Displaying items by tag: musee du louvre

The Musée du Louvre in Paris is in the midst of updating its French painting galleries in the Sully wing, part of an ongoing effort under Jean-Luc Martinez, named the museum’s director in 2013, to focus on the permanent displays. “We need to breathe new life into the museum to make its fabulous collection come alive…. I want to give the museum a complete makeover,” Martinez told The Art Newspaper in a 2014 interview.

The 19th-century French painting galleries, which have be rehung, reopened August 5.

“Poussin and God” is one of a three-part series of exhibitions through which the Musée du Louvre is showcasing the art of the seventeenth century. On show at the museum’s Hall Napoléon through June 29, 2015, “Poussin and God” marks the 350th anniversary of the death of Nicolas Poussin in 1665.

According to the Musée du Louvre, although Poussin is the greatest French painter of the seventeenth century and is considered by some as the greatest of all time, he is less well known today than Watteau, Delacroix, Monet, or Cézanne. The Musée du Louvre is aiming to rectify the situation by proposing a fascinating yet accessible entry point to the work of the great French master.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has announced loans of important paintings by Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt van Rijn for its upcoming landmark exhibition "Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer" (October 11, 2015–January 18, 2016). Vermeer’s "The Astronomer" (1668) will be on loan from the Musée du Louvre in Paris, while the artist’s "A Lady Writing" (about 1665) will be on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Works by Rembrandt in the exhibition will include "The Shipbuilder and his Wife" (1633) on loan from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the full-length, life-size "Portrait of Andries de Graeff" (1639) from Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel in Germany. They will join the two seated full-length portraits by Rembrandt from the MFA’s collection, "Reverend Johannes Elison" and "Maria Bockenolle" (both 1634).

"A Lady Writing" portrays a privileged woman engaged in the art of letter writing, associated in 17th-century Holland with a certain level of education and wealth. Belonging to the same elite world, "The Astronomer" represents a “gentleman amateur” engaged in scientific inquiry that had relevance to the maritime navigation crucial to the mercantile interests of the young country.

The final installment of the “American Encounters” exhibition series co-organized by the musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition “The Simple Pleasures of Still Life” explores the rise of still-life painting in 19th-century America. In the wake of the exhibitions on landscape, genre painting, and portraiture, this exhibition provides a new opportunity to foster dialogue on American painting.

Featuring 10 artworks from the collections of the four partner institutions, this final exhibition follows on from the previous ones to illustrate how American painters like Raphaelle Peale, Martin Johnson Heade, and William Michael Harnett adapted European models to their time and country, and thus contributed to the creation of a national voice.

The Syndicat National des Antiquaires (SNA) -- or the French National Union of Antique Dealers -- announced that it will launch a new fair aimed at young collectors this spring. Paris Beaux-Arts, which will be held at the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground center adjacent to the Musee du Louvre, will complement the SNA’s prestigious Biennale des Antiquaires.

The long-running Biennale des Antiquaires, which is celebrated for its elegant atmosphere, blue chip offerings, and elite guest list, specializes in rare antiques, fine art, jewelry, silver, and porcelain. The SNA intends for Paris Beaux-Arts to be equal to the Biennale in quality and range, but with a stronger emphasis on modern and contemporary art.

This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents "Goya: Order and Disorder," a landmark exhibition dedicated to Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746–1828). The largest retrospective of the artist to take place in America in 25 years features 170 paintings, prints and drawings—offering the rare opportunity to examine Goya’s powers of observation and invention across the full range of his work. The MFA welcomes many loans from Europe and the US, including 21 works from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, along with loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Galleria degli Uffizi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and private collections. "Goya: Order and Disorder" includes some 60 works from the MFA’s collection of Goya’s works on paper, one of the most important in the world. Many of these prints and drawings have not been on view in Boston in 25 years. Employed as a court painter by four successive rulers of Spain, Goya managed to explore an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, genres and formats. From the striking portrait "Duchess of Alba" (1797) from the Hispanic Society of America, to the tour de force of Goya’s "Seated Giant" (by 1818) in the MFA’s collection, to his drawings of lunacy, the works on view demonstrate the artist’s fluency across media.

In choosing Jean-Luc Martinez to succeed Henri Loyrette as the head of the Musée du Louvre in April 2013, president François Hollande opted for a consensus choice as well as a break with tradition. Martinez could be considered the antithesis of his imperious predecessor, who reigned over the Louvre for 12 years and whose ambition led to a period of frenetic expansion in France and elsewhere. Loyrette decided not to seek a new term for the job when he understood that this period was about to end, and government subsidies would be cut by around 11%.

Martinez, who had the support of the museum’s staff, was born into a modest suburban family on the outskirts of Paris in 1964.

Paris’s Musée du Louvre has announced an anticipated thirty percent increase in its annual attendance over the next 11 years. By 2025, reports the Art Newspaper, the world’s most visited museum (see artnet News report) expects to welcome 12 million annual visitors, up from a record 9.3 million in 2013.

As reported by artnet News last week, the Louvre is among a number of French institutions considering to open its doors a full seven days a week, following the lead of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, and major museums in London and Madrid.

As “Birth of a Museum”, the preview show of the Louvre Abu Dhabi's collections, ends today, 28 July, at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Manuel Rabaté, the chief executive of Agence France-Muséums, which manages relations between the planned satellite in the Gulf and its French partner institutions, has told Le Figaro that 300 loans from 13 French museum partners – including the Musée du Louvre, Musée d'Orsay and Centre Pompidou will be announced “by the end of this year”. He also revealed the terms of the loan agreement.

Rabaté, who is based in Abu Dhabi, said the loans will be rotated over a ten-year period, with each work remaining in the Gulf for around a year at a time, and displayed alongside the “500 acquisitions making up the permanent collection.”

Ten masterpieces of French painting are currently on view at China’s National Museum in Beijing. The exhibition, which was organized by the National Museum and the Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais in Paris, is part of an ongoing series of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between France and China.

The paintings are on loan from France’s most celebrated institutions -- the Musée du Louvre, the Château de Versailles, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Picasso, and the Centre Pompidou, musée national d’Art moderne. The show marks the first time that these renowned institutions have collaborated on an exhibition. Works on view include Jean-Honore Fragonard’s “The Bolt;” Georges de La Tour’s “Saint Joseph Carpenter;” Pablo Picasso’s “Reading the Letter” and “The Matador;” Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Dance at Le moulin de la Galette” and “The Swing;” Jean Clouet’s “Francois I of France;” Hyacinthe Rigaud’s “King Louis XIV of France at age of 63;” and Fernand Leger’s “Three Figures.”    

“Ten Masterpieces of French Painting” will remain on view at the National Museum through June 16.