A baking summer’s afternoon at the Louvre. Milling around the Mona Lisa are maybe 150 people, all with their phones held high above their heads so they can snap that enigmatic smile. Meanwhile, in the vast galleries surrounding Leonardo’s masterpiece, an eternal throng of visitors from every corner of the globe trudges wearily on — most, this far into the gallery, seemingly oblivious to the glorious art around them, reports The Sunday Times.
Paris’s great museum has about nine miles of galleries, spread over 403 rooms. You enter it from beneath IM Pei’s celebrated glass pyramid, which on a day like this behaves like a giant magnifying glass for the blazing sun. Many visitors probably won’t venture more than half a mile into the heart of the museum.
But in this huge, former royal palace there is one tranquil room. Far from the madding crowd, Laurence des Cars, 59, the first female director of the Louvre in 228 years, sits in her book-lined office, the picture of the formidable, Sorbonne-educated Parisian intellectual she is. If she is physically distanced from the heaving mass of humanity trudging round her domain, however, her brain is constantly occupied with it.
“One of my first decisions when I became the director in 2021 was to limit our daily admissions to 30,000,” she says. “You know that, just before Covid, the Louvre was getting ten million visitors a year? When I got here the staff said, ‘Please let’s not go back to that because some days we were up to 45,000 visitors.’ And that figure is too much. Even now we are saturated. The building is suffocating. It’s not good for staff, visitors or the art.”
Last month the Louvre’s staff emphasised their grievances by going on a spontaneous strike (a “mass expression of exasperation”, their union official said), leaving thousands of tourists outside with no idea why they weren’t being let in. “It wasn’t a strike,” des Cars says firmly. “It was a meeting with the unions because of the conditions and especially the heat. I put in place immediate measures to make things better and we reopened that afternoon.”
Read more of this report from The Sunday Times.