Word: mitterrand
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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President Francois Mitterrand's likeness will probably never grace a ceiling. But what he shares with the Emperor is the French monarchical itch to build upon the nation's patrimony. His Grand Louvre renovation, launched in 1981, was once attacked as an exercise in Socialist self-aggrandizement. Today the project is described by Jacques Toubon, the new Gaullist Minister of Culture, as "a historic and cultural space without comparison in the world...
About their own culture, all Frenchmen are hyperbolists. But in this case, Toubon might be right. For when Mitterrand opened the newly rebuilt Richelieu wing last week, he vastly expanded the world's most famous museum and, for the first time in the palace's 447-year history, allowed the Louvre to be dedicated entirely to its extraordinary art collections. With its 231,400 sq. ft. of floor space, the three-story Richelieu wing will double the Louvre's display areas, allowing its curators to pull more than 4,000 works out of the reserves and put a total...
Every stage of the Grand Louvre renovation has had its controversy, and this one is no exception. When in 1989 Mitterrand first unveiled architect I.M. Pei's modernistic glass pyramid in the the museum's vast central courtyard, the work brought accusations of aesthetic heresy. This time Pei has offended some observers by combining the museum with an underground shopping gallery that includes 13 fast-food counters and 60 boutiques, ranging from Lalique crystal to Esprit sportswear and a Virgin Records Megastore. The new commercial space is elegant and features at its center an inverted Pei pyramid, which echoes...
...That afternoon the switchboard at George Washington logged 250 calls from the press. By the next day more calls and faxes were flooding in from as far away as Spain, Sweden, South Africa and Australia. A spokesman for the Japan Medical Association found the experiment "unthinkable." French President Francois Mitterrand pronounced himself "horrified." The Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano warned in a front-page editorial that such procedures could lead humanity down "a tunnel of madness...
...Helmut Kohl isn't making any GATT demands that U.S. theaters show a fixed percentage of Wim Wenders movies, and Francois Mitterrand, mercifully, has not asked Clinton for a Godard quota. But for TV the Europeans have drawn a line in the sand: the E.C. now requires that 50% of each nation's programming be produced in the E.C. -- and the French, being French, go further, requiring that 40% of their TV shows be produced in France. Still, the glossy American product flutters in, and prevails. Beverly Hills, 90210 is wildly popular all over the Mediterranean; in South Africa, Major...