President of France, Emmanuel Macron appointed the art historian Laurence des Cars as the president of the world’s most visited museum.
Now, Mona Lisa’s reputation in Musée du Louvre, Paris might get overshadowed by another female— Laurence des Cars, who is ready to replace the current museum leader, Jean-Luc Martinez.
President of France, Emmanuel Macron appointed the art historian Laurence des Cars as the president of the world’s most visited museum. She will take over the current president, Martinez, in September. Her name will go down in history, becoming the first female president in 228 years since the wake of the french revolution.
The current president of Musée d’Orsay and L’Orangerie, both in Paris, faced stiff competition for the position.
Des Cars, 54, said her heart was “beating very strongly” when 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, as reported by Guardian.com.
The post of the president of the museum had a monopoly of upper-class historians, which Martinez, a seasoned working-class archaeologist, had broken and now it seems to return to its tradition by Des Cars, who belongs to a French noble family of writers. She is a master of 19th-century painting.
Her emphasis has always been on the social role of museums. She has conducted exhibitions in 2019 at the Orsay on the representation of Black female figures in 19th-century western paintings. Under her leadership, Orsay also voluntarily returned a French painting looted by the Nazis.
Des Cars' emphasis as the Louvre’s president would be to extend the museum's timings to attract the youth, as the current closing timing of the museum is 5:30 pm. Her emphasis would be on, “dialogue between ancient art and the contemporary world”.
“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 as reported by the Guardian.com
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