-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2002/0118/1342038507FR18LOUVRE.
html
}}}>Begin
The Louvre lacks a comprehensive inventory
>From Lara Marlowe, in Paris
These alarming conclusions are contained in a 10-page segment of the
annual report which the Cour des Comptes will send to President
Jacques Chirac at the end of this month.
Much of its contents were leaked to Le Figaro yesterday. In its
editorial, the right-wing newspaper suggested the Louvre has become
"a fantastical cultural construction, maintained by national pride
and the vanity of politicians". The ill-functioning museum is "a
symptom of the French illness," the editorialist Armel le Héliot
wrote. "We think big, very big. We invest millions of francs . . . in
pharaonic projects to show off the building and its precious
collections."
The writer Michel Braudeau has described the Louvre, with its 60,000
square metres of floor space, as "this immense splendour of worked
stone, whose galleries and colonnades unfold along the edge of a slow
river". It beca
me the site of a royal palace during the Crusades, and was restored as the "Grand
Louvre" during Francois Mitterrand's 14-year rule. Mitterrand wrested the Napoleon
wing from the Ministry of Finance and installed a glass
pyramid designed by I.M. Pei in the main courtyard.
The museum's outgoing director, Mr Pierre Rosenberg, and his successor, Mr Henri
Loyrette, may welcome the report. For it identifies their single greatest problem: 60
per cent of the Louvre's 1,900 employees do not fall u
nder their authority. As civil servants employed by the otherwise occupied Ministry of
Culture, curators, security guards and receptionists do what they want to.
Because of strikes related to negotiations enacting a 35-hour working week, and an
unwritten rule that says employees in contact with the public are entitled to a
half-hour break for every half-hour they work - not counti
ng meal times - more than a quarter of the museum was closed to visitors at any given
time last year. "You want to see Vermeer or Rembrandt?" Le Figaro noted. "Don't show
up on Monday or Saturday! You want to see oriental
antiquities? Don't venture there on Friday or Sunday!"
To make matters worse for the Louvre's director, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux
creamed off €9.15 million of the museum's earnings last year, to redistribute it -
égalité oblige - to poorer museums elsewhere in France.
Some of this was returned to the Louvre in the form of acquisitions, publications,
exhibitions and guided tours, but the two parties disagree on the amount.
Anecdotes in the auditors' report show the devastating effects on security. The
Louvre's director fired the chief of security when a masterpiece by the 19th-century
painter Jean Baptiste Camille Corot was stolen in broad
daylight in May 1998. It took the Ministry of Culture seven months to confirm the
dismissal, during which the fallen security chief received salary and bonuses. He then
continued inhabiting an apartment inside the Louvre,
rent-free, until October 2000.
This is not the first time the Louvre has seen chaos. Henri IV began
lodging painters there at the end of the 16th century. By the reign
of Louis XV, careless artists had started countless fire and floods
in the palace. Its courtyards were filled with shops, bars and
prostitutes. When Napoleon decided to make the Louvre a showcase for
the art he pillaged all over Europe, it took him 15 years to clean
the place up.
© The Irish Times © None © None
End<{{{
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