The new president of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars, in March 2021 at the Musée d'Orsay, an institution that she had run since 2017.ALAIN JOCARD / AFP
The art historian Laurence des Cars (Antony, France, 54 years old) was appointed this Wednesday the new president of the Louvre Museum, becoming the first woman to hold the position since the museum was founded in 1793. Des Cars will head the gallery more visited in the world, which surpassed the record of 10 million tickets sold in 2019. It will do so with a desire to open up to new audiences and themes similar to those it has developed in recent years at the Musée d'Orsay, an institution that has been running since 2017. His project, entitled
Louvre 2030
, with which he proposes to "open up to the world of today talking about the past", he convinced the Ministry of Culture and Elysium himself, on which the proposal of those responsible for the largest French museums, such as the Louvre, the Orsay Museum, depends directly. the Pompidou Center and the Palace of Versailles.
“The Louvre can be fully contemporary. We need perspective, we come out of a crisis that destabilizes us. We live in an exciting but complicated time, ”Des Cars said this Wednesday in his first interview after the appointment, on France Inter radio. “The museum is the sounding board of society. He has always reflected the world around him. It is not only a place of conservation, but also of transmission. To do this, you have to listen to the public and their different sensibilities, "said Des Cars, who believes that the Louvre has" a lot to say "to young people. "They will be at the center of my concerns as president," he added.
Trained at the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre, a prestigious nursery for art curators in France, Des Cars began her career at the Musée d'Orsay in 1994, where she began by making an inventory of the frames that created dust in her archives. This specialist in the art of the 19th and early 20th centuries was quick to take on larger projects: in 1996, she orchestrated the entry of
The Origin of the World
, the controversial painting by Courbet, in the halls of the institution, where he took charge of exhibitions dedicated to Édouard Vuillard, Thomas Eakins and Edward Burne-Jones, among other nineteenth-century painters. She remained at the Musée d'Orsay until 2007, when she was appointed scientific director of the France Muséums agency, in charge of the development of the Abu Dhabi Louvre project and the acquisition of its collection in the years prior to its inauguration. Later, she directed the Musée de l'Orangerie between 2014 and 2017, when she returned to the Musée d'Orsay as its head. There he has piloted a program that is respectful of the solemnity of the center, but also innovative, with projects by contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin and Julian Schnabel.
Des Cars, a woman with a hoarse voice and a scathing humor hidden behind exquisite forms, descends from an aristocratic family in which intellectuals abound, but has become unmarked in the French art world with a discourse that questions certain privileges and social hierarchies. For example, his exhibition
The Black Model
, which triumphed at the Musée d'Orsay in 2019, directed a critical look at the representation of men and women of color in the art of recent centuries. “The institutions are apprehensive, they are afraid of instability. When I announced that exhibition, many believed that I was completely crazy, that I was going to endanger the museum, ”she recounted in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2019 regarding an exhibition that was previously rejected by MoMA and the Metropolitan of New York. “Museums cannot be an isolated place, dedicated only to tourism or aesthetic contemplation. They must deal with issues that are at the heart of today's society, seriously and without opportunism, but also without being afraid of being political ”. Within the framework of these shows, he changed the names of the works with racist titles, such as
Portrait of Madeleine
- formerly called
Portrait d'une négresse, a
pejorative term in current French -, become an icon since Beyoncé gave him a leading role in her video recorded at the Louvre in 2018.
At the edge of collapse
The new president of the Louvre will succeed, from September, Jean-Luc Martinez, who says goodbye to the institution after eight years as its head.
He aspired to continue with a third term, but the Elysee, attentive to renewal and also to parity, preferred the profile of Des Cars.
Martinez leaves the Louvre after having organized lavish retrospectives dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer or Delacroix, which have already gone down in the museum's history, and taken important measures to improve access and the quality of the visit.
But also with crowded theaters and on the brink of collapse, before the pandemic ended the era of
blockbusters.
museum (large exhibitions that are a hit at the box office), and excessively dependent on tourism, which in 2019 accounted for 75% of their visits.
Among the challenges of Des Cars is the need to readjust these flows and to overcome the financial disaster of 2020, which will undoubtedly be repeated this year: the museum has just reopened after six months of closure. Des Cars, who this Wednesday refused to designate his favorite work of the museum that he will now direct, did advance that he will not accept that his jewel in the crown leaves its rooms, after speculation in recent years. “La Gioconda is a very fragile work, all conservatives know it. Furthermore, that is one of the wonders of going to a museum: being able to discover works that one knows will not move from there ”, he concluded.