Paris Notes June 2001

PARIS NOTES

June 2001

Volume 10 Issue 5

The "biggies"—the Louvre, the Pompidou and other museums—offer lots of reasons for a return visit

Let's say you "did the biggies" on a visit to Paris years ago, fulfilling a vow to your college art history professor to glimpse the Mona Lisa and the ominous, hulking form of the Pompidou Center (or Beaubourg, as it is known to many) at least once before you departed this image-filled earth. Fast-forward to 2001. You're back in town, itching to squeeze in the sites you skipped on your last tour. With over 130 museums in Paris, it may seem hard to justify a return trip to the Louvre or Beaubourg's labyrinthine galleries.

But before you chisel your itinerary into a hunk of stone, consider revisiting these two behemoths of artistic opulence. Like twins locked in battle, they complement but also compete with each other: one eager to claw out of its old-school past, the other pining for the art world’s respect. Meanwhile, the other heavyweights—the Musée d’Orsay, Musée Carnavalet and the Cluny (National Museum of the Middle Ages)—have also tuned up exhibits and overhauled amenities to welcome back one-time visitors. Toss out that ’85 Fodor’s or Let’s Go. The most important museums of Paris dare you to recognize them beneath their new facelifts.

For many, the 1989 installation of the infamous pyramid was the Louvre's last gasp at showing how "modern" it could be. It's true that I.M. Pei's controversial project made the headlines, catapulting the venerable institution, at least architecturally, out of the Renaissance. However, since then, a host of less dramatic changes has been quietly transforming this museum into a technologically adept, educationally oriented institution that offers expanded services and gallery space to its visitors.

Thanks to the "Grand Louvre" project launched by President François Mitterrand in 1981 and only recently completed, the museum's exhibition space will have doubled from 31,000 to 60,000 square meters by the end of 2001. In most cases, the new digs have advanced the Louvre's central mission—to present Western masterpieces spanning the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, where the Orsay's mission begins—by providing room to rearrange entire wings with greater chronological, thematic and geographic coherence than ever before. The Louvre's ancient relics at the origins of Western art—Greek, Mesopotamian and Egyptian collections—expanded into a new 10,000-square-meter space in December 1997. That same year, renovations of the Roman and Etruscan wings were completed, and sections featuring Islamic, ancient Iranian and eastern Mediterranean art and artifacts were enlarged (Italian and Spanish paintings are still being touched up). In 1999, a major addition of objets d'art opened, mostly showing 19th-century royal treasures. The main benefit for art fans has been hundreds of new works liberated from storage.

Then in April 2000, a remarkable top-down reform took place, pushed by President Jacques Chirac despite protestations from the Louvre's curators. For the first time, this cultural bastion gave way to the non-Occident, opening four modern galleries in the museum's southwestern outskirts, the Pavilion des Sessions, accessible via the newly opened Porte des Lions. Described as a home for "primitive art," the rooms are entirely devoted to works from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The whirlwind survey includes Nigerian and Malian sculptures; carvings from Indonesia, Pakistan, Polynesia and Taiwan; and Aztec, Mayan and Inuit masks and figures. Even an Easter Island stone head stares you down. There's only one hitch: the art's on loan until a new $190 million space devoted to these sidelined cultures cozies up to the Eiffel Tower. When the Musée des Arts Premiers opens its doors in 2004, the entire collections of the Museum of African and Oceanic Art and the Ethnology section of the Museum of Man will be joined by the Louvre's dubious tenants in a flashy space designed by star architect Jean Nouvel (Institut du Monde Arabe).

One development was made possible only by a leap-of-faith embrace of digital media. CyberLouvre, the museum’s digital effort, went on line in January 1999 and encompasses ambitious CD-ROM, Web site and database initiatives. At the physical CyberLouvre space (situated near the central entrance) and satellite stations elsewhere in the museum, there’s free computer access to in-house multimedia productions about art history, culture, and individual works and artists. Users can connect to a database of more than 325,000 combined files when visiting CyberLouvre or www.louvre.edu, the first cultural educational site to open in France.

Determining what else is "new" at the Louvre partly depends on how long it's been since you last passed under the pyramid, but overall, in every wing and corner of the Louvre, visitors can sense a shift away from stuffiness and exclusivity towards populism and conviviality. There's wheelchair access to every space, special "hands-on" sculpture exhibits for the sight-impaired, night programs and special passes for youth, and a series of temporary exhibitions. The museum has opened a free audio/visual room to screen films produced by the museum, plus an auditorium where you can enjoy a full program of films, lectures, concerts and conferences.

And there’s more to come. In June 2001, six new rooms for the Ecoles du Nord—the museum’s collection of 17th- to 19th-century German, Flemish, Dutch, Russian and Scandinavian paintings—will be created. In the fall, a new arrangement of the Oriental antiquities section will be unveiled, including a special room for the Code of Hammurabi. The Salle des Etats, where the Mona Lisa was once displayed, is getting a two-year makeover. While a private chamber is being prepared for the smiling lady, she has been moved to the Salle Rosa in the Denon Wing, first floor. The vast Galerie d’Apollon, which holds the crown diamonds, has already shut its doors for renovations; the loot is now located in the Sully Wing, first floor.

Several more Louvre-directed projects are planned for completion between 2002 and 2004, including the restoration and cleaning of the palace façades, touching up the Jardins du Carrousel, and eliminating parking from parts of the museum grounds. These and many more projects will all be overseen by the Louvre’s new director, Henri Loyrette, named in April to replace Pierre Rosenberg, who retired after 38 years at the museum. Loyrette takes up the post after seven years as director of the Orsay, and appropriately breaks tradition by being an outsider who hasn’t worked his way up through the Louvre ranks to head an institution revitalized for a new era of museum-going.

Once upon a time, tourists could get a prime view of Paris without paying a franc by riding the Pompidou Center's tube-like escalators to the sixth-floor platform. But since last year, when the center debuted its sweeping renovations, visitors have had to produce at least the price of the basic admission to look out over the Marais and the capital's sliced-up pie of streets. But before getting into a huff about losing one of Paris' cheap thrills, consider the 30F contribution a ticket not only to a refreshed permanent collection but also to the results of the center's $90 million update. After 27 months as a construction site, France's misunderstood art complex reemerged on January 1, 2000, with millennial fever. It boasts an impressive list of accomplishments: 70,000 square meters of renovations, 8,000 square meters of new space, 28 design and engineering firms and 59 other companies participating, and 3,000 people hired to make it all happen.

Beyond the fresh coat of paint inside and out, and the now single entry into a foyer with expanded or new amenities (including an SNCF ticket office, ATM machine, post office and double-sized bookstore), the average visitor can quickly appreciate the large increase in the National Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition space on levels 4 and 5 (14,000 square meters, up from 9,500). But the Pompidou has always encompassed more than just the permanent collection. In fact, it houses a large and free research library (the BPI), a music research institute (IRCAM), loads of temporary exhibition space, cafés, a restaurant, cinemas and archives. All of these have been expanded and enhanced by the recent renovations to impress visitors so that they will see the center as more than an architectural oddity.

Renzo Piano, one of the center's original architects, was tapped to renovate the lower three floors. With not a little reshuffling, an educational center for children's workshops and a members' reception area are now located on the ground floor, while level minus-one showcases four regrouped multi-purpose spaces for theater, dance, music, lectures and film, and a small gallery. In fact, with numerous smaller galleries scattered throughout the Pompidou, the curators' idea is to program more diverse, multi-disciplinary art simultaneously, turning the place into the true "Centre" that Georges Pompidou envisioned back when his posthumously completed palace first opened in 1977.

More space became available when administrative offices moved off site, so the updated public information library—now equipped with 370 Internet-connected computers, multi-lingual TV-watching stations and video players for language study—stretches over two floors. (The free library, attracting 40 percent of the Pompidou's overall eight million annual visitors, remains a refuge for those who miss reading Newsweek or thumbing through English-language books.) New heat, central air and handicap access is a plus, while perhaps more controversially, the center has fully embraced the "outsourced services" mantra, its boutique now run by the Printemps fashion chain and the café service managed by an up-market caterer.

Despite all the new side attractions of the center, curators hope the new look, paradoxically, will direct more traffic to the museum itself, which annually receives only 750,000 visitors, the same number who typically see a short-run show like "Picasso Sculptor" or "The Pop Years." Now museum-goers enter on the fourth floor (devoted to art from 1960 onward), working their way through the Warhols, Oldenbergs and new acquisitions of Sophie Calle and Christo before climbing to previous decades, 1905 to 1960, to see the likes of Chagall, Matisse and a newly restored Mercure by Picasso, plus new arrivals such as Francis Picabia's Dresseur d'Animaux.

This layout should focus more attention on the contemporary collection, which will be rehung every 18 months, enticing viewers to return for more of the museum’s 45,000-piece collection (only around 1,600 works can be shown at one time). The Musée National d’Art Moderne may never be flooded with Louvre-like numbers—six million paying visitors annually, curators sigh—but the new format and the debut of individual rooms devoted to design, architecture, graphic art and Pop Art are attracting fresh populations to put it in more direct competition with the Tate Gallery, MOMA and the Guggenheim, museums the Pompidou administration hopes to once again rival.

But what about that once-free ride to the sixth floor? Now, after seeing the new galleries at the top of the world, you can sit at the 350F-a-head Georges, the slickly decorated restaurant for the trendy set whose metallic pod-like dining enclosures and thumping soundtrack make you feel like you're eating inside a work of modern art.

>Meanwhile, downstream at the Orsay, it's not so much what's changed as what's going to change. This year inaugurates the first major overhaul of the former train station that, according to a museum publication, opened in 1986 "in order to show, in all its diversity, the artistic creation of the western world 1848 to 1914." Work that commenced in February will help enlarge, reorient and strengthen the building. Goals include building a refurbished welcome center and special group entrance, improving the bookstore and temporary exhibition space, and shoring up the aging building, which is marred by corrosion. Though the Orsay's exterior plaza is shrouded in unattractive metal sheeting, and concrete barriers block some entrances, museum officials stress that the entire collection will remain open to the public during the one-year construction period.

>Over in the Latin Quarter, the Cluny premiered a new medieval garden last fall that helps connect the Roman baths/abbey edifice to the urban exterior. Woven branch fences divide the space into terraces, "glades," a "meadow" and the "forest of the unicorn," which offers children's games based on the "Lady and the Unicorn" tapestries found inside. Themed medieval garden plots inspire fine cuisine, medicinal cures, spiritual inspiration and romantic love. The overall effect is one of visual relief—a quiet patch of green space and palpable history for passersby at the busy Boulevard Saint-Germain/Saint-Michel intersection.

>Hopping back to the Right Bank, the Archéo 2000 project, completed in December 2000, is big news at the Paris-history-infused Musée Carnavalet. A former 17th-century orangerie on the Marais museum grounds now houses a tremendous trove of artifacts in a well-lit and documented layout, including dug-out canoes, or pirogues, which date from the earliest origins of Paris, 4000 to 2000 BC. Now in protective display cabinets, the boats came to light during the mid-1990s excavations of Parc du Bercy, which revealed a Neolithic village on the banks of the Seine. These pieces join the existing archaeological collection, which includes representative pieces from the Paleolithic period, the Bronze and Iron ages, and the third-century Gallo-Roman era, when Paris was museum-less Lutèce.

>Louvre: Internet: www.louvre.fr. Open daily 9am-6pm; Mon. and Wed. until 9:45pm; closed Tue. Entrance: 46F, Sun. and after 3pm, 30F.

>Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou: Internet: www.centrepompidou.fr. Open daily 11am-10pm; closed Tue.; museum and exhibits until 9pm; library noon-10pm Mon.-Fri., 11am-10pm Sat. and Sun. Entrance to exhibits: 30-50F.

>Musée d'Orsay: Internet: www.musee-orsay.fr. Open Tue., Wed., Fri. and Sat. 10am-6pm; Thu. 10am-9:45pm; Sun. 9am-6pm. Entrance: 40F.

>Musée National du Moyen Age, Thermes et Hôtel de Cluny: 6 Place Paul-Painlevé, 5th. Internet: www.musee-moyenage.fr. Open daily 9:15am-5:45pm; closed Tue. Entrance: 30F.

>Musée Carnavalet: 23 Rue de Sévigné, 3rd. Internet: www.paris-france.org/musees. Open daily 10am-5:40pm; closed Mon. Entrance: 30F. Free Sun. 10am-1pm.