Word: fumaroli
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...everyone shares her enthusiasm. Just ask Marc Fumaroli, who chairs the Society of Friends of the Louvre, a 111-year-old French association that helps finance some of the museum's acquisitions. With 70,000 members, most of whom pay a $100 annual subscription, it still packs some clout. Fumaroli is frank about the criticism. "The Friends of the Louvre is a milieu that is both cultured and demanding, and it easily gets into a bad mood," he says. There's particular concern about the way the museum is sending out its treasures. "Some think there is excessive exportation...
...other big complaint is about the contemporary art. Fumaroli wrote an indignant article about the biggest show to date, an exhibition earlier this summer of works by Belgian artist Jan Fabre that was held in galleries containing Dutch and Flemish masterpieces. Among the highlights: a gigantic earthworm wriggling on upended gravestones in the Rubens room. The show was part of a series designed to give visitors a new perspective on old works. "It's important to have polyphony around the collection," Loyrette says. But Fumaroli dismissed it as pantalonnades--pantomime...
Sitting in his book-strewn office in the Collège de France opposite the Sorbonne, the white-haired Fumaroli is frank about the criticism. "The Friends of the Louvre is a milieu that is both cultured and demanding, and it easily gets into a bad mood," he says. There's particular concern about the way the museum is sending out its treasures. "Some think there is excessive exportation," is how he puts it - especially when money seems to be the primary motive...
...Fumaroli's association isn't the only one to be concerned about that. The Abu Dhabi deal alone will bring the Louvre $900 million - $600 million for the right to use the Louvre name for 30 years, and the rest for services that include lending up to 300 works. (The total deal amounts to $1.3 billion; some other French museums participating in the government-backed project will share the rest of the proceeds.) When the deal was struck last year, an Internet petition declaring "our museums are not for sale" quickly drew several thousand signatures, including those of well-known...
...other big complaint is about the introduction of contemporary art. Fumaroli wrote an indignant piece in the French magazine Beaux-Arts about the biggest show to date, an exhibition by Belgian artist Jan Fabre that was held earlier this summer in galleries containing Dutch and Flemish masterpieces. Among the highlights: a table strewn with feathered sculptures depicting the severed heads of seven owls in the same room as Van Dyck portraits, and a gigantic earthworm wriggling on upended gravestones sharing a space with 21 Rubens depictions of Marie de Medicis. The show was part of a series called "Counterpoints," designed...