From the talks with Jacques Chirac who will appoint him president of the Louvre, Henri Loyrette raises the idea of a Louvre in the region, the national aspect of a project which will also have, with the Louvre Abu Dhabi, an international aspect.
Daniel Percheron, president of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais regional council, learns of it through a paragraph in the press.
“In the endless night of the deindustrialization of the mining basin, I dreamed of the Bilbao effect
,” he recalls.
During the Lille 2004 festivities, he manages to meet Henri Loyrette and asks him this question:
“If I proposed the candidacy of Lens, would I be ridiculous?” “No, on the contrary, on the contrary…”
, answers Loyrette with benevolent laconicism.
“This proposal was enlightening.
This new Louvre had to grow in a place without culture.
A Louvre in Aix-en-Provence would not have had the same meaning.
There was such an explosion between these two names of Louvre and Lens, a poor city, devastated by war and crises to which the Louvre was going to provide reparation!”
Henri Loyrette already knows the key words of this new museum.
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Not a provincial Louvre, nor a miniature Louvre, but another Louvre, complementary to the Parisian encyclopedic museum: as transdisciplinary in Lens as it is segmented into departments of the history of art in Paris, as possible to explore in its totality in Lens that it seems unlimited in Paris.
So offering to contextualize its 35,000 objects in a different way, 90% of which were not designed for a museum but for private collectors.
Or two Louvres - three with Abu Dhabi - each offering a different experience of the museum, which invites you to move from one to the other, without falling back on the masterpieces:
"There was no question that Louvre -Lens becomes the outlet for the museum's reserves.
On the contrary, it should exalt its collections”
, says Loyrette.
A dialogue of works
He remembers the story by Charles Péguy, then a young normalien, of a visit to the Louvre, where he experienced the impression of
"promotion of being"
and
"the immediate perception of this long and visible journey of humanity”
.
The brilliant idea of the Galerie du Temps arises: a walk between two hundred masterpieces from the collections, renewed as they go, and where a dialogue between the works is organised.
"A stroll between the masterpieces of humanity unique in the world and free"
, adds Percheron.
There was no question of the Louvre-Lens becoming the outlet for the museum's reserves.
He should on the contrary exalt his collections
Henry Loyrette
For the architecture of this new Louvre, built on a pithead in the shade of the highest slag heaps in Europe, instead of the expected architectural gesture, Loyrette imposed the museum designed by a young agency, Sanaa, which did not not yet received the Pritzker.
The museum is not a palace, but a single-storey glass and aluminum building that reflects the surrounding landscape and blends into it.
The neighboring Bollaert stadium boasts a different style.
Loyrette then Percheron retire.
"I had the feeling that we were losing sight of the fact that we play in the first division of world museums in Lens as in Paris and that we were assigned the social mission of the Louvre"
, says Daniel Percheron.
“A certain number of temporary exhibitions ended up there because it was not possible to show them in Paris whereas they were exhibitions of specialists who did not enter into the editorial line of Lens
, says Henri Loyrette quoting the boxes of Le Brun or the Le Nain brothers.
The Louvre-Lens is made for major exhibitions of civilization, such as those organized on the Renaissance, the century of Rubens or the “Disasters of war”.
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For his part, Daniel Percheron regrets that the Louvre is simply indicated by a small panel on the A1 and has not spread to the region.
“
The territory did not mobilize as it should have.
The Louvre should irrigate the Pas-de-Calais.
We have 250,000 works in the conservation center at the Louvre in Liévin.
Each town hall should make its Louvre, by restoring a work that it would exhibit.
It can come back.
By accompanying
Le Scribe accroupi
in Lens, a work brought back by Mariette who is from Boulogne, Emmanuel Macron is absolutely faithful to the Louvre that we had dreamed of”,
concludes Daniel Percheron.
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