The Louvre’s New Islamic Galleries Bring Riches to Light
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
The new space consists of ground- and lower-ground-level interiors topped by a golden, undulating roof. More Photos »
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: September 19, 2012
PARIS — When I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid opened at the Louvre more than 20
years ago, many argued that this 70-foot-tall structure had destroyed
the classical beauty of one of the world’s great museums. But today, as
crowds wait on long lines outside the pyramid, which serves as the
Louvre’s main entrance, what once seemed audacious has become as accepted a part of the city’s visual landscape as the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe.
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Now the museum
is again risking the public’s wrath as it introduces the most radical
architectural intervention since the pyramid in 1989. Designed to house
new galleries for Islamic art, it consists of ground- and
lower-ground-level interior spaces topped by a golden, undulating roof
that seems to float within the neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the
middle of the Louvre’s south wing, right below the museum’s most popular
galleries, where the Mona Lisa and Veronese’s “Wedding Feast of Cana”
are hung.
Ten years in the making, the $125 million project, which opens on
Saturday, has been financed in part by the French government, along with
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who gave the Louvre $20
million toward the galleries, the largest single monetary gift ever
given to the museum. Corporations have kicked in money too, including
Total, the oil company, and the governments of countries like Saudi
Arabia, Oman, Morocco, Kuwait and the Republic of Azerbaijan.
On a recent cloudless afternoon, as teams of workers were putting the
finishing touches on the project, a visitor was allowed to enter the
heavily guarded Visconti Courtyard, where the golden roof billows up
from waist level at the edges to about 22 feet close to the center. At
first glance it looks gauzy enough to blow away in a heavy wind, but
according to members of the architectural team who were working at the
site, it weighs 150 tons and has been painstakingly fashioned from
almost 9,000 steel tubes that form an interior web, over which are a
layer of glass and, on top of that, a shimmering anodized gold surface.
This deftly engineered design is the work of two architects, the Italian
Mario Bellini and the Frenchman Rudy Ricciotti, who won an
international competition to create the new wing in 2005.
When the plans were first unveiled, the architects said, the roof
resembled a “a scarf floating within the space” — a somewhat loaded
description, perhaps, considering that last year the French officially
banned full veils in public places. The museum’s “luminous veil,” or
“flying carpet” as it has also been called, covers some 30,000 square
feet of gallery space on the ground and lower floors. The new galleries,
roughly four times as large as the space previously devoted to Islamic
art at the Louvre, house a collection spanning 1,200 years of history,
from the 7th through the 19th centuries, and includes glass works,
ceramics, metalwork, books, manuscripts, textiles and carpets.
Their opening comes 10 months after the Metropolitan Museum of Art
introduced its own new galleries dedicated to the arts of Islam. The
Met, in an effort to avoid defining the collection solely in terms of
religion, chose an unusually long title for its spaces, “The Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.” The Louvre, on the other hand, has taken the exact opposite approach, calling its galleries simply, “Islam.”
“This is the way the world has spoken about Islam, not only the religion
but the civilization,” explained Sophie Makariou, the Louvre’s director
of Islamic art, insisting that the name is not an oversimplification.
“We were out to tell the history of these people. It’s as complicated as
a textile. There are many different threads and a lot of different
kinds of civilizations who built this world.”
And while the Met’s installation is organized mainly by geography, the
Louvre has arranged its objects chronologically. The collection draws
both from the Louvre’s own holdings of about 14,000 artworks and
artifacts representing the breadth of the Islamic world from Spain to
India and from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is
contributing 3,500 works on permanent loan.
Delicate manuscripts and textiles are displayed in the lower-floor
galleries, where there is no natural light, while vitrines upstairs
display stone sculptures, glassware and metalwork. (These angled glass
cabinets — the work of the architect and museum designer Renaud Piérard —
allow art and artifacts to be seen from all angles. “It is very
important to have perception of objects, their shapes, their profiles
and not to hang them like pictures against a wall,” Ms. Makariou said.)
When Henri Loyrette,
the Louvre’s director, arrived at the museum in 2001, there was not
even a separate department of Islamic art. This in spite of the Louvre
owning what it calls “one of the richest collections of Islamic art in
the world” — a trove large and varied enough to easily warrant a museum
of its own. Still, Mr. Loyrette said recently, he did not want to create
a separate museum for the Islamic works because they are “so closely
linked to our collection, and to Western art, they would be sorely
missed were they not part of the Louvre.”
Already the world’s most popular museum, with nearly nine million
visitors in the past year alone, it is on its way to becoming even more
popular, Mr. Loyrette said. “We have always been open to the world, and
today, as our attendance keeps growing, our visitors are increasingly
interested in the Islamic world. But many people do not know anything
about it, and it is important to show them the luminous face of this
civilization.”
The Islamic collection includes prized objects that have been on view at
the Louvre for years, like an intricately inlaid 14th-century metal
basin from the Middle East known as the Baptistery of St.-Louis,
Ottoman jade bowls that belonged to Louis IV and an early-11th-century
Egyptian rock crystal ewer from the royal abbey of St.-Denis.
But now there will also be scores of artworks and objects that have not
been displayed before. Sitting in her office on the Rue de Rivoli,
several blocks away from the Louvre itself, Ms. Makariou talked of some
of the discoveries she has made over the last few years. One of the most
intriguing, she said, and the one that gave rise to the most
challenging undertaking of the project, was the group of some 3,000
16th- and 17th-century ceramic tiles from the Ottoman Empire that had
been languishing in storage since the 1970s.
“Many of them didn’t even have accession numbers,” she said. Each tile
was photographed, recorded and a database created, and then a team of
curators, conservators and mount makers spent two years working every
day to figure out how to arrange them in a convincing display. “It was a
giant puzzle that took more than seven years to complete,” Ms. Makariou
said.
A corridor outside her office is still papered with the thousands of
color printouts, each representing a tile, that the team used in
assembling the last display visitors to the galleries will see.
“It’s a pure creation, but we wanted to give the impression of what an Ottoman wall looked like,” Ms. Makariou said.
Also extremely complicated to create — or recreate — was the Mamluk
Porch, an ensemble of about 300 stones that once formed the vault and
walls of a vestibule at the entrance to the home of a ruler of the Egyptian Mamluk dynasty in Cairo
at the end of the 15th century. While looking through the archives of
the Louvre, Ms. Makariou discovered a decades-old letter from a curator
at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to a curator of Islamic art at the
Louvre, asking if a portal and a vault depicted in accompanying old
drawings were in fact parts of a work of Islamic architecture. Besides
the illustrations the letter also contained an accession number from the
French museum system. That was Ms. Makariou’s first clue that anything
like this existed.
So began years of detective work, financed in part by a grant from the
Kress Foundation in the United States. The portal, Ms. Makariou
discovered, was part of a vestibule that had been disassembled in late
1887. The stones had been packed in crates and stored in Cairo and then
sent to France by ship, presumably to be shown in the Exposition
Universelle of 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower was built. But for some
unknown reason they were never exhibited and instead were put in storage
and forgotten about until their discovery in early 2000 in a museum in
the South of France. The restorers and the architectural team on the
project also discovered 11 more drawings of the portal in the National
Institute of Art History in Paris that were made by a French architect
in Cairo between 1880 and 1884.
“I promise you I’m not Agatha Christie,” Ms. Makariou said with a laugh,
pointing to a postcard on a shelf in her office depicting Christie at
her typewriter.
The stones were taken out of storage and shipped north to Paris, and the
portal was recreated from the drawings. Weighing five tons, it
illustrates the building techniques that were used at that time as well
as the style of decoration — displays of geometric eight-point stars and
hexagons; stylized floral motifs in two shades of limestone — of Mamluk
architecture.
“It’s been kind of a thriller,” Ms. Makariou said of the project.
“Suddenly this great piece of architecture appears that illustrates the
grandeur of Cairo during this very exceptional dynasty.
“It is also the first example of Mamluk architecture to be displayed in a
museum,” she added, calling it one of many highlights of the new
galleries that “further enrich the picture of Islamic art for the
general public.”
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
The
new space consists of ground- and lower-ground-level interiors topped
by a golden, undulating roof that seems to float within the
neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the middle of the Louvre’s south
wing.
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Ten
years in the making, the $125 million project, which opens on Saturday,
has been financed in part by the French government, along with Prince
Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who gave the Louvre $20 million
toward the galleries, the largest single monetary gift ever given to the
museum.
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Extremely
complicated to create — or recreate — was the Mamluk Porch, an ensemble
of about 300 stones that once formed the vault and walls of a vestibule
at the entrance to the home of a ruler of the Egyptian Mamluk dynasty
in Cairo at the end of the 15th century.
The
Islamic collection includes prized objects that have been on view at
the Louvre for years, but there will also be scores of art and objects
that have not been displayed before.
An intricately inlaid 14th-century metal basin from the Middle East known as the Baptistery of St.-Louis.
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
An intricately inlaid 14th-century metal basin from the Middle East known as the Baptistery of St.-Louis.
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
The
new galleries, roughly four times as large as the space previously
devoted to Islamic art at the Louvre, house a collection spanning 1,200
years of history, from the 7th through the 19th centuries, and includes
glassworks, ceramics, metalwork, books, manuscripts, textiles and
carpets.
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