PARIS — Laurence des Cars went from being a curator at the Musée d’Orsay to directing the museum for four years. She now faces challenges of a different magnitude at the Louvre, the largest museum in the world, of which she has been president since 2021.
The ancient palace—home to the kings of France until 1682—exudes grandeur and is a soft power arm of the French state. However, it is also a 21st century museum that has a duty to be relevant and inclusive and to provide its millions of visitors with the widest possible access.
There is also the eternal question of the Mona Lisa. Since its theft in 1911, the Renaissance masterpiece has been besieged by increasing numbers of visitors, making crowd control the biggest pain for any Louvre head.
But Des Cars said she felt “completely comfortable” from the moment she arrived, because running the Musée d’Orsay “really prepared me technically for what it means to run a big museum.” She also felt equipped for “the diplomatic and almost geopolitical dimensions” of being president of the Louvre.
Des Cars wants to create a second entrance on the museum’s easternmost façade, leading to the Renaissance wing. It aims to relieve congestion around the Louvre Pyramid, the glass and steel entrance designed by IM Pei in the 1980s to welcome 4.5 million visitors a year, but which welcomed a number in 2018. record of 10.2 million. An estimated 80 percent come just for the Mona Lisa, the Louvre reports; They wait in a waiting area for their turn to take a selfie.
The museum president hopes that a second entry point will make a visit to the Louvre more pleasant and help re-attract French visitors, who currently represent only 30 percent of the total.
It has also limited daily attendance to 30,000 people, compared to pre-pandemic peaks of 45,000. “We must rebalance the Louvre,” he said.
The fate of France’s national museums is determined by the state—and in the case of the Louvre, by the President.
In recent years, the Louvre has gained autonomy by committing to generate almost half of its annual budget of about 270 million euros ($288 million). However, the Des Cars masterplan, which would involve a modern entrance, lobby and exhibition space, needs the backing of President Emmanuel Macron. The plan depends in part on Des Cars’s powers of persuasion.
The two presidents get along well. Des Cars sometimes accompanies Macron on trips abroad and regularly hosts state dinners at the Louvre.
At the same time, her colleagues say, she is neither uptight nor opinionated. When she became president of the Musée d’Orsay in 2017, she set out to reposition it as a destination that would attract a younger, more diverse audience from Paris and its suburbs. Exhibitions of Degas and Picasso were combined with performances by dancers and acrobats.
What he is best remembered for at the Orsay is “Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” a major exhibition focusing on black figures in French art from the late 18th century to the present. It attracted half a million visitors, including first-time attendees.
In her previous role, Des Cars was scientific director of Agence France-Muséums, a consortium that laid the foundation for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. She oversaw the team that organized loans from 13 museums, including the Louvre, acquired works for the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s own collection and prepared exhibitions.
Des Cars said that “creating a museum of this size from scratch doesn’t happen very often.” He said the hardest part was reversing “the incomprehension and fear” of his colleagues at the Louvre in Paris, who were reluctant to lend works to Abu Dhabi.
Today, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, housed in a domed building designed by architect Jean Nouvel, is one of the world’s great cultural destinations, seen as a model for a more global, less Western-focused form of museum-making.
Des Cars said that being the first president of the Louvre created additional pressure: “You have to live up to the expectations, which are many.”
But, he added, thanks to “the professional expertise that I have accumulated over the last 30 years and my passion for the Louvre, I feel—as far as possible—in the right place.”
By: Farah Nayeri
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6952198, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-24 19:00:08
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