Displaying items by tag: francois hollande

Some of France’s best-known museums, including the world famous Louvre in Paris, will soon be opening their doors to visitors seven days a week, French President François Hollande announced Monday.

The Louvre, along with its Paris neighbor the Musée d'Orsay and the Château de Versailles, located just outside the French capital, will open week-round from this autumn, Hollande said.

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.

The French President, François Hollande, yesterday, 26 August, named Fleur Pellerin as the new minister of culture in France’s reshuffled cabinet. She succeeds Aurélie Filippetti, who published an open letter of resignation in the newspaper Le Monde on Monday after a dramatic split in the French cabinet that emerged this weekend. Pellerin was the minister of foreign trade and tourism in the first government under Prime Minister Manuel Valls from April this year.

A rising political star, Pellerin previously served as the delegate for small and medium enterprises, innovation and the digital economy at the finance ministry.

France’s outgoing culture minister Aurélie Filipetti has joined Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg in blasting President François Hollande’s economic policy and declaring that she will not be part of the reshuffled government to be announced Tuesday. Ex-education minister Benoît Hamon is also among the rebels.

The director of the Pompidou-Metz Laurent Le Bon has been appointed president of the Musée Picasso in Paris, which is due to reopen at the end of September after a five-year refurbishment. Le Bon succeeds to Anne Baldassari, who was dismissed last month due to her much-criticized management style.

The Louvre has been on the hunt for a director since the current chief, Henry Loyrette, announced his resignation in December 2012. Today, April 3, 2013, French President Francois Hollande announced his decision to appoint Jean-Luc Martinez, a French specialist in Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities, as the museum’s new director.

Martinez, who has worked with the Louvre since 2007, is currently helming the restoration of the museum’s famed sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace. He has participated in a number of other projects at the museum including the creation of the Louvre’s outpost in the French city of Lens as well as the museum’s expansion in Abu Dhabi.

Martinez, 49, has signed on for a three-year term and will take over operations in mid-April. Loyrette, who has been the Louvre’s director for 12 years, leaves behind a lasting legacy. During his time at the museum Loyrette nearly doubled the Louvre’s annual attendance. By the end of 2012, approximately 10 million people were visiting the museum each year, making it the busiest museum in the world. Loyrette also implemented the museum’s contemporary art program, employed a policy that relied on crowed-sourced fundraising, and launched a number of successful public campaigns.

The search for a new chief was extensive; for the first time in the museum’s 220-year history the Louvre considered hiring non-French candidates for the role of director.

French president Francois Hollande has given special allowance to Édouard Manet’s (1832-1883) Olympia (1863), permitting the masterpiece to travel from Paris to Venice for an exhibition. It will be the first time the influential painting has left the French city since it was given to the nation in 1890. Olympia, which features a nude woman and her fully clothed maid, shocked audiences with its subject’s provocative gaze and the suggestion that she was a prostitute.  

Olympia, which is part of the Musée d’Orsay’s collection, will travel to Italy to anchor an exhibition at the Doge’s Palace in Venice. The painting will appear alongside Titian’s (1485-1576) The Venus of Urbino (1538), which is on loan from Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, as part of the exhibition Manet: Return to Venice. The exhibition features 70 works including 42 paintings by Manet on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, which will received a considerable amount in fees for the unprecedented loan. A number of paintings will also be on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Manet: Return to Venice will explore how Italian artists such as Vittore Carpaccio (1460-1520), Antonello da Messina (1430-1479), and Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) influenced the French painter. The exhibition will be on view from April 25 to August 4, 2013.

During the French Revolution, which lasted from 1789 to 1799, French troops took Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577-1640) The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus from the Tournai cathedral in Belgium. The work was whisked away to Paris and in 1801 it was sent to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France.

The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus is one half of a diptych that was commissioned for the cathedral by the bishop of Tournai in 1635. Napoleon’s army stole both The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus and its accompanying work, The Freeing of the Souls from Purgatory, which was returned to the cathedral in 1818.

Tournai officials are adamant about having the Rubens painting returned to the cathedral. Ruby Demotte, president of the French Community of Belgium, has penned a letter to French president Francois Hollande as well as to the French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti asking that the work be sent back to Belgium. Demotte made the same attempt last year but never received a response from the French government.

Tournai recently completed a major renovation of its cathedral and are hoping to finally reunite the two Rubens paintings.

For the first time in the Louvre’s 220-year history, the search for a new chief for the museum may include non-French candidates. Public spending in France is being reduced by $13.4 billion this year and a candidate with expertise in international fundraising is crucial to the Louvre, which has led officials to broaden their search criteria. While French President Francois Hollande vowed not to cut cultural projects, the culture ministry’s budget was reduced by 2.3 percent for 2013.

The Louvre’s new director will be responsible for finding funds to expand the institution’s reception area; the area was built in the 1980s when the museum hosted 4 to 5 million visitors a year. The Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, now welcomes around 10 million visitors a year.

Talks regarding a new director for the Louvre began when the museum’s current chief, Henri Loyrette, announced his resignation on December 17, 2012. Hollande plans to have a new director in place when Loyrette’s twelve-year run at the helm of the institution ends in April.

After twelve years at the helm of the world’s busiest museum, Henri Loyrette announced that he will leave his post at the Musée du Louvre in April of 2013. Before becoming the president and director of the Louvre, Loyrette served as the first curator and then the director of Paris’ Musée d’Orsay from 1994 to 2001 and has served as France’s chief curator of heritage since 1975. Loyrette has already informed the president of France, François Hollande, and the country’s minister of culture of his departure.

The Louvre attracts more visitors each year than any other institution in the world and Loyrette has managed to keep that number on the rise. In fact, the number of visitors has almost doubled under Loyrette’s leadership; 5.1 million patrons were reported in 2001 and by the end of 2012, almost 10 million people will have visited the Louvre this year.

However, Loyrette did much more than increase attendance during his time at the Louvre. He is responsible for implementing the museum’s contemporary art program and has organized exhibitions by Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), and many other renowned modern artists. Loyrette employed a new policy that relied on crowd-sourced fundraising and launched a number of successful public campaigns that asked art enthusiasts to help the museum make important acquisitions. Loyrette also oversaw the opening of the Louvre’s outpost in the northern city of Lens as well as the expansion of the museum’s Islamic art galleries, which opened earlier this year.

Loyrette will no longer be in charge when the Louvre’s outpost in Abu Dhabi opens. The controversial project stirred debate in the French art world as Abu Dhabi has paid nearly $1.3 billion to use the Louvre name for thirty years and to gain access to the museum’s collection during that time. Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the Abu Dhabi location is slated to open in 2015.