million visitors.
Yet critics accused Martinez of an authoritarian style that
ignored the advice of his curators and a cheapening of the museum’s brand by
forming partnerships with brands like Uniqlo, or allowing a couple to spend a
night in the museum as part of a marketing campaign for Airbnb. (The Louvre
also leased its space to Beyoncé and Jay-Z to film the music video for their
song “Apes**t” and features prominently in the Netflix hit “Lupin,” one of the
platform’s most watched series.)
In March, after a dispute over a new color scheme in one of the
Louvre’s galleries became a weekslong talking point in France’s news media,
Henri Loyrette, a former president of the museum, threw his weight behind
Martinez’s critics. He gave testimony in a lawsuit brought by the Cy Twombly
Foundation, which said a new paint job had disfigured a ceiling mural by the
abstract American painter.
Martinez will continue at the museum, which reopened May 19
after months of being closed, until Aug. 31. He will then become a heritage
ambassador, responsible for coordinating France’s participation in
international projects.
Des Cars learned of Macron’s decision Monday, when she was
visiting the Musée d’Orsay with her parents and other family members and
received a call on her cellphone from the culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot. “My
heart beat much faster,” she said. “The Louvre is the heart of Paris. The
building itself goes back 800 years. It’s a former royal palace that became a
public institution that belongs to the culture of France and also to the
citizens of the world. It was quite an emotional moment.”
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