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Grand Louvre
The Grand Louvre was a decade-long project initiated by French President François Mitterrand in 1981 which expanded and remodelled the Louvre – both the building and the museum – by moving the French Finance Ministry, which had been located in the Louvre's northern wing since 1871, to a different location. The centerpiece of the Grand Louvre is the Louvre Pyramid designed by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, which was also the project's most controversial component. The Grand Louvre was substantially completed in the late 1990s, even though its last elements were only finalized in the 2010s.
Following Louis XIV's move to Versailles in the 1660s, the Louvre Palace ceased to be mainly used as a royal palace and became inhabited by artists, civil servants and the occasional royal, as well as hosting various bodies and institutions. Even after the Louvre Museum was first established in 1793, many other activities still existed in the palace. This mixed-use reality was perpetuated in Napoleon III's Louvre expansion, which resulted in the entrenchment of administrative offices in the Louvre's North Wing, from 1871 mainly the Ministry of Finance.
The expansion of the museum's collections, combined with the gradual shift of curatorial practices towards less cluttered displays, meant that the Louvre Museum was increasingly short of space, despite the periodical release of some of its holdings to other museums in Paris. Thus, the pre-Columbian artifacts of the musée américain left in 1887 to the newly created Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro; in 1905 the ethnographic collections of the Musée de Marine were divided between the Trocadéro museum, the National Antiquities Museum and the Chinese Museum (Fontainebleau); the rest of the Musée de Marine followed in the early 1940s, to the Palais de Chaillot; the Louvre's extensive Asian art collections were handed over to the Guimet Museum in 1945; and most of its French artworks created after 1848 (except those which had to remain in the Louvre because of binding bequest provisions) were headed for the Musée d'Orsay by the early 1980s.
Even so, the Louvre Museum was cramped and lacked any space for modern facilities such as reserves, educational spaces, shops, restaurants and cafés, not to mention security screening, cloakrooms or washrooms. Its exterior spaces had also deteriorated from their heyday during the Second French Empire, and had never been remodeled after the destruction of the Tuileries Palace in the 1870s had fundamentally altered the logic of their arrangement. In the central courtyard, the two octagonal gardens were poorly maintained and surrounded by the parking lots for Finance Ministry employees (to the north) and museum staff (to the south). Because of lack of parking space in the vicinity, unsightly tourist buses were permanently stationed along the southern side of the palace.
The natural solution was to relocate the ministry to another site and to repurpose the North Wing for an expanded museum with improved and larger support facilities. This option was advocated in 1950 by Georges Salles, then the head of the French Museum Administration, and subsequently by other experts and curators. But it ran against the considerable power of the Finance Ministry, whose senior bureaucrats had no appetite for abandoning their offices' convenient and highly prestigious Louvre location.
François Mitterrand unexpectedly announced his decision to remove the Finance Ministry from the Louvre and dedicate the entire building to museum use at the end of his first presidential press conference on 24 September 1981. It is probable that the influence of art historian Anne Pingeot, a curator at the Louvre since 1972 and Mitterrand's longstanding, though secret, mistress, played a significant role in the decision, which was also recommended after Mitterrand's election by his high-profile Culture Minister Jack Lang. The project, immediately dubbed Grand Louvre, became the most high-profile of Mitterrand's Grands Projets which also included the Arab World Institute, the Grande Arche, the Opéra Bastille, and later the new site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, as well as the new building for the relocated Finance Ministry in the Paris neighborhood of Bercy.
The project immediately encountered criticism, including on ground of cost, not least from the finance ministry and the powers-that-be it was able to influence, which for that matter included Mitterrand's Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. Meanwhile, on 27 July 1983 Mitterrand announced his decision to entrust the project design to Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, who had acquired fame from successful museum designs such as those for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Gallery of Art's East Wing in Washington DC. Pei's proposed concept of a glass pyramid leading to underground spaces at the center of the Louvre, first designed in late 1983 and presented to the public in early 1984, added to the controversy: ostensibly on esthetic and preservationist grounds, but more substantially as a political proxy for attacks on Mitterrand and his "monarchical" leadership style. The campaign against the pyramid peaked in 1985, with the creation by former Culture Minister Michel Guy of an association dedicated to that fight (association pour le renouveau du Louvre) and the publication of the polemic Paris mystifié: La grande illusion du Grand Louvre by respected scholars Bruno Foucart, Sébastien Loste et Antoine Schnapper, with a preface by celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Mitterrand invested significant political capital into the project, however, and was able to bring it to full completion. To create a sense of irreversibility, finance minister Pierre Bérégovoy moved his office to a temporary location outside of the Louvre in January 1986. Following the trouncing of Mitterrand's Socialist Party at the 1986 legislative election, the new finance minister Édouard Balladur announced the reversal of the decision to leave the Louvre and took up his office there in mid-April. But Balladur did not prevail, as other key members of the government, despite being political opponents of Mitterrand, acknowledged the popularity and relevance of the grand Louvre project, which was actively defended by culture minister François Léotard. A compromise was eventually announced on 29 July 1987, with a ten-year schedule for the project completion. The move of the ministry was again accelerated following Mitterrand's re-election in 1988. On 11 July 1989, Bérégovoy, again finance minister, symbolically returned to Mitterrand the keys of the finance ministry's offices in the Louvre, and the demolition and building works swiftly started in the vacated wing.
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Grand Louvre
The Grand Louvre was a decade-long project initiated by French President François Mitterrand in 1981 which expanded and remodelled the Louvre – both the building and the museum – by moving the French Finance Ministry, which had been located in the Louvre's northern wing since 1871, to a different location. The centerpiece of the Grand Louvre is the Louvre Pyramid designed by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, which was also the project's most controversial component. The Grand Louvre was substantially completed in the late 1990s, even though its last elements were only finalized in the 2010s.
Following Louis XIV's move to Versailles in the 1660s, the Louvre Palace ceased to be mainly used as a royal palace and became inhabited by artists, civil servants and the occasional royal, as well as hosting various bodies and institutions. Even after the Louvre Museum was first established in 1793, many other activities still existed in the palace. This mixed-use reality was perpetuated in Napoleon III's Louvre expansion, which resulted in the entrenchment of administrative offices in the Louvre's North Wing, from 1871 mainly the Ministry of Finance.
The expansion of the museum's collections, combined with the gradual shift of curatorial practices towards less cluttered displays, meant that the Louvre Museum was increasingly short of space, despite the periodical release of some of its holdings to other museums in Paris. Thus, the pre-Columbian artifacts of the musée américain left in 1887 to the newly created Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro; in 1905 the ethnographic collections of the Musée de Marine were divided between the Trocadéro museum, the National Antiquities Museum and the Chinese Museum (Fontainebleau); the rest of the Musée de Marine followed in the early 1940s, to the Palais de Chaillot; the Louvre's extensive Asian art collections were handed over to the Guimet Museum in 1945; and most of its French artworks created after 1848 (except those which had to remain in the Louvre because of binding bequest provisions) were headed for the Musée d'Orsay by the early 1980s.
Even so, the Louvre Museum was cramped and lacked any space for modern facilities such as reserves, educational spaces, shops, restaurants and cafés, not to mention security screening, cloakrooms or washrooms. Its exterior spaces had also deteriorated from their heyday during the Second French Empire, and had never been remodeled after the destruction of the Tuileries Palace in the 1870s had fundamentally altered the logic of their arrangement. In the central courtyard, the two octagonal gardens were poorly maintained and surrounded by the parking lots for Finance Ministry employees (to the north) and museum staff (to the south). Because of lack of parking space in the vicinity, unsightly tourist buses were permanently stationed along the southern side of the palace.
The natural solution was to relocate the ministry to another site and to repurpose the North Wing for an expanded museum with improved and larger support facilities. This option was advocated in 1950 by Georges Salles, then the head of the French Museum Administration, and subsequently by other experts and curators. But it ran against the considerable power of the Finance Ministry, whose senior bureaucrats had no appetite for abandoning their offices' convenient and highly prestigious Louvre location.
François Mitterrand unexpectedly announced his decision to remove the Finance Ministry from the Louvre and dedicate the entire building to museum use at the end of his first presidential press conference on 24 September 1981. It is probable that the influence of art historian Anne Pingeot, a curator at the Louvre since 1972 and Mitterrand's longstanding, though secret, mistress, played a significant role in the decision, which was also recommended after Mitterrand's election by his high-profile Culture Minister Jack Lang. The project, immediately dubbed Grand Louvre, became the most high-profile of Mitterrand's Grands Projets which also included the Arab World Institute, the Grande Arche, the Opéra Bastille, and later the new site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, as well as the new building for the relocated Finance Ministry in the Paris neighborhood of Bercy.
The project immediately encountered criticism, including on ground of cost, not least from the finance ministry and the powers-that-be it was able to influence, which for that matter included Mitterrand's Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. Meanwhile, on 27 July 1983 Mitterrand announced his decision to entrust the project design to Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, who had acquired fame from successful museum designs such as those for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Gallery of Art's East Wing in Washington DC. Pei's proposed concept of a glass pyramid leading to underground spaces at the center of the Louvre, first designed in late 1983 and presented to the public in early 1984, added to the controversy: ostensibly on esthetic and preservationist grounds, but more substantially as a political proxy for attacks on Mitterrand and his "monarchical" leadership style. The campaign against the pyramid peaked in 1985, with the creation by former Culture Minister Michel Guy of an association dedicated to that fight (association pour le renouveau du Louvre) and the publication of the polemic Paris mystifié: La grande illusion du Grand Louvre by respected scholars Bruno Foucart, Sébastien Loste et Antoine Schnapper, with a preface by celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Mitterrand invested significant political capital into the project, however, and was able to bring it to full completion. To create a sense of irreversibility, finance minister Pierre Bérégovoy moved his office to a temporary location outside of the Louvre in January 1986. Following the trouncing of Mitterrand's Socialist Party at the 1986 legislative election, the new finance minister Édouard Balladur announced the reversal of the decision to leave the Louvre and took up his office there in mid-April. But Balladur did not prevail, as other key members of the government, despite being political opponents of Mitterrand, acknowledged the popularity and relevance of the grand Louvre project, which was actively defended by culture minister François Léotard. A compromise was eventually announced on 29 July 1987, with a ten-year schedule for the project completion. The move of the ministry was again accelerated following Mitterrand's re-election in 1988. On 11 July 1989, Bérégovoy, again finance minister, symbolically returned to Mitterrand the keys of the finance ministry's offices in the Louvre, and the demolition and building works swiftly started in the vacated wing.