Sacre Bleu! It's the Louvre Inc.
By Peter Gumbel/Paris
Even by her own standards, the black-tie gala that Houston socialite Becca Cason Thrash organized in Paris on June 10 was exceptional. The 272 guests, who paid up to $10,000 each to attend, included a smattering of European royalty, Bianca Jagger, Wall Street grandees Wilbur Ross and Stephen Schwarzman and the cream of Houston high society. Cason Thrash flew her Los Angeles decorator in and says she was so nervous about the arrangements that "by 6 p.m., I was looking for a cyanide capsule." This wasn't any old fund raiser: it was held for the Louvre, in the Louvre, in the vaulted Galerie Daru beneath the Winged Victory of Samothrace. There, seated at two long, mirrored tables and surrounded by 2,000-year-old statues of Roman Emperors, the guests dined on asparagus souffle and veal noisettes before moving on to a charity auction and a Duran Duran concert held under the Louvre's landmark glass pyramid. The evening raised $2.7 million.
Until recently, France's iconic museum wouldn't have dreamed of rolling out the red carpet for international partygoers, however rich, let alone--quelle horreur!--allowing food and drink to be served in a gallery. Fund raisers may be standard practice at American museums, but then no American museum is like the Louvre, which has served as the state-funded bastion of high culture in France for much of its 800-year history. A succession of French Kings built their art collections there, and in 1793, shortly after the French Revolution, it was turned into a museum that is now easily the most popular in the world. Last year it drew 8.3 million visitors--more than a million of them American.
But times are changing, state funds are tight, and the Louvre has an ambitious director named Henri Loyrette, who is seeking to pull the venerable institution into a new era. Tapping rich people around the globe for funding is just one of the changes he's brought about since becoming director in 2001. Armed with a vision of the Louvre as a beacon of culture that is both accessible and global, he has set in motion a dramatic opening to the outside world. So far, that includes signing a deal to create a Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi--a franchising concept pioneered by the Guggenheim--and staging exhibitions of the museum's treasures in such places as Kobe, Japan, and Macau. U.S. museums are particularly benefiting, and not just the usual Louvre partners like New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Loyrette set up an unprecedented three-year partnership with the High Museum in Atlanta and has sent exhibitions to cities like Seattle and Oklahoma City. He's also overhauling the museum's internal workings to make it financially viable and better able to cope with a huge increase in visitors--up 60% since 2001. As part of this transformation, he and his chief administrator, Didier Selles, have trademarked the Louvre name and cut a deal with labor unions to end the strikes that used to shut down the place for a couple of weeks every year. Most controversially, he has invited contemporary artists to exhibit at the Louvre and even decorate it--provoking howls of protests from French detractors.
Loyrette, 56, says his goal is not to be controversial just for the sake of it. But he insists, "In a house like this, you need to open the windows. We hadn't aired for a long time." He is an art historian by training who previously ran the Musee d'Orsay. Some of what he's doing is experimental, he acknowledges. He calls the Abu Dhabi project, which is set to open in 2013 and for which the Louvre will receive $900 million for the use of its name and for temporary loans of up to 300 works, a "leap into the unknown." As for contemporary artists, he points out that they've long had a place at the Louvre; both Eugene Delacroix and the Cubist artist Georges Braque painted ceiling panels in the museum, and Loyrette recently commissioned American artist Cy Twombly to do the same. "I'm not inventing or adding anything," he says. "I'm just renewing what has always been done."
There are some limits. The Louvre still takes its public-service mission very seriously, and its lending policy isn't limitless either: earlier this year, the Louvre pulled out of a show that a private promoter was mounting in Verona, Italy. The Louvre would have received $6.4 million for its participation, but the idea of working on a commercial basis with a private operator rather than a museum caused some concern among curators. Even Cason Thrash ran into restrictions on what she could do at her party: the museum drew the line at using candles and turned down her request to hold the event in a painting gallery. "They do that at the Met," she gripes. Still, she gushes about Loyrette. "Henri's a visionary. He totally gets it," she says. "It's time for the Louvre to spread its wings."
Not everyone shares her enthusiasm. Just ask Marc Fumaroli, who chairs the Society of Friends of the Louvre, a 111-year-old French association that helps finance some of the museum's acquisitions. With 70,000 members, most of whom pay a $100 annual subscription, it still packs some clout. Fumaroli is frank about the criticism. "The Friends of the Louvre is a milieu that is both cultured and demanding, and it easily gets into a bad mood," he says. There's particular concern about the way the museum is sending out its treasures. "Some think there is excessive exportation" is how he puts it, although he acknowledges that "as one of the biggest museums in the world, the Louvre cannot escape the consequences of globalization."
The other big complaint is about the contemporary art. Fumaroli wrote an indignant article about the biggest show to date, an exhibition earlier this summer of works by Belgian artist Jan Fabre that was held in galleries containing Dutch and Flemish masterpieces. Among the highlights: a gigantic earthworm wriggling on upended gravestones in the Rubens room. The show was part of a series designed to give visitors a new perspective on old works. "It's important to have polyphony around the collection," Loyrette says. But Fumaroli dismissed it as pantalonnades--pantomime.
Loyrette doesn't have to worry overly about traditionalists because under his direction, the Louvre is becoming less dependent on the French establishment. The state still subsidizes the museum to the tune of about $180 million a year, but these days that's only about half the total budget. The rest is raised by the Louvre itself, from ticket sales and donations by French companies and American and other philanthropists. It's a process that started under Loyrette's predecessor, Pierre Rosenberg, in the early 1990s, when the government handed the Louvre some limited autonomy. Loyrette and his deputy, Selles, have taken that and pushed hard, wresting management of the museum's finances and staff from government bureaucrats and in exchange signing a deal with the Culture Ministry that commits it to meeting certain performance targets. "We used to live in an absurd system, a universe that was completely archaic," Selles says.
The bottom line is that the Louvre now has a lot more money than ever. Its annual acquisition budget jumped from $4.5 million in 2004 to $36 million last year. Changes to French tax law in 2003 have helped, but Loyrette has also expanded the three-man fund-raising department that Rosenberg set up in the late 1990s into a full-time operation with 19 staffers. And the Louvre is about to set up a U.S.-style endowment fund--the first in France--using the money from the Abu Dhabi deal to ensure that it can finance a bevy of ambitious projects in the future.
If you ask Genevieve Bresc-Bautier, the crusty chief curator of the Louvre's sculpture department, what has changed in the Loyrette era, she'll grumble a bit about the heavier load of administration that comes the way of the museum's seven departments. She's also not convinced that appointing department heads for just three years at a time is a smart move. (Until Loyrette came along, they were appointed for life.) But then she'll start to talk about the "very expensive" $3.7 million Austrian bust that the Louvre was able to buy in New York for her department and the ambitious exhibition of French bronzes she'll be putting on later this year, not to mention the restoration budget, which is "incomparably bigger than it was a decade ago."
Ultimately, this may be the big difference: for the first time in ages, the Louvre has cash to spend. Its fund-raising activities are very new, but Loyrette is constantly looking to broaden them. He persuaded Christopher Forbes of the wealthy publishing family to start the American Friends of the Louvre at a time when the U.S. and France were sparring over Iraq. It has taken off and just given birth to the International Friends of the Louvre.
Which raises the question, Why should anyone give money to a French museum that already receives a hefty government subsidy? A few days after Cason Thrash's party, one of the attendees, a wealthy Floridian named Max Blumberg who made his money in lighting, was sitting in his Paris pied-`a-terre opposite the Tuileries Gardens--with a view of I.M. Pei's pyramid--and provided the answer. "The name of the Louvre has magical powers in the world of art," he said. And then, of course, there's Loyrette. "He's a great seducer," Blumberg said, "because he believes so much in what he's doing." Running the Louvre, it seems, is quite an art in itself.
CULTURE AND CASH How the world's most popular museums stack up
[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Visitors per year Incoming resources/- Public funding Louvre, Paris 8.3 million $390 million* 49% (2007) British Museum, London 6.1 million $170 million 53% (2007-08) Pompidou Center, Paris 5.5 million $193 million 69% (2006) Tate Modern, London 5.2 million $203 million** 34% (2006-07) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 4.5 million $291 million 9% (2006-07)
Source: The Art Newspaper; museums' latest accounts. /-Includes state grants, commercial activities, gifts and endowments. *Excludes the $240 million first payment for Louvre Abu Dhabi. **Funding for all Tate galleries.