Unveiling a Bigger Louvre

The same week a new, world-class art museum, the Getty, debuted in Los Angeles, its grown-up and once frumpy Parisian cousin, the Louvre, became bigger and better than ever, with its astonishing Egyptian collection now displayed in a refurbished wing where kings and queens once slept.

The expansion marks the near-completion of “Act III”--the final phase--in the enlargement and modernization program for the celebrated French museum that was decreed in 1981. But the work will never really stop, the Louvre’s president and director says.

“The museum is done, for the most part,” the museum’s Pierre Rosenberg said. “But I believe that taste changes, techniques evolve and progress exists in all fields. And in consequence, a museum is always a construction site. A museum that is not is a dead museum.”

On Dec. 21, two days after President Jacques Chirac presided over a formal inauguration ceremony, the Louvre threw open to the public more than 100,000 square feet of refurbished gallery space in some of the oldest parts of the former royal palace alongside the Seine.

The new rooms house collections of 16th and 17th century Italian paintings and drawings; artworks from Roman and Coptic Egypt; and Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities.

Unquestionably, however, it is the 5,000 objects from ancient Egypt that have brought most Parisians and visitors to the French capital flocking to the Louvre in this windy, rainy holiday season. After an absence of more than three years, an eye-popping trove of treasures exhumed from the sands along the Nile--ranging from a mummified crocodile to a huge and brooding sandstone bust of Pharaoh Ikhnaton dating from around 1340 BC--was back on view.

The number of Egyptian artifacts on show has increased 25%, and the 30 rooms allocated to the period provide 60% more space than before construction began.

To assist the modern-day visitor, the art from the times of the pharaohs has been arranged in two circuits, one chronological that follows the 3,500-year sweep of history, the other thematic. Separate exhibits, for instance, explain the role of the Nile or of talismans in ancient Egyptian life, or how the dead were mummified.

For the moment, all explanatory notices are in French. But Louvre spokeswoman Patricia Mounier said brochures are being printed that will give the highlights of each room in English.

The expansion and modernization at the Louvre, costing a total of 7 billion francs, or around $1.2 billion, is supposed to wind up in 1999, when an additional 54,000 square feet of space becomes available for display.

By then, the most famous of Paris’ museums will have doubled in size--to nearly 650,000 square feet, or the equivalent of more than 13 football fields--and the number of works of art on exhibit increased from 22,000 in 1992 to 30,000.

All those numbers can make a visitor’s head swim--but some of the greatest masterpieces in the world of art are on display in the Louvre’s 370 rooms, from the armless Hellenistic sculpture commonly known as the Venus de Milo to what is almost certainly the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

Even the building is a work of art--and the stage on which some of the most dramatic episodes in the life of France were played out or had an echo. Under Philippe Auguste, in 1190, the building of the Louvre, originally a fortress, began on the north bank of the Seine. Over the centuries, the palace grew to become the largest complex of buildings in Paris, a distinction it still holds.

The newly reopened rooms are in the Denon Wing fronting on the Seine and the hollow square to the east known as the Sully Wing. In one of the Egyptian rooms, visitors can view the woodwork and alcove that decorated the bedroom of the young Louis XIV, who later moved the royal residence to Versailles.

In 1981, newly elected Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, a man as interested in art as in France’s image as a font of world culture, decreed the “Grand Louvre” project that was to bring about a radical transformation in the museum created by French revolutionaries in 1793.

The Louvre had grown “decrepit,” Rosenberg said, as well as cramped. Thanks to Mitterrand, the Finance Ministry was evicted from the Richelieu Wing, adding as much additional space to the Louvre as is contained in the entire Orsay Museum on the opposite bank of the Seine.

The most hotly debated aspect of the project was the building of a vast pyramid of glass, designed by I.M. Pei, in the Louvre’s courtyard to serve as the entrance to a new and greatly expanded underground reception area.

The pyramid opened in March 1989, well in time for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. Since then, it has become a generally accepted feature of the Paris cityscape and Louvre attendance has climbed--to 4.7 million last year.

General admission from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. is 45 francs (about $7.60), but ticket sales meet only a little over a quarter of the cost of museum operations or the payroll for its 1,600 employees. Last year, the French government dug into its pockets and gave the Louvre nearly $50 million to help make up the difference.

Unlike some other internationally renowned museums, like New York’s Metropolitan or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Louvre’s goal is not to be all-encompassing but to focus on Western art from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, and the ancient civilizations that preceded and inspired it.

“We are a little museum with limited ambitions,” Rosenberg, a member of the Academie Francaise, said with ironic but winning modesty.

Unlike the new Getty, he added, the Louvre has no intention of diversifying into a photography collection, art library or other “plura-disciplinary activities.” Other Paris museums already do that.

The director noted that “a lot of little things” still must be done to finish the Louvre’s modernization. They include new rooms for exhibits on the Mediterranean world at the time of the Roman Empire and the dawn of Christianity; for art objects from Northern Europe; and for Spanish painting from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Rosenberg, a specialist on French and Italian painting and drawing of the 17th and 18th centuries, is particularly unhappy about the second-floor hall in the Denon Wing, where “Mona Lisa” now hangs behind bulletproof glass.

“The room she is in is frightful,” Rosenberg complained. “We must find simultaneously the financing and practical solutions to better present her.”