The New Nation - Internet Edition

Claudine Canetti

The Musée du Louvre has launched a rich and unique collaboration with the United States, offering to showcase American artists - almost totally absent from its collections - and initiating an unprecedented series of loans which, for a three-year period, will bring hundreds of the Louvre's most precious works (selected from its various Departments) to the United States for several months. Another highlight of this Franco-American "artistic campaign" is the deal reached with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, featuring eight exhibits of key works on loan from the Louvre that will charter the museum's history from its founding in 1793 through the present. These works will be housed in one of the two new wings of the Atlanta museum recently completed by Italian architect Renzo Piano (one of two architects who designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris), covering 700 square metres and two levels. American art patrons will finance the entire project and will help fund the renovation of the Louvre's 18th century French furniture galleries, currently closed to the public.

At a news conference in Paris presenting this collaboration, Louvre director Henri Loyrette evoked the museum's well-established relations with American artists, as well as "the new artistic map of the United States". Moving beyond its usual partnerships with major museums on the East Coast, from D.C. and Boston to New York, the Louvre has turned to Atlanta, the ninth largest metropolitan area in the United States. The recently established High Museum of Art distinguishes itself from other large American museums through its history and its collections. It is currently viewed as the most important museum of the American Southeast, "demonstrating remarkable vitality".

One in every seven visitors to the Louvre is American, accounting for some one million Americans in 2005, added M. Loyrette, regretting the total absence of American art from the museum apart from three paintings. Operation America will be launched in mid-June with the opening in Paris of the exhibit "American Artists and the Louvre". Featuring some 30 pieces from the 18th century to the 1940s, the exhibit will show how the Louvre was a source of inspiration for Americans artists, welcoming them from the onset. On display, among other works, a large-scale painting by Samuel Morse, inventor of the electric telegraph and the Morse code but also a talented painter. Painted in 1831 and depicting the Louvre's Salon Carré and the Grande Galerie in perspective, this work was previously presented several years ago at the American Museum of Art in Giverny, near the home and garden of Claude Monet that gave this little village on the outskirts of Paris its claim to fame. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre has been hung in the same Salon Carré so that visitors can compare the gallery's current aspect with its appearance some 175 years ago.

Mid-October will see the opening in Atlanta of the first of eight exhibits organised over a three-year period. Each year will feature a major 11-month exhibit supported by themed exhibits lasting three to six months. For this unprecedented partnership, devoted to "Kings as Collectors" (15 paintings and 17 sculptures and objets d'art), the Louvre has selected the perfect ambassador, accepting to temporarily part with a masterpiece from its permanent collection, Raphael's Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, a loan so exceptional that this treasure of the Italian Renaissance will "only" remain in the United States for three months - so as not to deprive Louvre visitors for too long! L'Infante Marie Marguerite by Velasquez, Murillo's The Young Beggar, Rembrandt's Saint Matthew and the Angel and other masterpieces will return to Paris eleven months later, while Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds of Acadia will remain in Atlanta for seven months.

Two other exhibits will be presented during the first year of the Louvre Atlanta partnership, which will feature some 142 works in 2006-2007. "The King's Drawings" provides an overview of the collection of royal drawings amassed by the kings of France, while "Decorative Arts of the Kings" showcases one of French royalty's favourite collections. In 2007-2008, Americans will discover the history of the Louvre's major archaeological collections and its Egyptian, Oriental, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, as well as Empress Josephine's personal collection of antiquities and works by sculptor Houdon, including the famous busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The third year, entitled "The Louvre, Today and Tomorrow", will bring the collections up to the present, with the museum's new department of Islamic Arts, the introduction of contemporary art pieces and the new Louvre-Lens museum in northern France.