Michel Laclotte ‘created the modern Louvre’
Michel Laclotte, who as director of the Louvre oversaw much of its historic renovations, and who earlier, as its chief curator of paintings, championed the Musée D’Orsay (the museum-in-a-train-station) and I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre — two of the most controversial but ultimately beloved architectural projects of late 20thcentury Paris — died Aug. 10 in Montauban, in southern France. He was 91.
Pierre Rosenberg, Laclotte’s successor at the Louvre, confirmed the death, at a friend’s home. No cause was given.
Laclotte went to battle for the Musée D’Orsay in 1972, after the French government had demolished the centuries-old market buildings at Les Halles. That had ignited a zeal for preservation in Paris rivaling that in New York City almost a decade earlier, when the old Penn Station, a beaux-arts landmark, was destroyed.
The Gare d’Orsay, a decommissioned train station on the left bank of the Seine, was facing the same fate when Laclotte had an epiphany: to turn that enormous and exuberant beauxarts building into a museum.
He and his colleagues had already decided to expand the mission of the Jeu de Paume, a nearby offshoot of the Louvre that held the country’s collection of impressionist paintings, to include other 19th-century work. For that Laclotte needed more space, and lots of it. The station seemed to fit the bill.
But there was also a thought in the air to turn the Gare d’Orsay into a hotel, or perhaps a center to promote products from the French provinces. Laclotte had to make a move.
As he recalled in “A Key to the Louvre: Memoirs of a Curator” (2004), he paid a visit to the minister in charge of greenlighting the project and made his plea: “Minister, you have to choose between Cézanne and reblochon cheese.” Cheese lost.
A few years after the Musée D’Orsay opened, he found himself with a group of American curator
friends, two of whom were arguing about the museum. “One was shouting, ‘I hate Orsay,’ the other, ‘I love Orsay,’” he wrote in his memoir. “At that point, I said to myself that the battle was won. The museum inspired pleasure, interest and intellectual debate — exactly as we had wished.”
The debate around the Musée d’Orsay, however, was a tepid academic tiff compared with the one that erupted when plans for a multiphase renovation and expansion of the Louvre, called the Grand Louvre, were unveiled in the early 1980s. The vast, rambling palace that was the Louvre — the most famous art museum in the world and the home of the “Mona Lisa” — was by the 1970s cramped, dingy, disorganized and impossible to navigate. Laclotte described it as a sea
serpent that he and his colleagues were forever wrangling.
One wing of the museum had been taken over by the Ministry of Finance, which turned it into a warren of offices. The Cour Napoleon, the Louvre’s central courtyard, was a parking lot by day and a gay cruising spot by night. When François Mitterrand, head of the country’s Socialist Party, was elected president in 1981, he gave his go-ahead
for the renovation. (Large cultural institutions in France are run by the state.)
Émile Biasini, the administrator appointed to oversee the project, chose Pei to be its architect, embracing his plan for a starkly stunning modernist glass pyramid, to be built in the central courtyard as an elegant solution to the maze of the Louvre. Laclotte, who had admired Pei’s expansion of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was thrilled by the design. Much of the rest of the country was not.
Pei’s pyramid opened in 1989, and the fully renovated museum was reopened in 1993 (though work was to continue for several more years). Laclotte retired the next year. Rosenberg, his successor, said of him: “He created the modern Louvre. The image of Paris would not be what it is today without him.”
He began working at the Louvre in 1951 as an intern while still in school, giving guided tours and helping to document works in the painting department. One of his projects was to help identify works found in Germany that had been stolen from Jewish collectors.
The next year the government began a program to inspect museums that had been battered or destroyed in the war. Laclotte was chosen to direct the team that cataloged the artworks, or what was left of them, as well as to expand the collections and oversee the buildings’ restorations.