The Making of the Louvre Museum With Françoise Mardrus, Director of Museum Studies and Research Support Department

January 18 : The Making of the Louvre Museum
With Françoise Mardrus, Director of Museum Studies and Research Support Department

The Louvre Museum was the first public museum created in France and is the largest art museum in the world. Françoise Mardrus, Director of Museum Studies and Research Support Department at the Louvre and co-editor of the definitive three-volume Histoire du Louvre (2016), will tell the story how the Central Museum of the Arts was created in 1793, one year to the day after Louis XVI vacated the premises; how its collection expanded with artwork plundered by Napoléon during his many conquests (known as “art de la conquête”), when the museum was renamed the Musée Napoléon; how its collection shrank after Waterloo when the looted artworks were returned to their rightful owners, but was rebuilt and expanded again and again over the next 150 years until the Grand Louvre project of François Mitterrand, which culminated with the inauguration of I.M. Pei’s iconic Pyramide du Louvre in 1989 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Revolution, moved the museum to another level. The Louvre is now the largest museum in the world, covering nearly 10,000 years of history.