Restored and rebuilt to face the 21st Century, one of the world’s great museums, the Louvre, celebrates its 200th birthday Thursday with the inauguration of a vast, three-story wing of artistic treasures, ushering space, light and modernity into its halls.
The Richelieu Wing, which for nearly a century housed the dim and dated offices of the French Finance Ministry, has been transformed by American architect I.M. Pei of New York into an area that doubles the museum’s exhibition space. Works of art that were previously buried in reserves or hidden in badly lit corridors, including dazzling French sculptures, Islamic art and 17th Century European painting, are now displayed in colorful new surroundings.
The billion-dollar project represents the crown jewel of French President Francois Mitterrand’s monumental Great Works undertakings and marks more than a decade of institutional transformation at the Louvre.
Thursday’s inauguration comes 200 years-to the day-since the museum opened.
At a news conference Wednesday, Pei-handpicked by Mitterrand to head the project-said, “The responsibility was a very great one. We had to be sure we were right-and are right.”
The Richelieu Wing’s 165 rooms and three covered courts represent a most spectacular transformation. The wing opens onto spacious, glass-enclosed courtyards studded with restored statues, like a pair of snorting, pawing horses in Carrera marble, made for Louis XIV’s Marly chateau in the 17th Century.
A section on Oriental art features the 30-ton, 12-foot Assyrian bulls of Khorsabad, from a 7th Century Assyrian palace. The human-headed, winged bulls were previously exhibited in low-ceilinged, dim surroundings. A new section on Islamic art displays many treasures previously held in reserves.
But perhaps the boldest of Pei’s transformations is the colorful space renovated for European paintings. A roomful of masterpieces by the painter Rubens is framed in bright aqua. The next series of rooms with works by painters such as Durer, Holbein and Bruegel have lime- or plum-colored walls.
On the next floor down, French Renaissance paintings are exhibited on deep teal and burgundy walls.
“We have changed the color (of the walls) from generation to generation,” said Michel Laclotte, president of the Louvre, explaining that Pei wanted more neutral colors and the curators wanted brighter backgrounds.
But he added that they were able to compromise. “We thought there would be more problems between the curators and the architects. Both are usually psychopaths,” he said.
The enormous undertaking at the Louvre, one of the Great Works projects of Mitterrand’s presidency that also includes the Arche de la Defense, the Opera Bastille and a four-towered national library, was considered the most essential of them all.
The museum, a symbol around the world of French cultural wealth, was long overdue for a face lift, battered by time and the wear of 5 million visitors a year.
The project will be completed in 1997. An underground complex linked to the Louvre galleries beneath the Place du Carrousel houses a vast shopping, cultural and parking area. A large section houses exhibition halls that will be used for Paris’ seasonal fashion shows.