Louvre plans branch museum
Source: Agencies |
December 5, 2009, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IT'S an abandoned coal mining site in a depressed corner of northern France that was pummeled by two world wars.
Soon, a branch of the Louvre Museum will rise up on this unlikely site. Work is to start soon on a sleek glass-and-aluminum building that will house hundreds of the Louvre's treasures, from Egyptian artifacts to Renaissance paintings. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and Louvre officials inaugurated the construction site yesterday in Lens.
The modern building will let the venerable French museum experiment, "giving us a new viewpoint on the Louvre's works," said curator Henri Loyrette, who attended the event as Louvre staff back in Paris reopened the museum after a strike shut its doors on Thursday.
The 150 million euro (US$226 million) museum, to open in 2012, is part of a strategy to spread art beyond the traditional bastions of culture in Paris to new audiences in the provinces. The Pompidou Center modern art museum is opening a branch in Met, and it also hopes to show its masterpieces in a traveling circus big top.
Lens was picked for the Louvre project because it could use a reversal of fortune. The city was reduced to rubble by the Germans during World War I. During World War II it was occupied by the Nazis and battered by Allied bombings.
For decades, workers risked their lives in the city's coal mines, and then the mines closed -- the last one in 1986 -- plunging the area into hardship. Lens' unemployment rate still hovers around 14 percent, well above the national level of 9.5 percent.
French officials said they want to thank Lens for its sacrifices. Inaugurating the construction site, the culture minister asked the crowd to observe a moment of silence for 42 miners who died in a 1974 accident.
Soon, a branch of the Louvre Museum will rise up on this unlikely site. Work is to start soon on a sleek glass-and-aluminum building that will house hundreds of the Louvre's treasures, from Egyptian artifacts to Renaissance paintings. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and Louvre officials inaugurated the construction site yesterday in Lens.
The modern building will let the venerable French museum experiment, "giving us a new viewpoint on the Louvre's works," said curator Henri Loyrette, who attended the event as Louvre staff back in Paris reopened the museum after a strike shut its doors on Thursday.
The 150 million euro (US$226 million) museum, to open in 2012, is part of a strategy to spread art beyond the traditional bastions of culture in Paris to new audiences in the provinces. The Pompidou Center modern art museum is opening a branch in Met, and it also hopes to show its masterpieces in a traveling circus big top.
Lens was picked for the Louvre project because it could use a reversal of fortune. The city was reduced to rubble by the Germans during World War I. During World War II it was occupied by the Nazis and battered by Allied bombings.
For decades, workers risked their lives in the city's coal mines, and then the mines closed -- the last one in 1986 -- plunging the area into hardship. Lens' unemployment rate still hovers around 14 percent, well above the national level of 9.5 percent.
French officials said they want to thank Lens for its sacrifices. Inaugurating the construction site, the culture minister asked the crowd to observe a moment of silence for 42 miners who died in a 1974 accident.
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