(Paris) Access, hours, promotion of the collections: Laurence des Cars, new president and director of the Louvre and first woman to hold this position, wants to re-enchant “the most beautiful museum in the world” by favoring “the quality” of the visit.
Posted at 10:28 a.m.
“I want everyone to rediscover the Louvre, I want to re-enchant it, it’s the most beautiful museum in the world, it’s up to us to be creative, inventive while being respectful of the place, of the extraordinary history of its collections and knowing how to question them by addressing all audiences”, she said during a first meeting with the press, six months after taking office.
Because the Louvre Museum, which in Paris houses the Mona Lisa among 37,000 other works and received nearly ten million visitors each year before the health crisis, is “an encyclopedic museum, but discontinuous and incomplete”, she analyzes.
In 2021, despite the health crisis, nearly three million visitors remained faithful to the largest museum in the world, closed from 1er January to May 19. Among them, 61% of French people, including a large majority of Ile-de-France residents, foreign visitors having deserted the premises with COVID-19.
It is for the public that she intends to “steer this great ship” like a “conductor”, with “accuracy”, as part of her “public service mission”.
“Connect”
“The Louvre must find something unique to say that reflects its history […]. What (he) lacks is the connection between the chapters. The idea is to connect things, to connect them”, she underlines.
It is with this desire that the site of the future department of the arts of Byzantium and Eastern Christianity was launched, which will constitute the ninth department of the museum alongside Roman-Greek-Etruscan, Egyptian and Oriental antiquities, the department of paintings, sculptures, works of art, graphic arts and Islamic arts.
At their head, as many directors among the 2200 employees, including “more than 200 scientists and researchers, in contact with 75 countries of the world” that she says “listen” and with whom she intends to “write a new page” of the history of the museum.
On the menu for this new chapter: “improvement of temporary exhibition spaces” which will be refurbished as well as “the exploration of new formats” on the occasion in particular of an exhibition devoted to Uzbekistan at the start of the next school year.
Also on the program: the “return of major thematic exhibitions” in connection with other European museums and the transformation of the “session pavilion” which houses African works, but is “little frequented, because at the end of the circuit”.
Extend hours
You have to “make the objects speak again in all their potentialities, because I have the feeling that this is what the public expects, not simply (to offer) a top-down aesthetic discourse, but to give keys”, she says.
A “first working seminar with the teams from the Louvre and the Quai Branly museum (dedicated to the arts of Oceania, Africa and the Americas) was well received. It is a question of inventing a new dialogue “which will also be extended to the Guimet museum (arts of Asia, editor’s note) she says, for a” new presentation at the start of the 2023 school year “.
A route for children will be included in each exhibition, in the middle of that taken by adults, says Laurence des Cars, with her four years of experience at the head of the Musée d’Orsay where she has promoted access for young people. public.
On the traffic side, it intends to multiply access to the Louvre, on all sides – instead of a single main entrance – to “rebalance and streamline the visit to the full extent of the building by reactivating the extraordinary Sully side and the square courtyard, neglected by visitors.
And to offer the public the time necessary for their visit, it wishes to “extend the opening hours at the end of the day”.