Word: museumize
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...just as fervent about bringing in contemporary artists. He argues that they've long had a place at the Louvre, noting that both Eugène Delacroix and Cubist Georges Braque painted ceiling panels in the museum; Braque's 1953 paintings adorn a 450-year-old carved ceiling in the former royal antechamber. In the same vein, Loyrette has commissioned American Cy Twombly to paint one of the museum's last undecorated ceilings. "I'm not inventing or adding anything," he says. "In a way, I'm just renewing what has always been done...
Even Cason Thrash ran into restrictions on what she could do at her June party: the museum drew the line at using candles - she had to make do with battery-powered votive lights instead - and it also turned down her request to hold the event in a painting gallery. "They do that at the Met," she gripes. Still, Cason Thrash gushes about Loyrette, his embrace of American-style fund raising and his attempt to open up the place to a wider audience. "Henri's a visionary. He totally gets it," she says. "It's time for the Louvre to spread...
...Marc Fumaroli, one of 40 members of the Académie Française, the cream of the French intelligentsia, who are known as "the immortals." He's chairman of the Society of Friends of the Louvre, a 111-year-old French association that helps finance some of the museum's acquisitions. Its popularity has been waning, but with 70,000 members, most of whom pay a $100 annual subscription, it still has some clout - even if it doesn't formally have any say in the way the Louvre...
...Collège de France opposite the Sorbonne, the white-haired Fumaroli is frank about the criticism. "The Friends of the Louvre is a milieu that is both cultured and demanding, and it easily gets into a bad mood," he says. There's particular concern about the way the museum is sending out its treasures. "Some think there is excessive exportation," is how he puts it - especially when money seems to be the primary motive...
Displeasing the traditionalists might have had important repercussions in the past, but these days the museum can largely shrug them off. That's because, under Loyrette and his deputy Selles, the Louvre is becoming ever less dependent on France's establishment. The French state, which wholly funded the museum for much of its history, still subsidizes it generously, doling out about $180 million in 2008. But that's only about half the total budget. The rest is raised by the Louvre itself, from ticket sales, traveling-exhibition receipts, and above all donations by French companies and American and other philanthropists...