“Overwhelming” was how I described my first visit to the Musée du Louvre more than twenty years ago; “ordeal” was the word used by its director last week when considering the contemporary experience. Laurence des Cars was raising concerns over inadequate facilities, risks to the collection and the constant pressure of numbers, and having spent many hours within the institution’s walls over the last two decades I can’t disagree. Today, in response, President Emmanuel Macron has announced plans for an expanded, modernised building with a special (apparently underground) room for the Mona Lisa, a new entrance and higher ticket prices for non-EU citizens to help pay for it all.
The largest and most visited art museum in the world, which now welcomes more than double the number of people it was designed for just a generation ago, in many ways the Louvre is Paris. Its art, its history and even its plan have reflected but also shaped the city over nine centuries, from Philip II’s mediaeval castle via the Axe historique of the Renaissance palace to the pyramid that signalled a new millennium. But that very longevity has created the first of many problems for anyone undertaking what one now calls the visitor journey.
The entire Louvre site is tightly constrained. To the south, cars hammering along Quai François Mitterrand cut across the path of anyone approaching by bridge, creating a poor first impression. To the west, the viciously-trafficked Place de la Concorde plus the fortress-like ramparts protecting the Tuileries gardens effectively do the same even if you know the museum is there. To the north, Rue de Rivoli is lined with cheap eateries and souvenir shops and its mean pavements have always felt dark in the shadow of the Louvre’s towering, windowless walls. In my view, making this street a shared surface would give pedestrians room, reduce vehicular traffic and aid rehabilitation of the buildings opposite, a process that should begin later this year with the opening of Fondation Cartier’s vast contemporary art space. Other tenants more sympathetic to the Louvre are sorely needed, though, and in mentioning redevelopment of the immediate neighbourhood today Macron appears to agree.
The museum’s street entrances are hard to find and unwelcoming. There are only three in a perimeter that runs for a kilometre or more, often it’s two due to seemingly randomised closures and one is primarily for the underground shopping mall anyway – a case of entry through the gift shop, perhaps. All are quite narrow for the scale of the building. The announcement of a new entrance on the eastern side of the complex through which the World’s Most Famous Painting will be accessed thus makes perfect sense, but there’s surely room too for the kind of work done in London recently to widen existing portals and make them feel more inviting.
Once you do make it as far as the main courtyard you will find the pyramid entrance continues to attract queues even though it was modified a few years ago to reduce congestion. Peter Rice’s engineering still looks sharp, however, and there can be few visitors who haven’t wanted to ride on the space-age piston elevator, meant for the mobility-impaired, rather than the escalators. Whichever way you use to descent, it’s in the cavernous space below that the next set of tribulations occur.
The Zen-like elegance of the museum’s orientation hall, readily apparent in photographs of its opening, is now a distant memory. Ioh Ming Pei’s architecture remains sublime – what looks like creamy stone is actually concrete, the most exquisite you have ever seen – but is obscured by an accumulated overlay of screens, posters and Tensa barriers. The purpose-built book and gift shop, arranged over two floors, was closed and repurposed some years ago and as des Cars says, the food and beverage provision is weak and has always struggled to support the sheer numbers needing refreshment. Noise and confusion abound, and there is almost nowhere to sit – Pei’s few benches are beautiful but always occupied. After buying your ticket and having it checked, more escalator trips are then needed since the galleries are actually two floors higher, back at street level.
That grates, but not as much as the Louvre’s invisible ground floor. There are so many steps, changes of levels, ramps and dog-leg corridors on what the museum maddeningly maintains is a single floor called Level 0 that it’s incredibly difficult to work out where, exactly, you are in relation to what you want to see and it’s also of course the one storey that every visitor has to use, increasing the stress. Signage has never been good, the rather weak logo (which always reminds me of an eighties album cover) is unchanged and I’ve always found it strange that the same, inadequate map has been handed out to visitors the entire time I have been using the museum. One other idea that occurs to me is allowing public access to the superb Cour Lefuel, the only internal courtyard left open to the sky. Its extravagant staircase was once used by horses and takes the form of a horseshoe itself, and children would I’m sure enjoy the four beasts that decorate its flights even as their parents relax with a drink.
Clearly there are and will always be pinch points around famous, small or otherwise tricky-to-view works but once you are finally in the galleries, it is in fact possible to lose oneself in the art within many runs of rooms with almost no-one else present. It’s time to relax.
Unfortunately when it comes to taking a comfort break des Cars has another good point – there are astonishingly few toilets within these circuits, whose very length also militates against retracing your steps. It is to be hoped that space can be recovered from back-of-house areas to address the first issue, but the very nature of the Louvre’s layout combined with the little-appreciated fact that it contains other institutions such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs must militate against adding any short cuts.
It’s quite a list of difficulties, though charging Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians and Brits more to experience the solutions is a canny move.
All those years ago I also described the Louvre as a gallery plus a museum added to a shopping centre and crossed with an airport; that’s a fair representation of the challenge faced by Macron, des Cars, their teams and the chosen designers over the next few years.
I wish all involved bon chance.
Comments