Travelers' Tales Paris (13 page)

To this day, some Parisians insist the opposition was not wholly esthetic. Some of the anger was focused on the fact that Mitterrand had chosen his chief architect without competition (Pei does not participate in competitions).There was, as well, the automatic resistance of conservatives to a Socialist president's building ambitions. As one Parisian woman involved in the arts recalled, the opposition view was: “How dare Mitterrand touch the Louvre? How dare a Socialist do this?”

In Pei's New York office, the published insults are preserved in a foot-thick file. A man of resolute high spirits, Pei now says with a laugh, “I was hurt but not mortally so.” He had the firm support not only of the Mitterrand government but, eventually, of the entire Louvre staff. Still, in the early days, during frequent business trips to Paris, he could sense the public hostility even in casual encounters. Some of the animosity abated after a full-scale prototype, without glass, went up on the site in 1985, conveying a sense of
what the courtyard would look like with this large, spare addition. And after the 1989 opening, public opinion was swiftly transformed. “People stopped me on the street and thanked me,” Pei recalls. He would repeat himself brilliantly in the design for the Carrousel du Louvre. Daylight pours into that underground space through another big pyramid, this one inverted so that its point becomes a beacon in a great space.

Pyramid bashing has now faded, to be replaced by agitation over the Tuileries. The Grand Louvre project includes restoration of those splendid formal gardens that stretch from the museum grounds as far as the Place de la Concorde. One citizens' group organized a protest, enlisting American support and contributions, with flyers that instructed the public on “How to Stop the Massacre.” The victim of the massacre, in their eyes, was a piece of history—Le Notre's incomparable 17th-century gardens—and the means was their growing commercialization. In recent years, garden space has been rented out for three-week street fairs, a giant bookseller's exhibition and what seemed to be the last straw—a skating rink.

As one architect involved in the project sums it up, the conflict is a battle between two groups: the functionaries who oversee the Tuileries and who, to support the gardens, will rent a plot to any entrepreneur able to pay congenial sums of francs for the privilege; and on the other side, the strict preservationists who don't want to see anyone even walking on the grass. The resolution will likely be a compromise. The street fairs, popular events for children, have already been reduced from two a year to one.

Whatever pride Parisians take in the Louvre is hardly translated into a notable local presence in its galleries. Since the pyramid reception hall opened, the number of visitors has gone from three million a year to more than five million. The majority are foreign, and about one-seventh of all visitors are North American; the proportion from the city and suburbs is said to have risen from a sparse 31 percent to 36 percent. Even so, people in the businesses and professions of the arts insist that although they are often at the Louvre, their friends never go. Among knowledgeable residents
there is an amiably cynical rule that residents of this culture-ridden city turn up at the pyramid in large numbers, lunch in the gourmet restaurant, take in a lecture or film, pause to inspect the glorious bookshop and go home without ever having stopped to inspect a work of art.

Apparently many do not even wander beyond the great entrance hall for the short walk to one of the newest—and oldest—works on display. Even before digging began, French archaeologists told Pei and the builders that they would find vestiges of the first royal dwelling on the grounds. What the excavation actually uncovered were substantial sections of walls, towers and wells of the austere 12th-century fortified castle that was the first Louvre—an impressive and strangely touching remnant of the city's early history.

Recent innovations trouble some Louvre professionals. Without prompting, a curator suddenly offers an explanation for an unexpected detail on the Louvre's one-page map. Published in six languages and color-coded to help tourists find their way through confusing spaces, it provides the precise location of six masterworks that many first-time visitors feel it is crucial to see—among them, the
Mona Lisa
, the
Vénus de Milo
and the
Winged Victory
. No museum is happy to encourage tourists to proceed through the building at a gallop primarily or exclusively in order to stand before a half-dozen celebrated pieces. But something had to be done for the peace of mind
of those staff members who preside over the information desk: they were bored beyond endurance by the number of tourists wanting directions to those works.

In fact, the museum administration appears to be singularly attentive to the comforts of its 1,300 employees. Michel Laclotte, a small, brisk, unpretentious man, is the first scholar ever to head the museum, and one would expect his interests to focus chiefly on the art inventory and its proper display. Nevertheless, since his arrival the Louvre has found room for an employee health club complete with weight machines, a lending library and a part-time social worker available to help staff members with financial or domestic problems.

Of the six stellar pieces listed on the map, Leonardo da Vinci's
Mona Lisa
is not only a point of pride but a source of torment. Posing the question as “one of the crucial issues” confronting the museum, his words edged in irony, Pierre Rosenberg, the Louvre's curator of paintings, asks, “What are we to do with the terrible
Mona Lisa
?” With her faint cryptic smile and her sly eyes, this 16th-century portrait is an object of great beauty and greater fame, rendered even more famous by theft. In 1911 it was stolen and kept hidden for two years by an Italian workman who thought it belonged back home where its model had lived.

In high tourist season, when the noise level and the crowds in the pyramid reception hall resemble the Miami airport on Christmas travel days, the groups of guided tourists rooted before the painting create day-long bottlenecks. Their presence makes it a chore to move through the Grand Gallery and nearly impossible to approach the art on neighboring walls. In
fact, one of the few depressing sights in the Louvre is to observe visitors gazing raptly at the portrait and scarcely casting a glance at two splendid Leonardo paintings that hang nearby, the
Virgin of the Rocks
and the
Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
.

Rosenberg has finally concluded that the only solution is to give the Mona Lisa a room of its own. “It is a little bit sad,” he notes. After all, what a museum of this size has to offer is context—a number of major works by a master, in the company of the paintings of some of his important teachers and followers. In this case, however, the obligation to educate has been vanquished by human traffic problems.

By Rosenberg's estimate, the range and depth of the Louvre's painting collection is matched only by the National Gallery in London. The public had a chance to experience the depth at the end of 1992 when the Louvre opened 39 refurbished rooms in the Cour Carrée, the oldest part of the museum, showing only 18th-and 19th-century works of French art. One-fifth of the exhibition had been in storage for years.

Reviews were mixed. Some critics thought the installations were entirely wonderful, “a sumptuous gift.” A serious French arts magazine complained about the murky colors of the painted walls—too dark—and suggested that under the natural lighting some still lifes looked as if they were in an “advanced state of decomposition.” Interspersed among pieces by such important painters as David and Ingres were fairly underwhelming efforts by such secondary figures as Flandrin and Chasseriau. In all, the galleries show 700 paintings, about a hundred pastels, drawings and miniatures, and a captivating three-walled woodland scene executed by Corot for the bathroom of a patron's home. Taking in the entire survey of two centuries of art in a single visit is something like consuming three gourmet meals in one day.

But the Louvre was not meant for visual snacking. The new Richelieu installation is a feast: 860 paintings of the Northern European school, including the Dutch, Flemish, and German treasures in the collection; 3,000 large and small antiquities from the Middle Eastern excavations; 33 rooms of French sculpture; a string
of rooms for a prime collection of objects of decorative art—among them, at last, the space to hang 80 large, rare Renaissance tapestries.

Interestingly, it was a sudden inspiration for the Richelieu in the planning stage that Pei believes won him the unwavering support he needed from key figures at the museum. In the hard winter days of 1982, bruised by the fierce attacks on his designs, Pei went off to Arcachon, a summer resort in southwestern France, to talk things over with the Louvre staff and with Emile Biasini, the agile civil servant whom Mitterrand had chosen to coordinate the project for the government. The Richelieu had one small and two large courtyards where Ministry of Finance functionaries habitually parked their cars. Pei proposed installing glass roofs over them so that the museum could use those gloriously decorated spaces to display large works of sculpture, including some eroded outdoor pieces removed from the adjoining Tuileries. The smaller space would be set aside for some of the rare pieces from the Middle East.

It was, he says now, one of those obvious lightning-bolt solutions that, with luck, arrive in an architect's moments of desperation. If the Louvre leadership had been vacillating about his ideas, it became at that moment a solid constituency for Pei's leadership.

Theoretically, the construction rigs and the workmen should be gone soon. But nobody believes it. Pierre Rosenberg is given to saying that, like the great castles and manor houses of Europe that are eternally engaged in addition and renovation, the Louvre will forever be a work in progress. Michel Laclotte is wryly certain that when the last picture has been hung and the last piece of carved ivory placed in its glass case, the curators of all seven departments will probably be heard complaining that they must have space, more space.

Suddenly Rosy, my ten year old, gasps, stiffens like a pointer, and darts down the wide corridor, brown hair and jacket flying behind her. Dodging the multitudes in her wake, I take off in pursuit, leaving Grandma with the guidebook: I have no idea what has spooked Rosy, but, since a very dapper French gentleman inexplicably stooped at a street corner earlier this morning to untie my shoelace, I am prepared for just about anything. I catch up as she skids to a stop in her little sneakers before the broad staircase, eyes and mouth agape, gazing upward, her face rapt with astonishment.