The French Finish Their Masterpiece : After 800 or so years of tinkering, they have finally declared the Louvre complete with a $1-billion renovation that nearly doubles the display space

The French have been tinkering with the Louvre--expanding and renovating--for nearly 800 years, ever since that cunning monarch Philip Augustus broke ground for this small fortress on the banks of the Seine to protect his beloved city.

The work didn’t stop in 1793, when the palace of the Louvre was wrested from royalty by revolutionaries and opened to artists and ordinary citoyens for the first time as a public museum. Nor did it stop for the emperors, kings and succession of republics that later took turns overseeing France’s national treasures.

On Thursday, 200 years to the day after it officially became a people’s museum, the Louvre will grow again. But this time, the museum’s centuries-old expansion, save for a few more touches over the next few years, will finally be finished.

The unveiling of the Richelieu Wing, occupied for the past century by the powerful government Finance Ministry and renovated at a cost of $1 billion, is being heralded in France as the cultural event of the year, if not the century.

More than 12,000 works of art, about half of them pulled from storage and shown for the first time, will be on display on the Richelieu’s three floors. At the same time, nearly 80% of the museum’s 25,000 works are being rearranged throughout the palace for easier viewing. And the museum’s total display area, already grand, will almost double overnight, to roughly the size of 10 football fields.

“I’ve dreamed of this transformation for 20 years,” said Michel Laclotte, the museum’s director. “This was our last chance. And this is probably the last major change ever for the Louvre, because we won’t be able to grow any bigger.”

Sitting in his dark office, once the 19th-Century home of Napoleon III’s stable master, Laclotte added wearily: “It’s enough.”

For the first time in the museum’s history, “the collection can be displayed,” added I. M. Pei, the 76-year-old American design consultant for the project.

The Richelieu Wing, constructed by Napoleon III in the mid-1800s, will add much-needed space to the historic museum. But, more important, it will complete an architectural loop, removing the last obstacle to turning the entire horseshoe-shaped collection of connecting palaces into a showcase for the public--and the public’s art.

“The Louvre has been so rich that it could not exhibit all the treasures it has had,” said Francois Puaux, a retired ambassador and president of the Society of Friends of the Louvre. “This project is an answer to the rising demand to see art, which is a phenomenon of our time. There is a hunger for museums today which is quite extraordinary.”

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Indeed, the Louvre, like art museums worldwide, has enjoyed a remarkable boom in recent years. It began in 1989, when Pei’s glass pyramid was unveiled in the Louvre’s courtyard, lighting a massive subterranean reception area for visitors.

Few can forget the fury that greeted the pyramid, a 20th-Century structure surrounded by about six centuries of palace architecture dear to the hearts of the French. A chorus of complaints rose throughout the country, consuming everyone from farmers to intellectuals. What, they asked, had Pei done to their museum?

Laclotte, the museum’s director since 1987, still winces when he remembers being verbally accosted by a taxi driver far outside of Paris.

“He asked what I did for a living, and when I told him, he went crazy,” the museum director remembered. “He was absolutely furious with me. ‘You let something like that happen to our museum?’ he said. And this man hadn’t even been in Paris for 20 years.”

Pei wasn’t surprised by the critics, only by their vehemence.

“It was a bit unexpected,” the architect said recently by telephone from his offices in New York. “But it’s all died down now.”

Laclotte, an early supporter of Pei’s design, agrees:

“The controversy is more or less finished. They have the right not to like the pyramid. Why not? But they don’t insult it anymore. Back then, it was really insulted.”

Insulted, perhaps, but also visited in surprising numbers. Maybe it was the controversy. Maybe it was the fact that the centrally located pyramid, as was intended, made it easier to visit the Louvre. Or perhaps it was just the timing of the pyramid, which arrived amid a resurgence of interest in art.

Whatever the reason, the number of visitors to the Louvre jumped sharply, to 4.9 million last year, from 2.8 million in 1988. Only about 35% of the visitors now come from France, the remaining 65% from other countries. And Americans and Canadians now account for 15% of the people who pass through the museum’s turnstiles.

Membership in the Society of Friends of the Louvre, regulars who pay $50 to $2,000 a year to support the museum, has more than doubled, from 18,000 before the pyramid to 40,000 now.

Puaux, the society’s president, acknowledges that he was an early critic of the pyramid. But he has made peace with the structure and now refers happily to the “pyramid effect” on his association’s membership rolls.

“People want to visit, not only from Paris but from everywhere,” he said. “And the Louvre profits.”

“The Louvre goes to the heart of Parisians every time,” he continued. “There is a special affection for the Louvre. It was the residence of our kings. Napoleon and Napoleon III were there. The story of the Louvre goes back to the beginning of the Middle Ages.”

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Although the French are fond of loud, artistic debates, most experts say they expect great interest in--and little resistance to--the renovated Richelieu Wing. Even the price tag, $1 billion, has unearthed no critics in this country, despite a recession and 11% unemployment.

But, then, no one has seen the new wing yet.

The four-year reconstruction project has been kept under wraps, and the Louvre has barred all photographers from the interior. Only a few fuzzy drawings have been published in a Paris magazine, but the general tone of the media coverage has been expectant--and positive.

“There will be parts of it that people may question, but I don’t expect any new controversy,” Pei said. “We’ve preserved parts of it. We cleaned it. It’s much more attractive than before. And I expect the number of visitors will increase again.”

It took President Francois Mitterrand himself to evict the reluctant Finance Ministry from the wing, named after the powerful 17th-Century prelate Cardinal Richelieu. It sits on the north side of the Louvre, opposite the pyramid on one side and the Rue de Rivoli on the other. The six floors of offices were gutted, and the majestically high ceilings of the original three-floor design, surrounding three courtyards, were restored.

The Khorsabad courtyard will be devoted to the Mesopotamian, Anatolian and ancient Iranian collections. It features two 15-foot winged bulls, each weighing 30 tons, from the 8th Century palace of King Sargon II of Assyria.

French sculpture, from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century, will dominate the two other courtyards, which have been covered by Pei’s 80-foot-high glass roof. Among the featured exhibits are groups of horses by Coustou and Coysevox, which once adorned the Place de la Concorde. Pollution had begun to take its toll on the sculptures there, though, and they have been replaced at the Concorde by copies.

Upstairs in the Richelieu Wing will be 1,000 works of Islamic art, which until now had been in storage or poorly displayed elsewhere in the museum. And Pei, along with several French architects, has preserved an 1850-era welcoming salon of Napoleon III, with its crimson velvet, gold trim and crystal chandeliers.

Napoleon III’s chamber, Pei said, “is not as good as some of the earlier historic architectural work.”

“But the total composition would be lost if you destroyed it,” he said, “so no one would tolerate it, least of all myself. The preservation of the ensemble was my aim.”

Art from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the 17th Century will be featured on the second floor. And on the top floor, 1,100 Northern European and French paintings from the 14th to 17th centuries will be displayed, in Pei’s design, as they were painted, in natural light.

The Louvre’s most famous masterworks--including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” the “Venus de Milo” and the recently restored “Marriage of Cana” by Paolo Veronese--will keep their former places in other wings of the museum.

(“People often ask us why we don’t put all the masterpieces in one big room,” Laclotte said. “But we refuse. We don’t want a digest. This is a collection.”)

Still in storage will be about 300,000 works of art, of which 120,000 are drawings that cannot be exhibited in natural light. Nevertheless, the new space will allow the Louvre to show more of what it has. Up to now, for instance, the Louvre has been able to display only 25 of 17th-Century French painter Nicolas Poussin’s works. Beginning Thursday, there will be room for all 36 Poussin pictures the museum owns.

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The Richelieu Wing is part of a large construction project, which includes the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground shopping mall featuring an inverted Pei pyramid, and an underground parking garage to hold cars and tourist buses that until now have routinely blocked traffic outside the museum.

The mall, which opened earlier this month, leads directly to the Louvre ticket offices from the Palais-Royal Metro station, and its centerpiece is, oddly enough, a Virgin Megastore, the second giant Paris branch of the British-based music and video store.

Virgin is joined by several dozen boutiques, all exempted from the French ban on Sunday sales because they are located in a designated tourist area.

The mall also has two restaurants and--a first for Paris--an American-style food court with a dozen fast-food outlets.

As yet unfinished are renovations to the Tuileries Gardens, the grand park that lies at the west end of the Louvre, and a few other minor refurbishing projects to rooms of the Louvre itself. The entire project is due for completion in 1997.

The Louvre today is a vast enterprise, with underground offices for 65 conservators and a laboratory for 49 scientists, who study and analyze art. Nearly half the 1,500 employees at the Louvre are there to protect its treasures, although some rooms still are occasionally closed because of a shortage of guards.

It costs $100 million a year to run the Louvre, with about 80% of that coming from the French government, the remainder from entry fees. (By comparison, operating expenses for 1992-93 came to $90.8 million at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, $63.2 million at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and $27.4 million at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.)

All French museums share a relatively small annual acquisitions budget, about $18 million. And half of that was eaten up last year by the acquisition of Antonello da Messina’s 15th-Century painting “Christ With a Column,” which cost the Louvre $7.5 million, the most the museum has ever paid for a painting.

Corporate sponsors and the Society of Friends of the Louvre also regularly buy art for the Louvre, and the national collections have been helped by a law that allows some inheritance taxes to be paid in works of art.

But the Louvre is far from the richest museum in the world, ranking about 10th, according to some experts. Nor is it the largest, although size comparisons, whether based on visitors or surface area, are difficult to make. (Supporters of the Louvre sometimes say their museum is the biggest, because it has the most windows of any museum.)

“It’s true that there are museums that are richer than us in some ways,” said Laclotte, the director. “And one can’t say that the Louvre is the biggest museum in the world. We wouldn’t have the arrogance to say we are the biggest. But we’re one of the four or five biggest.”

Laclotte says the important thing for a museum director today is to avoid the temptation to focus on size and marketing.

“It is essential to be a good manager, but what is important is to show the work,” he said. “That is the essential mission. To buy paintings, to study them and to show them to the public.”

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What has set the Louvre apart from other museums, though, is its historical influence on artists, the architectural heritage of the building and the scope and variety of a collection amassed over centuries.

No fewer than 17 kings set their architects to work on construction projects at the Louvre over the years, creating a remarkable mishmash of palatial styles that, in themselves, offer a kind of time line of French history. Although Philip Augustus’ fortress no longer remains on the site, the original walls of his moats were discovered a few years ago beneath the Louvre and have been restored and put on display.

For artists, particularly sculptors and painters, the Louvre has been more than a showplace. It has been a school. When the Louvre opened to the public, in fact, artists were allowed to visit the museum during the first five days of every two-week period while the ordinary public was relegated to only three visiting days.

Since then, many artists have made pilgrimages to the Louvre in search of inspiration as well as answers to technical questions from the work of their predecessors. When French Postimpressionist Paul Cezanne, toward the end of his life in 1900, was painting a portrait of his art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, he found himself unable to finish a tiny part of the subject’s shirt. Finally, Cezanne told Vollard: “I must go to the Louvre to see how to do it.”

The Louvre’s name itself is something of a mystery. Most experts believe it came from one of two Latin words-- lupera or lupara . Lupara, or lovre in French, may have referred to the fortress. But most think it derived from lupera, or louvre in French, a reference to the wolves that once infested the surrounding woods.

Long before it became a museum, the Louvre was a center for royal collections of art. The current collection, though, has its roots in the mid-16th-Century reign of Francois I, who began a new collection with 12 paintings by great masters such as Titian, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Among those first works were Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” today the Louvre’s best-known painting.

By Louis XIII’s time, the palace had 200 pictures, and by the death of Louis XIV, it had about 2,500. A century later, Napoleon made the Louvre the world’s richest museum by taking paintings from the countries he conquered. And successive rulers added to the collection. Soon after the “Venus de Milo” was discovered in 1820, for example, the ancient sculpture was bought by the French government for 6,000 francs, or about $1,000 at today’s exchange rate.

These days, French museums are divided by period. The Louvre collection dates from ancient times to 1848. Across the Seine, the Musee d’Orsay is home to works of the French Impressionists and others from 1850 to World War I. And modern art now is the province of the Georges Pompidou Center.

The controversy over Pei’s pyramid and the decision to invest $1 billion in upgrading the Louvre both reflect, more than anything else, the affection the French feel for their largest and oldest museum.

“For we French, the Louvre is, firstly, an institution like the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe,” said Emmanuel de Roux, deputy cultural editor of the influential daily newspaper Le Monde. “It’s massive. It’s something we are proud of but we really don’t visit as often as we should.

“In France, we construct many museums, we renovate many museums. Why? Because the museums are a reflection of our cities and of France,” he added. “And the Louvre is the same thing. It is very important because it is a sort of showroom of France.”

Said Laclotte: “For us, the object is not to have more people. Five million is enough. But we want to have a more and more valuable public, especially among the French.

“There’s a general feeling in France that the Louvre belongs to them, even if they don’t visit it.”