The Louvre-Lens view of art history

The Louvre, we are told by Wikipedia, is the world’s largest art gallery, and the world’s most visited art collection. The opportunity to visit the Louvre-Lens, the new outpost of the Louvre, and only the second location in France, after Paris, creates a sense of anticipation before visiting. Will this be simply a place to display the second-rate stuff, while the really top-rank things remain in Paris? Or is this the opportunity to create a wholly new art-historical experience, freed from the need to display the permanent collection with all its baggage?  

Visually, the Galerie du Temps is splendid – by far the most effective use of space in the new Louvre-Lens building. The Galerie comprises one huge room, with no dividing piers or walls, showing objects in one long chronological progression, with years shown as a timeline on one wall. It is always clear where you are in art history.

Nor is there any question of the quality of many of the objects. Several of the works are in the top rank, culminating in the Delaroche painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps – you can’t get much closer to the French heart than that. A work of outrageous hagiography, it is pure hero worship. Not a great painting, but certainly one of the ten or so most famous works in the Louvre; undoubtedly a masterpiece of propaganda.

Better still, the juxtaposition of civilisations and cultures works very well. The lack of walls means that other objects are in view at all times, so you could be looking at, say, an Egyptian statue and see a medieval king a few yards away. The gallery is excellent for making comparisons.

But what is the logic behind the 200 or so objects? They begin with prehistory, predating Egyptian times. But it ends rather curiously around 1830, for no apparent reason.  In terms of subject matter it reflects the Louvre Paris, in that there is a strong proportion of French art. Some of the objects appear to be included (the Delaroche, for example) as much for their links to French history as for their intrinsic value as works of art. It is not surprising that everything revolves around the Delaroche painting of Napoleon, since this painting, both in its position at the end of the Galerie and its sheer scale, dwarfing most of the other objects in the exhibition, suggests that the Galerie is as much about the history of France as about art history.

Does the Galerie du Temps reflect the Louvre collections? That makes some sense. The strong collections of Greek and Roman art, Egyptian and near Eastern art in the Galerie all correspond with major Louvre collections; and the absence of American, Indian, Chinese and Japanese art can I suppose be explained by the lack of any major collections in the Louvre itself on which to draw.  In other words, the Galerie du Temps is perhaps a kind of taster of the Louvre collections, mirroring the strength (and gaps) of the parent collection. It makes no attempt to be a universal history of world (or even Western) art for the period it covers. Even so, that still does not explain why the Galerie du Temps ends so abruptly when the Louvre collection continues well beyond that date.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Louvre-Lens, and the Galerie du Temps, contain nothing of any relevance to Lens and Northern France. Given that the region has been awarded world heritage status by UNESCO, that perhaps suggests a rather top-down view of high art. Certainly the Louvre-Lens building makes no attempt to integrate with anything in Lens, apart from being built on the detritus from a former coal mine.

To point out just one example of the rather curious selection, the last bay contains, alongside the vast Napoleon picture mentioned above, there is a painting of the artist’s family, by the little-known Claude Dubufe. It’s a lovely painting but appears out of place alongside the very public and conscious striving for effect of portraits by David and Ingres nearby. Similarly, there is a Corot landscape. Why just this landscape, and almost no others? What was the impact of M. Dubufe and his family on world history? 

Other portraits are included, I think, because of the identity of the subject as much as for the quality of the work; an example is a portrait of Mansart, by Hyacinthe Rigaud. Mansart is certainly one of the best-known French architects, but I would not put his portrait in the 200 key works in art history. The question is why include this picture, and not any of 20 or 30 others?

The limitations of this approach are, I think, twofold. First, as stated above, some of the works raise questions because they are not of great art-historical importance in their own right – so you ask why they have been included. Second, the throwing together of so many cultures and ideas make it difficult to make any meaningful comparisons.

In fact, if I were being caustic, I could claim that this display presents a view of art history based around the Louvre collections, largely by French artists in France, supplemented by works that came into French hands as French colonial acquisitions, and culminating in the greatest moment of France’s historical glory, the Napoleonic era (even though in art-historical terms there was much more to come later). I would like to see a spirited defence of the whole exercise by the gallery staff, a justification of the selection, and a room, or at least a small number of works, related to the surroundings. After all, this is Louvre-Lens, not just Louvre no 2.