Word: museums
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...Mitterrand left his imprint on Paris with a veritable building binge that included the Louvre pyramid, Bastille Opera, and Arch at la Défense. Given the grand construction legacies of his predecessors, is there anything unusual about current French President Nicolas Sarkozy's effort to create a new museum dedicated to French history...
...starters, Sarkozy doesn't want to actually erect a new museum building - nor add to Paris' stable of architectural wonders serving as monuments to French presidents. Instead, the President has ordered a study to determine which of France's existing buildings might best be used as the "symbolic venue, emblematic of our history." His idea is to assemble elements from some of the nation's roughly 900 historical museums into a single collection. Leading candidates to house that collection include Les Invalides - currently home to Napoleon's tomb - and Versailles. (See pictures of France celebrating Bastille...
...contemplate the history of France in its totality," Sarkozy said in a Jan. 13 address on culture in the southern city of Nîmes, where he had traveled to announce his idea for what's been dubbed la Maison de l'Histoire de France. "We have no big museum worthy of that name. There are several ideas on this, and they must be debated. We need a bit of arguing about this...
...student of French history knows, it doesn't require a presidential order to generate argument about a proposal - especially one that detractors suspect is fueled by political motives. Sarkozy, political opponents allege, is using the museum push as another sop to voters on the hard right, many of whom fear French culture and tradition are being over-run by immigration and globalization...
...Even when Wyeth is admitted into the canon, he's held a bit at arm's length. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City owns his most famous canvas, Christina's World, which it acquired in 1948, soon after it was painted, for just $1,800. But while the picture is always on display at MoMA, it's consigned to what you might call an anteroom on the margins of the more respectably modern galleries, a salon des refuses that it shares with Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad. Seeing Christina splayed across her field of grass...