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Louvre Atlanta: Haute at the High

By Porter Anderson
CNN

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ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The delegation assembled at the High Museum of Art awaits you in regal rows, beautifully ordered, devastatingly confident, graciously imperious. They watch through glass, unsmiling, as you approach. Serene. Accomplished. French.

These are the "Faces of History and Myth," dispatched by the world's most renowned museum as its lead ambassadors to a New World of international art exhibition. Without speaking or even turning a perfect head, they announce a three-year mission of keen importance to world culture.

Despite the superbly impassive expressions on these marble and bronze busts, Louvre Atlanta is an $18 million experiment that needs to succeed. (Curators discuss the project in an audio slide show.)

Much of its funding is in hand, thanks to gifts from High board member Anne Cox Chambers and corporate patrons that include Accenture, UPS, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, AXA Art Insurance and Turner Broadcasting, parent of CNN.com.

And the ambitious schedule of successive exhibitions on tap will keep museum goers close to their calendars. (See an interactive gallery about the project, the museums and artworks.)

Michael Shapiro, the High's director, is fond of pointing out to visitors that the tall, wooden pedestals on which these stately busts are installed are a part of Renzo Piano's design for his museum's new wing that opened last year. "Look how the light comes right through these pedestals," he says proudly, as sunlight pours across their glassed pavilion.

In fact, careful observation shows you even more subtle elements of the Piano group's design for the exhibition itself.

That ground-level assembly of busts is largely white with marble, while the drawings upstairs are set in a dusty salon-blue and the paintings hung on walls of rich de Marigny rose: the French tricolor is in place.

Hands across the continents

What's at stake is more conceptual than fiduciary.

Most of the traditional fine arts still require your physical presence
-- in museums, in concert halls, dance venues, theaters and literary readings.

By contrast, electronic entertainment media broadcast their wares on the airwaves, on film, on the Internet, on radio, by CD and DVD.

Such modern competition is generating efforts such as Louvre Atlanta to ramp up a response, come-hithering iPod-ers to symphony concerts, wooing filmgoers to live theater and tempting gamers to leave their carpeted video arcades and venture onto the blond wood floors of art galleries. Not always easy.

Louvre Atlanta arrives as one of the most anticipated responses of the arts season to this challenge, forging a three-year union between the leading museum of art in Europe and one of the U.S. Southeast's most widely recognized regional museums.

There's an immediate draw in the chance to see on American soil such revered and priceless treasures as Velasquez's famed 1654 "The Infanta Margarita"; Raphael's beloved 1514-1515 painting of his friend, "Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione"; Rembrandt's 1661 "Saint Matthew and the Angel"; and Simon Vouet's 1645 "Study for the Allegory of Intellect" in charcoal and chalk.

Built around the collections of three kings -- Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI -- the opening suite of exhibitions may charm those who know the Louvre not only with the beauty of these canvases, sculptures and drawings but also with the comparative convenience of the experience. The Louvre's Grand Gallery is more than a quarter of a mile long, while this concentration of work at the High can be seen in a good morning or afternoon.

Form and content

The Louvre opened as a museum in 1793 and displays some 35,000 artworks at any given time in its vast royal complex in Paris. Its department of drawings, alone, holds more than 130,000 pieces.

The High moved into architect Richard Meier's initial Woodruff Arts Center facility in 1983 and was augmented last year by Piano's new three-building expansion. It has 11,000 pieces in its collection.

Nevertheless, the twain meet in some very telling common experiences. "If 2 million of the 7 million people coming to the Louvre each year are French," says Louvre director and president Henri Loyrette, "I wonder what about the 57 million French people who did not come. How do we serve them?"

One way is to build a new facility, which is being designed by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa in Lens, a city in northern France. Expected to open in 2008, the new site will be one answer the Louvre can make to the need to draw people in: You go to them.

And in a similar way, the High's Shapiro has "brought it to the people" -- a concept nicely echoing the Louvre's revolutionary era establishment as a museum-in-a-palace -- with the Louvre Atlanta program.

He's not alone: The Denver Art Museum's Lewis Sharp has arranged for a version of the Louvre program to be exhibited there from October 2007 to January 2008: "Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre."

What does the Louvre get out of all this? For starters, that $18 million price tag includes a $6.4 million fee with which Loyrette can renovate the Louvre's 18th-century French decorative arts galleries in Paris.

Loyrette is quick, however, to say that the outreach is as important as the money. Although "Degas is my man," as he puts it in references to his several books on the French painter, he reminds guests at an opening reception that he also once created an exhibition about the architecture of Chicago, "one of my favorite cities."

For Loyrette and the Louvre, this is a smart combination of his personal pleasure in U.S. culture and the business need to expand an already major American contingent among the annual 7 million visitors to the Louvre. In 2005, more than 450,000 people visited the High.

It's a six-year adventure for the High -- planning started three years ago and culminated, in part, during a recent international symposium on the work of Raphael and his relationship with Castiglione. Three more years lie ahead and the enthusiasm on the Woodruff Arts Center campus is as infectious as a glint in "The Eye of Josephine," a sister show opening in the second year of the project.

"This is the good part," Shapiro says, beaming amid pre-opening events. "It's here."

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