How a great picture gallery became one of the first truly encyclopedic museums. And how Americans helped finance it.
7 December 2020 (Paris, France) – We are enchanted, even in a digital age, by iconography, the building as a depiction of a moral order, and in Paris so many also offering a medieval cosmos. It’s the sheer authenticity of ancient buildings. I was a student here at the Sorbonne in 1972 and 1973. For me, Paris was everything. My intellectual sauce. Painting, music, political awareness, writing, performance, creating, activism … thriving on repurposing. Trying to make sense of all the changes happening inside myself and in the society around me. And having every opportunity to do it. As Ernest Hemingway wrote “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you.” It has. When I went solo, I worked from here in the 1990s, and eventually bought a pied-à-terre.
The Louvre certainly became a fixture in my life. I have visited countless times, and I have been an Ami du Louvre (“Friend of the Louvre”) for countless years. That Society advances the Louvre’s mission through an active grant-making program, raises awareness of the Louvre’s collections and museum expertise, and helps make the Museum’s exhibitions and permanent collections more accessible around the world. Membership also gets you access to one of the “private” museum entrances so you can skip the tourist queue … to the delight of my family and friends when they visit. Oh, and 20% off bookstore and gift shop purchases 😎
But now … well, “virtual” visits ain’t so great. There is a wide range of online virtual Louvre tours, but apart from physical problems of reproduction – the pixel resolution is inadequate, the movement glitchy and twitchy – the real difference is the loss of tactile and optical tension, the missing dialogue of aching feet and happy eyes. And the new wine bars.
Online, we float, ghostlike, down corridors, making giddy hundred-and-eighty-degree spins, with no querulous photographer from Toledo, Ohio with a selfie stick to bump into. I simply miss the Zen of the museum experience: the physical and the painterly. Reproductions reproduce, and they often do it well, but they can’t reproduce the sex appeal of museum going.
The Louvre had reopened recently, in a cautious, by-appointment-only manner, but it was not the same. It is now fully closed until 15 December.
Because the thing about the Louvre is its essential experience … its enormity and intimacy, constantly colliding, on a scale unequalled by any other gallery in the world. The experience of its Grande Galerie – a corridor, not a room – is necessarily closeup. Even the large and little rooms that spring off its sides hold out the possibility of an intimate encounter with the past.
Ten million people visited the Louvre last year, before France’s lockdown in March, and no museum can become so crowded without cancelling its own purpose, or replacing it with another purpose – the purpose of a dutiful hajj, of “having been there”. The place is so big, so various, so filled with objects, and so beautifully disordered that there is still, especially off-season, a chance to infiltrate inside, instead of being regimented within it. A Saturday morning in one of the “lesser” wings – say, the Richelieu wing, opened in the nineteen-nineties – offers time alone with overlooked delights, like the sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries called “Les Chasses de Maximilien,” which include a bracing account of the Emperor out hunting with his dogs and horses and attendants and whippers-in on a winter morning, perfectly capturing the smoky, enveloping air of the Flemish woods while providing an extraordinary encyclopedia of canine types, some strange, some familiar. And that’s all in just one room. Of 60 rooms. On three floors. And just one wing of the entire Louvre.
There are 35,000 works of art on display across the whole Louvre. Over the summer, “Conde Nast Traveler” magazine estimated it would take you around 200 days to see each of the 35,000 works of art on display at the museum … if you took 30 seconds to see each and every piece.
So I was delighted when my wife gave me a pre-Christmas present, James Gardner’s The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum”. No one knows why the Louvre is called the Louvre. You would think that it has some relation to “Lutetia,” the Roman name for Paris, or the like, but not a bit; the origin of the name is as opaque as the French love of Johnny Hallyday. Even so, the name has stuck through the site’s transition from citadel to showplace.
And the continuity the Louvre represents is the continuity of the French state. Gardner relates the long story of the Louvre, starting around the thirteenth century, when it was simply a castle, through its elevation as a palace, and then, in the seventeenth century, its expansion into service as an office building for French royalty. In those centuries, the building intersects art history only occasionally.
A kind of false spring occurred when François I bought pictures from Leonardo da Vinci at Amboise, France (da Vinci lived in Amboise the last 5 years of his life, and is buried there) in the early sixteenth century – three paintings, including that smiling lady you’ve probably heard about, which remain the nucleus of the collection. It was a cosmopolitan collection – the French King, like many of his successors, displayed his power by demonstrating his taste, with the model of collecting as a form of exotic shopping already in place.
I relish Gardner’s views on architecture, a shrewd, watchful, knowing eye – noting, for instance, that the greatest architectural achievement of the complex, the seventeenth-century Colonnade, with its bas-relief pediment, is now so hidden away, around the corner from the pyramid and the central court, that “not one visitor to the Louvre in a hundred, perhaps in a thousand, will ever see this masterpiece.” His account reminds us that we always make one era responsible for what belongs to the one before, and among the truths of French history is that we give the Revolution credit – or blame – for historical processes and institutions that were under way long before 1789.
Example: the great public-private spaces of modernity – the restaurants and cafés with their class- and caste-spanning crowd – were all nurtured during the Enlightenment, even if they blossomed after the Revolution. Although the Louvre formally opened as an art gallery in 1793 – the beginning of the Terror – the idea to make it so had begun half a century before. The removal of the court to Versailles under Louis XIV, in 1682, had left an enormous volume of unused space, and even more was created by the expansion of the Tuileries Palace, west of the courtyard where the pyramid now stands.
The direction and planning of the incipient Louvre luckily fell into the hands of two remarkable fonctionnaires who, more than anyone else, are responsible for its character. The first was the extravagantly named Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billarderie, Comte d’Angiviller, who was appointed the keeper of the king’s estates by Louis XVI. As Gardner tells us, he was intent on establishing a museum in the Grande Galerie, and he went about the heroic work, through both architecture and acquisition, of turning a royal abode into an art gallery.
D’Angiviller’s dream was made real by an accident of finance almost impossibly ironic to imagine, given that the Louvre has, for more than a century, been the special haunt of American tourists. The end of the American Revolution, we learn from Gardner’s history, helped finance the French museum. Once the War of Independence had been concluded, the French government could start to collect on its loans to the American colonies, which had significant interest payments, and that put thirteen million livres in d’Angiviller’s hands.
He started collecting good pictures, not greedily and haphazardly, as prestige prizes, but with a modern kind of eye, devoted to filling gaps in the collection. He also renovated the Grande Galerie itself, envisioning a huge iron-and-glass skylight that would illuminate the arriving pictures.
He lost his job when the Revolution happened – he fled, for fear of losing his head as well – but the position of what was, in effect, museum director fell to an equally aesthetic and public-spirited conservator, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, usually called Roland. A Girondin liberal, he built on d’Angiviller’s efforts, with their implicit appeal to ever-larger audiences, and dreamed for the first time of a true museum: a synoptic collection telling the story of art-making in all its genres, available to everyone. “It should be open to everyone and everyone should be able to place his easel in front of any painting or to draw, paint, or model as he chooses,” he declared. When the Louvre opened at last as a museum, in 1793, anyone could go in.
Roland, with his impeccable liberal credentials and democratic instincts, was one of the more pitiable victims of the countless pitiable victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror. Only months before the museum’s opening, he took off, afraid of the radicals. Though he got out of Paris, his intellectual, spirited wife, an activist who belonged to the wrong families, biologically and politically, was arrested in the spring of 1793 by the Jacobins, and publicly beheaded in the fall. “From the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife,” Roland wrote, “I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies.” He committed suicide by sword thrust.
Roland’s wife, Jeanne-Marie Phlipon, is a fascinating part of French history. She was the daughter of a Paris engraver. Brilliant and cultured, she absorbed the democratic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century French philosophers. In 1780 she married Roland. The couple settled in Paris in 1791, and her salon quickly became a meeting place for the group of bourgeois republicans (later called the Girondins). In one of my many jaunts through Paris bookshops, I stumbled upon her biography, written in the early 1800s so almost contemporaneous to the times. It provided an incredibly clear idea of life in France during the 18th century, and all the political factions and dangers of the French Revolution. It led me to read Simon Schama’s classic “Citizens”, which chronicles the French Revolution, only to find the Phlipon biography credited in his bibliography.
When he came to power, Napoleon turned his predecessors’ idea of a great picture gallery into one of the first instances of a truly encyclopedic museum – a horizontal treasury of the world’s wonders, hauled into a single city and placed under one roof. Ok, he looted countries like hell – but he had terrific taste.
Does time turn loot into legacy? This is one of the great debates of our era, worth taking up. The point is foregrounded by the Greek government’s ever-hotter pursuit of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, taken from Athens by Lord Elgin in the early nineteenth century, with what seemed to be official permission from the Ottoman administration. What is plunder and what is portable cultural material?
It is very hard to acquit any art museum of looting once one looks hard at the historical circumstances of acquisition. In Christine Caulson’s history of American museums she notes that the great collections of European paintings in America were assembled, often by the dealer Joseph Duveen and the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, on something like the same unequal terms as the great archeological collections of Europe. Altarpieces were ripped out of Italian churches and palazzos with a disdain for their context equivalent to Lord Elgin’s – and at a time when Italy was as financially weak against American power as Greece had been militarily against English (and Turkish) power.
In truth, it all depends on the transaction and the treasure. Bronze Age people, after all, passed art around the Aegean, in the path of trade and armies, quite as much as later people did. Some of the nineteenth-century takings obviously mark the kind of cultural circulation and hybridization that is not just essential to civilization but exactly what we mean by “civilization”; others really do trail the injuries of theft. The Parthenon Marbles are part of a still existent if damaged architectural whole, and the splendor of the Acropolis Museum is that it looks directly out on the original site. They ought to be returned.
On the other hand, the Italian pictures at the Louvre represent the long-standing to-ings and fro-ings of art in European culture, a practice both loving and violently rapacious. Portable pictures are meant to move. As the art historian Adam Gopnik has noted:
Seurat in Chicago makes us all more Parisian. The Veroneses in the Louvre show us, in this sense, more historical truth than a Veronese in situ in Venice might. Portable pictures are inherently self-propelled, with the possibility of going elsewhere implicit in their making.
Or am I just selectively justifying the looting?
As the nineteenth century wore on, fewer great objects found a home in the Louvre. But the most extensive building projects in its history took place in the eighteen-fifties and sixties, under Louis-Napoléon and the Second Empire. That nineteenth-century Nouveau Louvre is most of what the tourist sees today, in the Cour Napoléon surrounding the pyramid.
The book continues into the present with impeccable details. The curious thing is that, for all the Parisian drama going on around it, the Louvre as a museum has been a remarkably stable institution. Very few things have entered the collection that stand above, or even very much alongside, its nineteenth-century acquisitions; the works that had arrived by 1870 are still its treasures today. The greatest single transformation in the building and its purposes since the Second Empire dates to our own era, François Mitterrand’s “Grand Louvre” which gave us the pyramid, completed in the 1990s. I especially enjoyed those chapters because I was living in Paris a good part of that time.
François Mitterrand served as President of France from 1981 to 1995, the longest time in office in the history of France. The “Grand Louvre” was part of his “Grands Projets” which was an architectural program to provide modern monuments in Paris, the city of monuments, symbolizing France’s role in art, politics, and economy at the end of the 20th century. The program was initiated in 1982 and it has been estimated at the time to cost the Government of France 15.7 billion French Francs (approximately €14.2 billion) both as a revitalization of the city, as well as contemporary architecture promoted by Socialist Party politics. The scale of the project and its ambitious nature was compared to the major building schemes of Louis XIV. It included the Louvre Pyramid and other Louvre renovations, the Musée d’Orsay, the Parc de la Villette, the Arab World Institute, the Opéra Bastille, the Grande Arche de La Défense, the Ministry of Finance and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the last and most expensive of the group, and where I go to just read and escape the digital world:
What Gardner regrets is the scale of the new mass tourism that Mitterrand’s “Grand Louvre” created. But the human spirit is a funny old thing. The more people have seen of the Louvre, the more they want to see it, just as the more baseball games you show on television, the more people come to the park. It’s also true that in a secularized society, where culture fills a role once played by faith, there is a persistent place for pilgrimage – even attached to penance, waiting outside in the hot Parisian summer sun for hours.