MINISTÈRE DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES ET EUROPEENNES
No. 9 – march 2012
French museums and their international partners
As the Louvre embarks on a new collaboration
with its American partners, other French museums are
also building ties with their foreign counterparts. Works
of art are travelling all the time, as networks are created
for training, restoration and research purposes.
International cooperation projects in French museums
are buzzing with excitement!
Thomas Cole, The Cross in the Wilderness, 1845
© Musée du Louvre, Paris
The Louvre, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the
Terra Foundation for American Art and the brand-new
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville,
Arkansas have been working together on a four-year
collaboration on American art in the 19th century. A
touring exhibition will be organised every year, alongside
conferences, discussion days on museography in the United
States and publications.
The first exhibition, New Frontier: Thomas Cole and the Birth of Landscape Painting in
America, includes paintings from all the partner museums and will be on display in the auditorium of
the Louvre until 16 April. It will then move to Bentonville from May to August and Atlanta from
September to January 2013 and will be accompanied by a book published in French and English. As
Henri Loyette, President-Director of the Louvre points out, “this ambitious project is a natural
extension of our previous collaborations with the High and the Terra.” The Louvre and the High
Museum of Art have already worked together on themed exhibitions, publications and academic
research, whilst the Louvre and the Terra Foundation have produced the first complete inventory of
American works of art in French museums.
The Terra Foundation for American Art is also involved in numerous projects in France, with
the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Grand Palais, the Musée d’Orsay and the Jeu de Paume museum.
As for the Louvre, over the last five years it has been working with 70 countries all around the world,
developing partnerships in areas that include training, conservation, restoration and research and has
organised ten exhibitions abroad. Fourteen are planned for this year, including one on Delacroix,
which will travel to Spain, and Myths and Legends, which will tour to Taiwan and then Korea. One of
the exhibition’s partners is the chateau of Versailles. The Museum of Versailles is itself frequently
approached by other institutions. As well as managing the Association of European Royal Residences,
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it delivers extremely popular turnkey exhibitions, such as the one on Napoleon in Japan and the one on
Louis XIV in China.
Versailles is also associated with the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, a project involving numerous
institutions including the Musée du Quai Branly. Unsurprisingly, Paris’s ethnological museum works
on collaborative projects in a wide range of areas, including building and development, inventories of
collections and database creation with Morocco, Micronesia, Mongolia, Peru, Vietnam and others. A
study has been launched with the British Museum on the textiles of the Andes and a research project
has been started on photographs of Australian aborigines with the Centre for Indigenous Australian
Studies at Monash University, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of
Cambridge and the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. This year, the Quai Branly and the National
Museum of China are organising two exhibitions. The French museum has embarked on a special
collaboration with the National Museum of Mali, including educational activities and publications of
academic research. It is also taking part in the “Museums for Development” programme, which
involves 26 African museums... and so it goes on!
Regional museums are also buzzing with excitement, particularly, at the moment, those in
Marseille, the 2013 European Capital of Culture. Amongst other things, the city’s museums are
working with the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence to prepare an exhibition on the “Studio of the
South” entitled Le Grand Atelier du Midi, which will feature works from both the United States and
Russia. In the meantime, they have been busy co-producing exhibitions with foreign partners such as
Orientialism in Europe with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Belgium, and last year, an exhibition
on the Austrian artist Hundertwasser, with the Hundertwasser Foundation in Vienna. They have also
loaned works for the Caravaggio exhibition to be held this summer in Toulouse and Montpellier
before it heads for Los Angeles. The museums in all three of these southern French cities are part of
the Frame association, whose other members include institutions in Bordeaux, Dijon, Grenoble, Lille,
Lyon, Rennes, Rouen, Strasbourg and the United States (26 in all), which work together on artistic and
educational projects.
The trend towards internationalisation is growing all the time, according to Franck Lacaille, the
curator responsible for loans management at Versailles: “All the world’s major museums are in contact
with each other, but we are now seeing the same in small museums in Europe, the United States and
Canada, as well as a diversification towards Korea, China and South America. Collections now travel
far and wide as the number of exhibitions soars.” A globalisation of museums which can only benefit
their primary audience: the public!
Sylvie Thomas
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