First Visit to the Louvre - A Museum Director's Reflection

Museum and exhibit reviews are among the things I want to include in this blog of my ideas related to cultural heritage, museums and public history. Perhaps it is fitting that the first museum to consider is the Louvre. I visited it Friday after walking the length of the Champs Elysée from the Arche de Triomphe. It was a gorgeous day, cool enough to wear a jacket, warm enough to sit outside. Of course, I had to see the Louvre while in Paris! But, as I apply metacognition in the reflection on the visit, I am amused about how much what I noticed, wondered and pondered was uniquely informed by my particular background, experiences and niche knowledge banks.

The year the Louvre opened, 1793, is also the year that Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette lost their heads to the French Revolution. It is the year I chose to focus the stories we told at the Louis (and Marie) Bolduc House when I served as the director of that site. How primitive a visiting Frenchman would have found the poteaux sur soles and en terre of the pro-monarchy French American town just west of the Mississippi River in La Haute Louisianne compared to the imposing doors, arches, windows and statuary of the Louvre! How magnificent are its edifices, the arch, the sculptures and the plaza!

Between the neatly trimmed hedges of the Jardin des Tuilleries and the pyramid, the ultimate participatory installation was freely and fully being experienced by hundreds of visitors speaking dozens of languages each little group isolated in their own imaginations and expectations. Concrete blocks insisted wordlessly that visitors pose as stone statues, some to be captured by an external lens, others rendered stationary by the scepter of a selfie-stick.

Three gendarmes, wearing berets, and another lurking in the shadows dressed in camouflage, all toting machine guns, were as still as hidden statues but out of range of the tourists’ cameras.

At the pyramid two lines formed – if you have a ticket, you were directed to the left. Sans ticket, to the right. Both lines led through a metal detector. Had it been raining, the glass pyramid would have sheltered us in our waiting to ride down the escalator to the large indoor plaza.

At last signs led to what every museum director knows is more popular than any Mona Lisa – toilets. I joined that line- earlier a public WC required 1 euro and, besides, I had just watched two men enter the unisex space- so I was willing and it was necessary that I queue yet again in this line. Before I reached the door, at least 40 Chinese people had gathered around the banner of their tour guide. I heard French, Italian and Spanish complaints about queuing while I stood in that line that lasted at least 20 minutes. Once inside the room, another 20 or more women stood between me and a stall. A black woman was cleaning the stalls which reduced the number of available privies by half. I found myself thinking about this museum director’s budget and how large a line item, within the visitor services department, there must be for toilet paper, plumbing and janitorial staff. An older man leading a blind woman, obviously his wife, cut through the entire line through the door to the front when I was the third in line. Everyone seemed surprised, most seemed tolerant, no one protested, except two loud women shouting in American English – “Hey, there’s a line here!”- who were soon hushed by the majority more patient, passive empaths.

How to get a ticket was my next challenge, solved for 15 euros – good for two days but I am leaving in the morning so c’est ça. Then another line for the café. The “Classique” option allowed me to purchase a large piece of pizza, a bottle of water and a chocolate cream filled chocolate éclair – who can resist selecting a chocolate éclair for dessert in France – not me. I did want to sit, or at least to put my bag down while I ate but this was not to be. About four small tables were placed opposite the queue for the café. They were all in use. The seats, of which one or two were open, are wooden box benches, highly polished, too high for me to sit on because I am too short, too slippery for me to stay sitting on once I had jumped up and back, too carved – seat sloping- for me to stand next too and perch my food on… The garbage containers were mere frames holding transparent plastic bags – more gun wielding gendarmes – I guessed the garbage container frames were to prevent anyone from hiding a bomb. Once again, toggling my experience writing budgets for a very small museum with my visit to the Louvre where more people stood in the queues on this one day than would visit my museum in a year, I couldn’t help thinking that, even with franchising the concessions to an outside vendor, the payroll just for visitor services and security has to be immense. Who else is thinking about budgets and payrolls at the Louvre?!

I went to an exhibition of fifteenth and sixteenth century French art from the low countries that had opened just two days earlier and that was quite crowded. No cell phones, no cameras, no smoking in this exhibition. Young women in black skirts and jackets, not identified as, but obviously, museum staff stalked around or sat briefly on the only chairs in the various rooms. As usual for an art museum, the interpretive panels gave information about each piece – who made it, when, what its title is and where it was originally displayed. Larger text panels connected sections of the exhibit to advancements or techniques or themes in art history. I scanned the panels, disappointed as I usually am at an art museum not to see information about the inspiration behind the painting, not to be able to connect image to story without already knowing it. The insider information and jargon that is of use to an art student does not speak meaningfully to me. It is a language I do not share in any tongue. However, I enjoyed the exhibit because, in my mind I was using the art as documents to develop a Living History exhibit. Even the tapestries could guide my choices of fabric, color, costume. So many of the people wore a cloth kind of Mary Jane shoe – colored and drab. The sculptured women wore pockets as did my interpreters at the Bolduc House Museum but there was a delightful variety of pockets worn by these marble girls that could expand our repertoire IF we could find later contemporary images to validate that variety continued over time. 

Speaking of women, very few were portrayed at all. What is with the demurely covered shy, modest looking-away young women with young breasts exposed, nipples erect? And, what is with the several images of Bathsheba shown fully naked, not in the privacy of her roof-top tub, but in the city square, supposedly receiving a message from King David? So much for keeping a bishop’s focus on the Lord when his illuminated prayer book is x-rated! What else did I notice – dogs wearing collars, only one black man portrayed in the entire exhibit – he was one of the magi in one of the paintings. The word Beauvais stitched into a tapestry to identify the cathedral of that town whose name crept into and remains in the genealogy and phone books of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. The mix of artistic medium – glass, cloth, parchment, canvass. The realism of the backgrounds and subjects – even when the impaled prey is a dragon or when some martyr lies, calm, not sweating and unfettered, on an iron bed beneath which coals glow red. It makes me think of Browning’s poem, Fra Lippo Lippi, in which the good monk-painter carps against the bishop who wants him to paint a person’s spirit but not his flesh:

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,              

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men — 

Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . . no, it's not . . .

It's vapor done up like a new-born babe — 

(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)

It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul!

Give us no more of body than shows soul! 

(Browning, R. Fra Lippo Lippi).

I wondered, like every museologist, what a person would miss if they explored this exhibit via a computer, digitally. A lot would be missed such as the textures in the paper acting like capillaries blurring sepia ink; the translucence of pencil marks; shadow images from the other side of the paper or parchment. Digital images would distort a viewer’s appreciation of the limitations and the artists’ mastery of the scale of the pieces – the tiny details in the miniatures, the amazing scope conveyed by tapestries that must measure 8 x 24 feet. The computer would alleviate the requirement to peer closely at a faded page or to back up to be able to take in the whole image. I found myself looking for story and overwhelmed at the vast array of unexplained visual stories that went on from room to room. I discovered that I think about and value this kind of art as visual documents from which to inform living history – what does the bread look like; how is the hair arranged; what supplies would the artist have carried into the field or studio; did that shirt have smocking at the neck – is that what held the tiny pleats in place? I wanted to sit down but there was no place to sit. The exhibit moved us visitors through as if we were in a maze. When we got to the end, the exit was not obvious until we turned the sharp corner to find a kiosk where postcards and audio tour devices were being sold.

I tried to use another kiosk to recharge my cell phone. It was ingenious, really. Why haven’t I seen one of these machines in the US? Every museum could make money from having one. Scan your debit card, pay 50 euros, and a little compartment opens with three different charge plugs including the one I needed for my I-phone. Plug in the phone, close the little door. Payment accepted. Voila, the screen says the phone is charged and the little door opens again. It took my money but, in spite of its assertion, no additional charge showed on my phone. Alas. 

So, how do I report on my visit to the Louvre? I am glad to be able to say that I have seen a piece of it. That exhibit was enough for my tired feet, given the crowd and the distance I had to walk to return to my hotel. I discovered more about myself and how my particular experience as the director of a much smaller, not-art museum guided my way through this iconic, first modern western museum. It makes me think of how I prepared my children when they were younger than most visitors to the St. Louis Art Museum by setting a challenge – today, we are going to look for dogs; on the next visit we will look for people playing games... The challenge became enough of a focus for the children to engage with the art. After we got home I always asked each child to tell which their favorite piece of art was and to draw it from memory. So, in compliance to that prompt, I have written my memory here. If I were to draw my favorite piece, it would be the brightly colored margin of a prayer book where the artist painted realistic flowers at about 100% scale up the side of the page, complete with a caterpillar creeping towards the opening bud and another bug hovering over a lower blossom.

c. 2017 by Lesley Barker