Word: bazin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...unusual link between popular music and great art, wrote: "You're the top, you're the Louvre Museum." While France is considerably less than she was 24 years ago, the Louvre is still the top. Last January, over lunch in Manhattan with visiting Louvre Chief Curator Germain Bazin, TIME editors began laying the groundwork for a comprehensive report on the Louvre and its great collection, to be keyed to a two-volume study of the museum being published this year. Photographer Eric Schaal was sent from Switzerland to take color photos of the Louvre masterworks, found himself...
Providing a handy anthology of the Louvre's highlights and recording the epic history behind its vast collection have long been pet projects of Art Scholar Germain Bazin, 50, chief curator of the Louvre. In his profusely illustrated The Louvre (323 pp.; Abrams; $7.50), published last week in the U.S., Curator Bazin covers 341 key paintings from the 13th to the 19th century. Next September the record will be brought up to date with the publication of his book on the impressionists. Together the volumes will be a clear case for Bazin's claim that the Louvre "contains...
Louverie or Lower? Bazin makes the dramatic history of how the roof came into being almost as interesting as the works housed beneath it. The original Louvre may go back to the 5th century. Etymologists speculate that the name may come from louverie (a meeting place of wolf hunters), or from a leper colony, or from a Saxon fortress (lower). Still to be seen in the present foundations are remains of the mighty fortress that King Philip Augustus erected on the site about 1190. But the Louvre of today owes its origins to France's great Renaissance prince...
Strolling over the Louvre's polished parquet floors, Bazin likes to philosophize on two great portraits. Titian's Francis I (who seems to be examining the jewel of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa) and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV (loftily surveying the great expanse of the 300-yard-long Grande Galerie). Both have a right to their proprietary air. Bazin feels, since, along with Napoleon, they are among the Louvre's greatest benefactors...
...Curator Bazin utters a proud Frenchman's protest against comparing Napoleon's vacuum-cleaner sweep of European art with the wholesale robbery by Hitler and Goring. Napoleon, Bazin insists, was motivated by the lofty ideal of creating a new and universal European culture, and was within the ethics of his time. But after Waterloo, Napoleon's conquerors saw Napoleon's operation uplift in another light, stripped the Louvre of 5,233 precious art objects, left little more than 100 canvases and 800 drawings...