An ugly year for the Louvre: where does the world’s biggest museum go from here?

After a heist and the departure of its boss, the French institution wrestles with water leaks, strikes and much-criticised plans for a €1bn renovationJust over a year ago, Laurence des Cars, the intellectually brilliant (if famously prickly) former head of the largest and most-visited museum in the world, wrote a somewhat alarming note to her boss, France’s culture minister.Des Cars, who on Tuesday resigned as president of the Louvre, lamented the advanced state of disrepair of the iconic museum’s buildings and galleries. Continue reading...

[Graphic of Mona Lisa looking tired and grumpy and wearing a damaged crown]

Everyone agrees that the Louvre needs work, but the expensive proposals have come under attack. Illustration: Guardian Design

Everyone agrees that the Louvre needs work, but the expensive proposals have come under attack. Illustration: Guardian Design

An ugly year for the Louvre: where does the world’s biggest museum go from here?

After a heist and the departure of its boss, the French institution wrestles with water leaks, strikes and much-criticised plans for a €1bn renovation

Just over a year ago, Laurence des Cars, the intellectually brilliant (if famously prickly) former head of the largest and most-visited museum in the world, wrote a somewhat alarming note to her boss, France’s culture minister.

Des Cars, who on Tuesday resigned as president of the Louvre, lamented the advanced state of disrepair of the iconic museum’s buildings and galleries.

The Louvre was overcrowded, she said. Facilities were substandard, technologies hopelessly outdated. Water was coming through the ceilings. Violent temperature swings were damaging artworks. The museum had reached a “worrying level of obsolescence”.

But she had the answer. Barely a week later, the first woman to run France’s most prized cultural institution stood beside Emmanuel Macron in front of its biggest draw, the Mona Lisa, as the French president proudly unveiled Louvre: New Renaissance, their radical, ambitious, €1bn plan for the museum’s renovation.

Des Cars’ immediate future, and that of the Louvre, looked assured. Alas, the year ahead had other plans. Rolling staff strikes, a decade-long ticket scam, an avalanche of ageing infrastructure issues and – most glaringly – a daring daylight heist of €88m (£77m) of crown jewels intervened.

Many in the art world think Laurence des Cars survived as long as she did because of Macron’s concern for a legacy project. Photograph: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters

No one doubts that the Louvre needs work. Spread across a sprawling 360,000 sq metre site, it is a city within a city. Originally a solid 12th-century fortress, it expanded into a gilded royal palace in the 16th century and, come the French Revolution, became a museum in 1793.

Its multilayered architectural fabric contains more than 400 rooms and about 9 miles of corridors. It has 600,000-plus items in its collection, about 35,000 of which are on permanent display. It is the world’s largest museum. It was not designed for that purpose.

In its current iteration, the Louvre is intended to handle about 4 million visitors annually. Last year, helped by star attractions including the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, it drew 9 million.

Something, undeniably, had to be done. The question is what. And how far it should be dictated by the projection of state cultural power (and French presidential ego-polishing).

Besides the necessary repairs and visitor improvements, des Cars’ project, enthusiastically backed by Macron, includes giving Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated portrait a room of its own, with independent access.

That will entail excavating cavernous new exhibition spaces beneath the Cour Carrée, the museum’s eastern courtyard. The Louvre will also be graced with a “new grand entrance” at the Colonnade de Perrault, also on the museum’s eastern side.

The project’s critics, who are many, call it pharaonic. The cost, estimated at more than €1.1bn, has drawn heavy criticism, from the state auditor and Louvre staff who feel the money could be far better spent. Experts question the true point.

“It’s unnecessary, and it’s harmful,” said Didier Rykner, the editorial director of La Tribune de l’Art, an art news website. “But des Cars convinced Macron. He sees it as the kind of grand legacy project that French presidents love to leave behind them.”

The Louvre’s last major refurb, in the 1980s, was commissioned by the late president François Mitterrand and included the striking glass pyramid, designed by the Chinese-American I M Pei, that serves as the museum’s current entrance.

[The Louvre glass pyramid]

François Mitterrand’s major refurb of the Louvre included the striking glass pyramid entrance. Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA

Previous leaders have given France such museum-monuments as the Pompidou Centre (Georges Pompidou), a new national library and an opera house (Mitterrand), and the Indigenous arts museum on the Quai Branly (Jacques Chirac).

Macron has an affinity with the Louvre. He chose it as the backdrop for his presidential victory speech in 2017. But the fate of what the current president has come to see as his signature cultural legacy is starting to look a little less certain.

Many in the French arts world openly believe that is why des Cars survived as long as she did: Macron, who leaves office next spring, did not fancy risking his flagship legacy project, despite the many and varied misfortunes that piled up.

The museum’s decaying infrastructure saw two water pipes burst this month alone, including in the Denon wing, home to the Mona Lisa. In November, more than 300 documents in the Library of Egyptian Antiquities were soaked by another flood.

The Campana gallery, famed for its Greek ceramics, closed late last year due to “structural weaknesses” in the beams supporting the floor above. Offices in another part of the Sully wing have been moved due to the risk of floor collapse.

But since des Cars penned her resignation to the culture minister, Rachida Dati (who also left office this week to launch her attempt to be mayor of Paris), repair and maintenance issues have been the least of the museum’s worries.

[Macron gives his presidential victory speech]

Macron celebrating his victory in 2017 in front of the Louvre. Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA

Morale is at an all-time low, with the Louvre’s 2,300 employees complaining of “untenable” conditions, severe understaffing and poor pay. Strikes have forced the museum to close, wholly or partially, more than a dozen times since last summer.

“Staff feel like they are the last bastion before collapse,” employee unions said in a recent joint statement. Union spokespeople talk of a “catastrophic” situation, unbearable tensions and “absurd and irresponsible” management decisions.

This month, police arrested nine people, including two museum employees and two guides, over a suspected ticket fraud scheme targeting Chinese tour groups that may, over the course of a decade, have cost the museum more than €10m (£8.7m).

[The scene of the heist]

A heist gang used a stolen truck with an extendable ladder to reach the gallery’s unsecured first-floor window. Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

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