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Laurence des Cars
Laurence des Cars said the Louvre’s ‘purpose is to be universal, and that’s what interests me’. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images
Laurence des Cars said the Louvre’s ‘purpose is to be universal, and that’s what interests me’. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images

Louvre appoints Laurence des Cars as first female president

This article is more than 2 years old

Art historian aims to attract young people to world’s most visited museum and focus on contemporary themes

The Louvre is to have a female president for the first time in its 228-year history.

Emmanuel Macron has appointed the art historian Laurence des Cars as head of the world’s most visited museum, founded in 1793. Des Cars, president of the Musée d’Orsay and L’Orangerie in Paris, both of which she has run since 2017, will take over the prestigious post in September.

She faced stiff competition for the job in a selection process that was fierce and at times bitter.

Des Cars, 54, said her heart was “beating very strongly” when the the culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, rang her to break the news. “It was a joyful and emotional moment. I will never forget that call,” she told France Inter.

The daughter of a journalist and writer, and the granddaughter of the novelist Guy des Cars, the new Louvre president is known for supporting the restitution of art looted by the Nazis during the second world war, encouraging exhibitions echoing contemporary themes, and creating programmes to attract more young people.

“What I want to do is think about what we consider a ‘universal museum’. This is the label we stick on the Louvre, wrongly as it happens because it’s not quite that. Its purpose is to be universal, and that’s what interests me,” she said.

“The Louvre can be fully contemporary, it can open up to the world of today while telling us about the past, giving relevance to the present through the brilliance of the past. We need time, we need perspective, we are coming out of a destabilising crisis, we are living in exciting but complicated times … We are all a little bit at a loss for direction. I think the Louvre has a lot to say to young people, too, who will be at the centre of my concerns as president of the Louvre.”

She said she would be reviewing the Louvre’s opening hours to make it more accessible. “We have to be open a little later in the day if we want young working people to come,” she said.

Asked whether she would allow the Louvre’s star exhibit, La Joconde (Mona Lisa), to be lent – which the former minister of culture Françoise Nyssen suggested four years ago was a possibility – Des Cars was firm.

“No, it is a very fragile work. It’s also one of the joys of the world’s great museums to go and see certain works knowing they will not have been moved,” she said.

Des Cars, a specialist in 19th and early 20th-century art, oversaw the development of the Louvre Abu Dhabi between 2007 and 2014. Under her presidency, the d’Orsay and Orangerie museums welcomed a record number of visitors in 2019. She also acquired a number of important works including Paul Gauguin’s Chapeau Rouge and Edouard Manet’s Tête de Jeune Homme d’après l’autoportrait de Filippino Lippi (head of a young man after the self-portrait of Filippino Lippi).

She was also reportedly the driving force behind the culture ministry’s announcement that one of the Musée d’Orsay’s major works, Gustav Klimt’s Rosiers sous les arbres (rose bushes under the trees), stolen by the Nazis from Nora Stiasny in Vienna in 1938, would be returned to Stiasny’s Jewish family.

“A major museum must look history in the face, including looking back at the very history of our institutions,” Des Cars told AFP.

French museums reopened last week after Covid restrictions were eased. The Louvre reported visitor numbers had dropped 72% in 2020.

Alternative candidates for the Louvre presidency included the current museum head, Jean-Luc Martinez, who ran for a third term. Martinez was publicly denigrated in March by critics who accused him of turning the museum into what they claimed was an overcrowded tourist-trap concerned more about Instagram and brand image than art.

Martinez responded saying he had “democratised” the institution.

Des Cars praised the work of her predecessor. She said: “I congratulate him on the work he has done over the last eight years. I’m very happy to be working with him over the next few weeks and months, because there will be a transition period.”

Des Cars is the most significant female appointment to head a French museum. About 67% of the country’s national museums are headed by women, according to the culture ministry, a rise of 27% from 2019. In March, Catherine Chevillot, the director at the Rodin Museum in Paris, was named president of the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, the biggest architectural museum in the world; Emma Lavigne is executive president of the Palais de Tokyo (centre for contemporary art); Sophie Makariou is president of the Musée Guimet, the national museum for Asian arts; and Chiara Parisi is director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

  • This article was amended on 7 June 2021 to remove a mention of the Élysée museum, which is in Switzerland not France.

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