Bust of Marie-Antoinette by Sèvres, after Louis-Simon Boizot, 1782. Porcelain; 15 ¾ inches tall. Musée du Louvre. On view in "Decorative Arts of The Kings.”
:In mid-September, when some art-world elite were jetting off to Paris for the Biennale des Antiquaires, curators at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and their colleagues from the Musée du Louvre in Paris were preparing for one of the most notable cultural exchanges since France presented the United States with the Statue of Liberty in 1885.
Called "Louvre Atlanta," the partnership forged by High Museum director Michael E. Shapiro and his counterpart, Henri Loyrette, president and director of the Louvre, debuted on October 14 in the High Museum's new 10,000-square-foot Anne Cox Chambers Wing. The galleries are part of the $170 million Woodruff Arts Center expansion, designed by Genoa-based Renzo Piano Building Workshop and completed in November 2005.
"Louvre Atlanta" is something of a coup for the High Museum, which was founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association and has a diverse collection of 11,000 works of art. By contrast, the Louvre, the world's largest museum-palace complex, has dominated its picturesque site along the Seine since the Twelfth Century. Originally a fortress, it became a museum in 1793. The Louvre's 35,000-object collection — ranging from antiquities and Islamic art to Western sculpture, decorative arts, paintings, prints and drawings — attracts more than seven million visitors annually, many of them Americans seeking a glimpse of Da Vinci's "La Giaconda," better known as the "Mona Lisa," or the ancient marbles "Winged Victory of Samothrace" and "Venus de Milo."
"Saint Matthew and The Angel” by Rembrandt, 1661. Oil on canvas; 37 ¾ by 31 7/8 inches. Musée du Louvre. On view in "Kings as Collectors.”
The "Louvre Atlanta" partnership grew out of a longstanding friendship between Shapiro and Loyrette, two like-minded directors, both new to their jobs. Shapiro, an expert in Nineteenth Century painting and sculpture, assumed his post in 2000, having joined the High Museum as a curator in 1995. Head of the Louvre since 2001, Loyrette is a historian of Nineteenth Century French art who previously directed Paris's acclaimed Musée d'Orsay. The men previously worked together on "Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums" and "Paris in The Age of Impressionism: Masterworks from the Musée d'Orsay," at the High Museum in 1999 and 2002. Substantial credit for the development and execution of "Louvre Atlanta" goes to the High Museum's chief curator, David Brenneman, and Olivier Meslay, the Louvre's curator of British, Spanish and American Art.
"In 'Louvre Atlanta,' we wanted to explore a cross-section of the Louvre's collection, and do it over a three-year period," explains Brenneman, previously assistant curator of paintings at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn. "In one of our early meetings, Olivier Meslay proposed looking at the history of the Louvre. With that idea, we began thinking about dividing that history into three periods, each covering very broad themes."
