What vision for the next ten years of the Louvre-Lens?
The new president of the public establishment, who watched over the creation of the Louvre Abu Dhabi when the Louvre-Lens was designed, sets out her priorities for this establishment.
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LE FIGARO.
- How would you assess the Lens museum today?
Laurence DESCARS.
-
I must salute the work of Marie Lavandier, who has been directing it since 2016. She was able to understand all the issues and the DNA of this project: a different Louvre in a particular place, Hauts-de-France, and which primarily speaks to this territory.
The local bet has already been won thanks to the strong subjects and the overall cultural program which Marie Lavandier has taken on with great conviction, a political vision of the museum, in the noble sense of the term, and a proactive action aimed at all audiences, especially young people.
Two directions to which I fully subscribe.
How would you like to see it evolve?
I want to stay in the spirit of a laboratory museum thought up by Henri Loyrette when he simultaneously initiated the Louvre-Lens and the Louvre Abu Dhabi in order to be able to reinvent the universal promise of the Louvre.
The Louvre is a large discontinuous encyclopedia for which it is constantly necessary to create links and cross-references between the different chapters so that it is more intelligible.
Lens and Abu Dhabi are part of this same desire, which was originally very much attacked in terms of relevance and legitimacy, but which we study today with two methods and two different scales, one and the other installed in masterpieces by architects whose vision after ten years remains powerful.
I wanted to contribute to rekindling the flame of the Louvre-Lens with a rather profound renewal of loans from the Galerie du Temps and two major exhibitions sponsored by the Louvre.
One on Rome and the other on Egypt
Laurence des Cars
However, nothing is taken for granted when we are concerned with the public and transmission.
The Covid crisis has shown that the public is coming back with new desires, after having frequented digital media a lot.
I wanted to contribute to rekindling the flame of the Louvre-Lens with a rather profound renewal of loans from the Galerie du Temps and two major exhibitions sponsored by the Louvre.
One on Rome and the other on Egypt.
The one-year loan of the
Crouching Scribe
, one of the Louvre's finest icons, renews the Louvre's commitment to the Louvre-Lens.
I thought about it very quickly because the Louvre is not just a large painting museum and Marie Lavandier also wanted to get out of “all painting”.
Le
Scribe
will therefore be a great ambassador for 2022.
The Galerie du Temps is unique in the world.
How to highlight it?
To renew the interest of the public and keep the DNA of the Louvre-Lens, we are going to widen its perimeter.
The Quai Branly, in conjunction with the Pavillon des Sessions, lent a few works.
Other national museums will lend, Orsay and the Center Pompidou, which have agreed to be present in the adventure in order to write a more complete history.
The Galerie du Temps is a veritable cultural manifesto that brings the works down to human height, on a fair scale that allows the museum to be appropriated and gives the visitor a unique feeling of freedom and choice.
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These new loans will make it possible to offer the diversity of beauty and artistic expression even more forcefully.
The Louvre is at the heart of a continuum of artistic creation.
The heart of the gallery will remain that of the Louvre collections, but the openness to the world and the history of art will be more complete.
The choice of works that will enter the gallery, the way in which they will meet and participate in the beauty of this story and this great momentum of crossing time is a work of very, very high fashion.
And the exhibits?
I want something methodologically different.
I wanted to put the College of Curators at the Louvre back at the center of this work: the departments of the Louvre will be closer and at the heart of the development of Louvre-Lens and Louvre Abu Dhabi.
It must work like a laboratory: exchanges, broader reflection will bring out points of contact from which exhibition subjects will arise.
The lesson of the Louvre-Lens and the Louvre Abu Dhabi must be meditated here, and the three places must resonate.
The open-ended vision is extremely stimulating and in tune with our times and therefore with the public curious about this connection.
Going towards more multidisciplinary collections is essential: it is necessary to present together paintings, sculptures, archaeological objects or works of art.
The era is less in the search for an absolute than in a thirst for the transversal.
The enlargement of the public remains a big project?
The Louvre-Lens is not well enough known.
Many French people, starting with Ile-de-France residents, have not yet been there.
It is still, ten years after its opening, a place that deserves to be discovered.
Likewise, we would like more people from Northern Europe to come.
There is a whole work of communication to be done by recalling the strength, the purpose, the originality of the dynamics of the place.
The great bet of the Louvre-Lens is to offer a feeling of freedom, sharing and decomplexing the relationship with the museum.
The European public can relate to this proposal for a very contemporary museum.
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