Louvre Lens The Guide 2014 Extrait

Funding for the construction of the Louvre-Lens Museum has come from the European Union, the regional authorities and primarily from the Nord – Pas-de-Calais Regional Council.

The Louvre-Lens Museum demonstrates a willingness to place a strong and ambitious cultural programme right at the heart of a positive regional venture.

The Louvre-Lens Museum is co-financed by the European Union.

Europe is committed to Nord – Pas-de-Calais through the European Regional Development Fund.

This book has been published as part of the exhibition “Galerie du Temps” at the Louvre-Lens Museum; it has been updated and takes into account the new works included in the exhibition as from 4 December 2013.

The exhibition the “Galerie du Temps” has been organised by the Louvre Museum, Paris, and the Louvre-Lens Museum.

The Grande Galerie has been constructed with the patronage of Crédit Agricole Nord de France.

In application of the French law of  March  (article ) and the Code of Intellectual Property of  July , all partial or total reproduction for collective purposes of this work is strictly forbidden without the explicit permission of the publisher.

In this regard, it is reminded that abusive and collective use of photocopying is a risk for the economic balance of the circuits of book production. © Musée du Louvre-Lens, Lens © Somogy éditions d’art, Paris  for the first edition  for the second edition www.louvrelens.fr www.somogy.fr ISBN Musée du Louvre-Lens : ---- ISBN Somogy éditions d’art : ---- Dépôt légal : November  Printed in Italy (European Union)

LOUVRE LENS THE GUIDE 2014 Xavier Dectot Jean-Luc Martinez Vincent Pomarède

The patrons and partners of the Louvre-Lens Museum Principal Sponsors Crédit Agricole Nord de France Veolia Environnement Major Sponsors Auchan Nexans Caisse d’Épargne Nord France Europe Key Partners Orange Caisse des Dépôts SNCF Partners Trend Française de Mécanique AG2R La Mondiale Fondation d’entreprise Total Vitra Groupe Sia Crédit du Nord CCI de région Nord de France Dupont Restauration Maisons et Cités With the participation of the Compagnons du Devoir et du Tour de France for the manufacture of the furniture in the picnic area

Exhibition Curators of the “Galerie du Temps”: Jean-Luc Martinez and Vincent Pomarède Design: Studio Adrien Gardère Louvre-Lens Museum President: Jean-Luc Martinez Director: Xavier Dectot General administrator: Catherine Ferrar Researcher and exhibition supervisor: Anne-Sophie Haegeman Public mediation: Juliette Guépratte Multimedia: Guilaine Legeay Organisation and administration: Raphaëlle Baume, Caroline Chenu and Marie-Clélie Dubois Louvre Museum President-director: Jean-Luc Martinez General administrator: Hervé Barbaret Assistant general administrator: Charlotte Lemoine Public mediation: Catherine Guillou, Amine Kharchach, Frédérique Leseur, Marina-Pia Vitali Lenders of the exhibition pieces The pieces exhibited in the “Galerie du Temps” all come from the eight departments of the Louvre Museum Display design Designer: Studio Adrien Gardère (project leader: Lucie Dorel / Mathieu Muin) Lighting: ACL. Conception lumière Display cases: Goppion Graphics: Norm Mounting: Version bronze Installation: André Chenue S.A.

Publication Louvre-Lens Museum Editorial coordination: Lucie Streiff-Rivail and Charles-Hilaire Valentin Iconography: Charles-Hilaire Valentin and Élodie Couécou Somogy éditions d’art Publishing director: Nicolas Neumann Graphic design and layout: Loïc Levêque Editorial coordination: Lydia Labadi and Laurence Verrand Translation from French to English: Timothy Stroud Editorial contribution: Natasha Edwards English translation: Timothy Stroud Editorial contribution: Natasha Edwards Technical production: Michel Brousset, Béatrice Bourgerie and Mélanie Le Gros

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was instigated and carried out by the Nord – Pas-de-Calais region and the Louvre Museum. Both teams – whose numbers make it impossible to thank them individually – must be warmly thanked for their constant dedication and involvement.

Very special thanks must also be addressed to those who first worked on the overall conception of the “Galerie du Temps”, Élisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, Jean-Marc Legrand, Olivier Meslay, Marielle Pic and Danièle Brochu. Particular mention should be made of Valérie Forey, Audrey Bodéré-Clergeau, AnneÉlisabeth Lusset and Amine Kharchach, as well as Violaine Bouvet-Lanselle, who advised on setting up the Louvre-Lens publishing department.

The Louvre-Lens teams were formed in 2011 and recognition is due to their constructive and ongoing efforts.

The Research and Restoration Centre of the Musées de France was a vital partner during this stage of the project and we would like to express our appreciation to all their personnel.

Lastly, the Louvre Museum would like to convey its profound gratitude to the descendants of Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, a donator to the museum.

Following pages: The Louvre Museum in Paris, aerial view The Louvre-Lens Museum, aerial view, looking south-north (computer generated image)

CONTENTS

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Preface, Daniel Percheron Foreword, Jean-Luc Martinez

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THE MUSEUM, Xavier Dectot

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THE GALERIE DU TEMPS

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ANTIQUITY, Jean-Luc Martinez

             

A Territory Like No Other Alike Yet Different, the Louvre-Lens

Introduction, Xavier Dectot

Antiquity in the Collections of the Louvre Museum THE ORIGINS OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS (4TH AND 3RD MILLENNIA BC) The Birth of Writing in Mesopotamia The Origins of Egyptian Civilisation The Rise of Mediterranean Civilisations THE TIME OF THE GREAT EASTERN EMPIRES (2000–500 BC) The Ancient Near East in the Time of Babylon Egypt of the Great Temples City-States of the Mediterranean The Assyrian Empire The Twilight of Ancient Egypt The Persian Empire A GREEK AND ROMAN WORLD (500 BC–476 AD) Classical Greece The World of Alexander the Great The Roman Empire

        

THE MIDDLE AGES, Jean-Luc Martinez and Vincent Pomarède

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THE MODERN ERA, Vincent Pomarède

The Middle Ages in the Collections of the Louvre Museum Eastern Christianity: the Byzantine Empire Western Christianity: the First Churches The Emergence of Islamic Civilisation Encounters between Italy, Byzantium and Islam in the West Gothic Europe The Islamic Golden Age in the Near East Encounters between East and West

The Modern Era in the Collections of the Louvre Museum The Renaissance Three Modern Islamic Empires Arts of the Court Baroque Europe French Classicism The Enlightenment Neoclassical Movements Islam and Western art in the 19th Century On the 1830 Revolution: Art and Power in France

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PREFACE

Daniel Percheron Senator for Pas-de-Calais President of the Conseil Régional Nord – Pas-de-Calais

With the opening of the Louvre-Lens Museum, situated over a former pithead, a dream has come true for the region of Nord – Pas-de-Calais and its president. It is also a dream for the inhabitants of the region, whose recent history is founded on the hardships of the coal-mining life and the difficulties of the closure of the pits, and who now accept the conversion of the facilities with immense courage and unequalled dignity. It is a dream, too, for the Conseil Régional, its members and administration, who have overcome uncommon obstacles to help this region hold its head high once more, fix on the horizon and forge a new path. It is a dream for the mining basin, which sees urban and rural landscaping projects transform the old mining centres and their surroundings: the slightly crazy hope of a successful graft for the economic renewal of France’s twelfth agglomeration, with the museum and its associated Euralens project, from which the entire region may benefit in a dynamic that we hope is irreversible.

This dream was founded on a wholly exceptional decentralisation project, wished for by President Chirac and then taken on by the Conseil Régional with the passion and ambition to bring the plan to fruition. This drive was not represented purely by the financial contribution made by the Conseil Régional and its partners for the construction and operation of the Louvre-Lens, it has also taken the form of this institution’s commitment to play a major role at every stage of the project since its launch in 2005, and which will extend well beyond the museum’s opening.

It is with the desire to participate with the LouvreLens in all its cultural, social and economic developments that the members of the Conseil Régional have wished to bring this dream to life, to offer it to the four million inhabitants of Nord – Pas-de-Calais and to share it with their fellow European citizens.

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FOREWORD

Jean-Luc Martinez President of the Louvre Museum

Happy birthday!

One year after the opening of the Louvre-Lens we are celebrating an especially happy first birthday.

We can be proud of the path we have followed since the establishment, in the heart of the mining district, of this museum that revisits the collections of the Louvre in depth. Long nurtured by two men, Henri Loyrette and Daniel Percheron, a beautiful idea finally bloomed on 4 December 2012 as a result of the commitment of a team whose faith in this completely innovative project had never wavered and the enthusiasm of the local stakeholders.

Warmly welcomed since its first days, in one year of existence the “other Louvre” has enjoyed high esteem and high visitor numbers that bode well for the future. We are delighted that the regional public, at whom the Louvre in Lens is particularly directed, forms the majority of the visitors and that school groups are also numerous. These results are a triumph for this museum, which has, since its inception, made cultural democratisation its primary vocation, in particular winning over the local inhabitants and their Belgian neighbours, who have come in large numbers during this first year.

The success of the temporary exhibitions in 2013, the first dedicated to the Renaissance and the second to the Europe of Rubens, is also a sign that the public approves of themes that are both exacting and accessible. The discovery of the Louvre’s collections and allowing the greatest number to explore the great periods of the history of art and archaeology should provide the guidelines for the planning of the exhibitions in the years to come. The year 2014 will first be dedicated to the great civilisation of the Etruscans, of which the Louvre holds the most impressive collection outside Italy, and then, in commemoration of the conflicts that have so marked the

history and landscape of the mining region and the north of France as a whole, the exhibition “The Disasters of War” will be presented.

This birthday also marks the first renewal of the presentation in the “Galerie du Temps”. For this second year, the public is again invited to admire, in close proximity, the masterpieces of the Louvre in this permanent gallery, whose display is partly altered each year to create an original journey through the history of art and the museum’s collections. Fifteen works presented in the opening exhibition have been returned to their rooms in the Louvre in Paris and replaced by the same number of new masterpieces. It is thus neither the same nor a different “Galerie du Temps” that the public will encounter, but a pathway through works and artists to be discovered and rediscovered. Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People has ceded its place to Ingres’ no-less-famous Oedipus and the Sphinx, which will bring this second exhibition to a close.

The Glass Pavilion, a place of discovery and analysis, has also been renewed and in 2014 will inaugurate a new partnership with the museums of the region, whose collections it will now present. In this immediate and tangible manner, the Louvre-Lens joins the dynamic network of museums in Nord – Pas-de-Calais.

The future of the Louvre-Lens remains to be written but our initial ambition will continue to guide us to make it a museum open to all, rooted in its territory, and a place to which it is a pleasure to return.

As a result of the common wish of the Region and the Louvre, there are now two Louvre museums in France: one year on, there is no doubt that the Louvre-Lens is an opportunity for everyone and, most of all, for the Louvre.

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THE MUSEUM

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A TERRITORY LIKE NO OTHER Xavier Dectot

The Louvre-Lens is a museum in every aspect, combining all the universality of the Louvre with all the richness of its host territory. The history of Nord – Pas-de-Calais has heavily marked the region and is consubstantial with its identity. It all began almost three hundred years ago in the part of the Hainaut annexed by France following the Treaties of Nijmegen. In 1716 Viscount Jacques Désandrouin obtained authorisation from the king to investigate whether the vein of coal known to exist north of the border continued into France. His discovery of it at Fresnes-sur-Escaut provided the spark for the first coalmining activity, in which the company Anzin played the leading role. The Industrial Revolution increasingly stoked the demand for coal but it was not until the mid-19th century that it was discovered that in Pas-de-Calais the vein curved along an eastwest axis. This moment marked the change in destiny of the Gohelle area. Until that time, the Lens plain had been sparsely populated and was devoted primarily to agriculture in spite of its relatively unfertile soil but, with knowledge that it was entirely crossed by the coal vein, the Gohelle was transformed. Pit after pit was opened and the plain became entirely devoted to coal mining.

The most important consequence of this transformation, much more so than the changing of place names (Bully-en-Gohelle became Bully-les-Mines), was the demographic explosion: from fewer than 3000 inhabitants in 1850, the population of Lens alone grew to more than 30,000 in 1913 and to over 40,000 in the 1960s. This increase relied greatly on immigration, initially from within France and from Wallonie in Belgium, then from further away: Poles and Moroccans were the nationalities most widely represented in the mines.

Even the organisation of the mining companies affected the territory. They implemented a system in which all social activities revolved around themselves: the inhabitants were grouped in communities linked to the pit in which they worked, where they were almost self-sufficient. Each family benefited from a patch of garden, health care, a church and schools. The entire system, from birth to death, operated for the benefit of and through the mine.

The great depth of the mines made extraction of the coal less profitable than in other regions, increasingly so as other sources of energy were developed. The pits gradually closed during the 1960s and 70s, with the last surviving into the 1980s, but they marked the landscape in the long-term, creating astonishing skylines, slag heaps and, above all, endowing the agglomeration that built up along the entire length of the coal vein with its distinctive appearance, that of a succession of mining estates built during very different epochs.

However, coal mining was not the only form of human violence that had an impact on this territory. The low hills of Artois are the only raised land between the Paris basin and the plain of Flanders and were a strategic location, particularly during World War I. After the three battles of Artois in 1914–15, the front remained stuck at the foot of Vimy ridge until it was captured in 1917. The towns at its foot, including Lens and Liévin, were almost completely destroyed, a fate that was repeated in World War II. The resulting appearance of these towns is a blend of a rich Art Deco heritage with more modern, often very utilitarian, architecture, such as the “Camus” buildings that constituted the reconstructed mining estates.

An understanding of the value of the former coal

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mines in terms of industrial heritage was slow to develop. Whereas today the mining region has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, it was long the case that when a pit was closed, its pithead was demolished. This was the fate of the installations at Pits 9-9 bis operated by the Lens mining company, when mining came to a halt in 1960 and the buildings were torn down in 1983 to make room for a business park. It was in 2004 that the decision was taken that this 22-hectare plot of wasteland would become the site of the “other Louvre”.

An important trading region since the Middle Ages, today’s Nord – Pas-de-Calais, which lies between Flanders, Hainaut and Artois, later turned to industry for its prosperity. Right across the region, not just in the mining district, manufacturing plants heavily changed the face of the landscape and the region’s cultural outlook. Following the example of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, which was founded at the end of the 18th century, a string of fine art museums sprang up in the 19th century as a result of the generosity of important local collectors and large State deposits. The two World Wars brought a heavy toll on the museums in terms of pillaging and destruction but a dynamic acquisitions policy combined, once again, with numerous deposits by the State allowed them to re-establish their prestige.

More recently the museum panorama has opened up to modern and contemporary art at the instigation of important collectors who have become generous donors. The finest example is probably the LaM (Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne) in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, the fruit of the donation of the collection belonging to Geneviève and Jean Masurel, which also incorporates one of the largest collections of Art Brut.

In addition to the creation of museums, mention must be made of the numerous refurbishments and redevelopments that have taken place: besides the LaM, the years before the opening of the LouvreLens were marked by another large museum project, that of La Piscine Musée d’Art et d’Industrie in Roubaix; this museum opened in 2002 in the former municipal swimming pool, an unusual development that encouraged its adoption by the local community.

Set against this cultural background, the Pasde-Calais mining basin may seem very isolated, yet cultural life here is far from barren as it can boast another vein of wealth in live entertainment, for which it has also inherited a large number of

theatres and other facilities from the 19th century.

Moreover, this sphere has been strongly supported by the Conseil Régional since its creation, as it has rightly been considered a means to counter economic and social decline at a time when mines and textile factories have seemed doomed to closure.

The outcome of their action is an extensive network of production and performance facilities. One of the most representative is Culture Commune, which was installed at Loos-en-Gohelle on the site of the former mine 11/19, close to the Louvre-Lens. Established in 1990, once the last coal had been hauled up and the mining history of Nord – Pas-de-Calais definitively closed, Culture Commune has patiently but determinedly succeeded in being accessible to a public, that often has little appetite for culture, without ever sacrificing quality. But perhaps even greater than Nord – Pas-de-Calais’ abundance of entertainment halls, which represents its cultural force and wealth, is the vigorousness of the networks that make use of them and the wide variety of productions they offer to the region’s different publics.

There are some who might think the creation of a new Louvre in the heart of a mining district with an essentially industrial and working-class history improbable. However, it is this very anomaly that has made this development possible. For, from its opening day, this other Louvre must be close to its visitors and deeply rooted in the local culture. Now, the history of this mining district, born of industrial and military violence, has moulded a unique people, one that sets great store by solidarity, warmth and a real tradition of welcome. When a decision had to be made on the location of what was to become the Louvre-Lens, the entire territory became involved in the enterprise: the local institutions, of course, first and foremost the Conseil Régional, which has carried the project forward with the support of the Conseil Général, the Communauté de l’Agglomeration and the Ville de Lens, but also that of the general public. The involvement of the local population has been very pronounced since the town first put forward its candidature and has never waned. As for the economic sectors, they have broadly implicated themselves in the life of the museum, primarily through sponsorship, which has been crucial since the construction phase, but also through investment by local companies and associations to transform the territory to welcome the arrival of the new establishment.

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 Watercolour by Peltier of the Pits - bis, - bis, - bis, - bis and their villages, Centre historique minier, Lewarde.

 Photograph of the pithead of Pit , Centre historique minier, Lewarde, pre- ().

 Head frame of Pit , Lens, Centre historique minier, Lewarde,  ().

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 Saint-Théodore mining village, Lens, municipal archives, Lens,  (F).

 Gable of a house in Lens, with Art Deco motifs.

 Facade of a house in Lens decorated with Art Deco mosaics.

 Aerial view of Pit , Lens, in .

 Twin slag heaps of Pit  ⁄ , at Loos-en-Gohelle, Nord – Pas-de-Calais.

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ALIKE YET DIFFERENT, THE LOUVRE-LENS Xavier Dectot

 North side: reception hall (in the centre).  East view of the reception hall.  Interior of the reception hall.

The architectural project The Louvre-Lens is closely linked with the territory in which it has been placed, first and foremost with the plot on which it has been installed. This is in fact an old pithead, the entry-point to Pits 9 and 9 bis operated by Mines de Lens, which has been raised a few metres above the surrounding terrain by the accumulation of shale. On the east side it is overlooked by a monument to sporting and mining history, the Bollaert stadium, built in 1932–33 by the mining company. To the north and south are two very different housing estates built for the mine workers. On one side, Saint-Théodore is a gardenestate built between the wars (like its neighbour, the estate Jeanne d’Arc). It is formed by streets of semi-detached houses with small, individual gardens and tree-lined avenues that create the impression of space. Beside the church in the centre of the village are two schools, one each for girls and boys.

The regularity of the buildings is only broken opposite the entrance to the mine, where large houses inhabited by the upper echelons of the personnel (the engineer, assistant engineer, doctor and pharmacist) are ringed by walls and larger gardens. On the other side, by Pit 9 bis, the village was destroyed during World War II and reconstructed with prefabricated buildings. Quickly built, these were known as “Camus” after the engineer who devised them.

These too are semi-detached and ringed by a garden but seem perhaps even more rational from an urbanplanning perspective.

With regard to the pit itself, all that remained of it at the start of the 2000s was the badly damaged changing room and the stable, which had been transformed into a living space. Around it a small

area had been turned into a business park but most of the 22 hectares had been abandoned and become overgrown.

It was this extraordinary space in the middle of the agglomeration and very close to the railway station that the Louvre and Nord – Pas-de-Calais region offered to the imagination of the architects who wished to take part in the design competition. The winner, who was chosen in 2005, was the Japanese firm SANAA, created by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (destined to win the Pritzker Prize in 2010) in partnership with Catherine Mosbach, Celia Imrey and Tim Culbert.

One of the most remarkable aspects of their design is the maximal use of the available space through the creation of a park-museum rather than a museum set in a park. As such, visitors to the Louvre-Lens do not suddenly enter a museum but approach it gently through an expanse of greenery that both draws attention to the history of the site and encourages appropriation of the place. The mine is present but delicately and subtly so. The old haulageways, the railway tracks that carried the coal to the station and the shale to the slag heaps have been transformed into paths through the park and towards the museum. Certain plant species, pines in particular, recall the timber joists used to support the mining tunnels. Others attest the reappropriation of the site by nature. Thus, the west side has been colonised by a copse of birch trees; birches are known as pioneer trees because they are the first species to take up residence in a new space. Further evidence of nature taking back this plot is provided by the more discreet liquorice milk vetch (astragalus

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glycyphyllos), a protected plant. For visitors, reminders of the mine are provided by views of the mining estates, the stadium, and the head frames, notably the one over Pit 3 in Liévin, where a mining disaster occurred in 1974, and slightly further away, one in metal and another in concrete at Pit 11/19 at Loos-en-Gohelle, which stand at the foot of the two highest slag heaps in Europe.

In the park, the building itself does not have a very dominant presence. Unlike the large, vertical constructions often favoured for museums by contemporary architects, SANAA chose to respond to the very linear and horizontal architecture of the mines with a long, single-storey building that extends the entire length of the park, and which, when viewed from the outside, almost disappears from view as the walls of the different modules of which it is composed are made of either glass or anodised aluminium and offer a delicate reflection of the surroundings. Furthermore, the gutter-bearing walls are not straight but slightly curved, accompanying the visitors’ gaze rather than confronting them head-on.

The building consists of five modules, all of which receive the public at garden level. The large reception area lies at the centre: its high, glazed walls can be entered from all sides, depending on which part of the garden you arrive from.

Two vast exhibition wings are spread on either side.

One of SANAA’s strokes of genius was to develop them as long galleries without permanent partitions inside, thus allowing the museum to evolve and transform over time. The walls of these two 

galleries have no apertures but natural light enters from above, the intensity of which can be controlled by an ingenious system of shutters.

On the east side, the Grande Galerie extends for 120 metres in length and is where the first exhibition, which will be discussed later, will be displayed for five years in an open space without any partition to interrupt the gaze of its visitors. Equally ambitious, the inside walls are also lined with aluminium, creating an effect that sets the works off in a very vibrant manner. At the end of the Grande Galerie lies a new glazed space, the Glass Pavilion, where visitors can enjoy views of the surrounding countryside and consider the major themes of the Grande Galerie more closely through small exhibitions whose purpose is to create a dialogue between works from the Louvre to those from museums in the region.

On the west side is the gallery dedicated to temporary exhibitions. Slightly shorter at 90 metres long, it will hold large international exhibitions for periods of approximately three months. This gallery too is built as a single volume but can easily be divided to match the requirements of the exhibition. Lying at the end of this gallery is La Scène, a large auditorium. The novelty behind this design is that La Scène and the temporary exhibition gallery communicate, which enables the events held in the auditorium to spill over into the exhibitions just as easily as exhibitions to extend into La Scène. The floor of the foyer is the setting for one of the museum’s contemporary artworks, a mosaic by the artist Yayoi Kusama.

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 Interior of the reception hall.  The visible and visitable storerooms.

Receiving the public differently One of the great qualities of the building designed by SANAA is that the ground-floor volumes are entirely devoted to the public, as the technical areas have been relegated to the basement. One of the great ambitions of the Louvre-Lens is to encourage visitors to learn about the working life of a museum and to pass through to the other side of the mirror. To achieve this, a space purely for the public has been created beneath the reception hall where they can view and explore the museum’s storerooms. These are storerooms proper, with their different spaces, storage cabinets and closets for smaller objects, shelving and supports for heavy objects, painting racks, and air-conditioning equipment to best meet the needs of the different materials. Visitors will learn that works are never held in the storerooms without reason; they are kept there either because their fragility does not allow them to be exhibited on a permanent basis (for example, textiles and drawings) or because their nature or state means it is better not to display them (if they turn out to be fakes or are waiting to undergo restoration).

Around the storerooms, all the other museum occupations are revealed. Glazed bays next to the storerooms open onto the museum workshops, so that the public will be able to witness the activities of those people who are closest to the works – the restorers and installers. Another opening will give a view of the museum’s large underground road and the activity that takes place around it to welcome works and visitors in the best conditions possible.

But other elements in the life of a museum are more difficult to show. For these, multimedia devices are used. Videos illustrate the different professions and occupations involved in a museum’s processes, whether they deal with conservation, public mediation, communication, administration or the security of an institution that receives large numbers of visitors. As a museum consists above all of the works it contains, a space has been allocated to explain

these works’ past existence – their creation, function and discovery – until the moment they arrived in the exhibition rooms.

Like any modern museum, the Louvre-Lens is equipped with a large auditorium. This multifunctional space can host conferences, theatrical performances, concerts or other forms of live entertainment. The museum’s aim is to offer the public not only another perspective of the works and the periods that produced them, but also of how they have been considered over time. This will be done both through scientific presentations and by demonstrating them in the context of their time through the performing arts or by inviting contemporary authors, actors or musicians to share their vision of these works. In its function as a necessary counterpoint to the exhibition rooms, the auditorium offers a moment of transience in a world of permanence.

The presentations held there will create a close bond with the museum collections, a bond that may sometimes reveal itself in the exhibition spaces, in particular during the museum’s monthly evening events.

Another place that represents this special relationship between the museum and the public is the Resource Centre, located in the heart of the reception hall. A study area, yet nonetheless convivial, it allows the public to prepare or enrich their visit. It is effectively a multimedia library, yet is more than that: a place for experimentation, where a visitor is helped to set the works in a broad context or to examine them in their finest substance. It is also there that visitors can enter their personal space on the museum’s website, a space also accessible from home, to record their thoughts or memories of visits, their wishes and discoveries. Above all, the intention is that the resource centre becomes a place of sharing and interaction: it has been designed so that it can be used by individuals, groups or, even, families, for whom a special area has been reserved.

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THE GALERIE DU TEMPS

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INTRODUCTION Xavier Dectot

The Grande Galerie is the heart of the Louvre-Lens.

It is the setting for exhibitions designed to be displayed for five years, using works lent by the Louvre in Paris and is in a way the permanent collection of the museum in Lens. Like any permanent exhibition, however, it is not static: in Lens the presentations will be affected by annual rotations that will see some works leave and replaced by others.

What makes the “Galerie du Temps”, the first exhibition to be held there, particularly original is its manner of presentation. Using the entire long gallery designed by SANAA, the elegant and ingenious layout devised by Studio Adrien Gardère presents the works chronologically in a single space. In consequence, works that in every encyclopaedic museum in the world are exhibited separately, as they come from different civilisations or were created using different techniques, are here placed alongside one another. And yet the world of the Mesopotamians and Persians was in permanent contact with the world of Greece and Egypt, and during the Middle Ages, just as in the 16th and 17th centuries, many artists habitually worked as painters, sculptors and specialists in other techniques. The “Galerie du Temps” therefore offers visitors a unique outlook on the history of art within the limits that are those of the Louvre: beginning with the invention of writing in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC and ending with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, just when coal began to be mined in Lens.

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ANTIQUITY

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Jean-Luc Martinez

ANTIQUITY IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE LOUVRE MUSEUM

With regard to the long period that it has become conventional to refer to as Antiquity, which began with the invention of writing (c.3500 BC) and ended in the West with the end of the Roman Empire (AD 476), the collections of the Louvre Museum make it possible to illustrate the rapid development of three distinct and more or less contemporary seats of civilisation: the Near East, Egypt and the Mediterranean basin. The “Galerie du Temps” at the LouvreLens brings together 70 works produced over more than 4000 years in this vast geographical area that stretched from Algeria to Afghanistan. The organisation of the display allows attention to be drawn to the relationships, exchanges and moments of unification that occurred between these three centres.

The works exhibited in the middle of the gallery originate in the region often called the Fertile Crescent, which, from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), a region crossed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, methods of writing and models of state organisation spread eastwards (to the Iranian plateaus) and westwards (as far as the shores of the Levant, today Syria and Lebanon) and thus came into contact with the two other continents where the two other centres were developing: Egypt, an African civilisation centred entirely in the Nile valley, which is presented on the right side of the gallery, and the Mediterranean basin, on the left side. This geographic distribution across the width of the gallery is interwoven with a chronological distribution running lengthways that highlights important moments of unification and reveals the complexity of historical geography. Thus,

after the period of the early civilisations (4th and 3rd millennia BC), the focus is on the great empires of the 2nd and 1st millennia – Babylon, the Assyrian Empire and then the Persian Empire –, which progressively unified the Near East and integrated Egypt and part of the Greek world before Alexander the Great’s conquests (336–323 BC) established a form of Hellenisation that stretched from the East to the West as a prelude to the Roman Empire. Visitors may wish to progress through the gallery transversally to appreciate works created in different places during the same period, which is the manner that is proposed in these pages. Alternatively, the option exists to follow the evolution of a given artistic production in a single geographic area – for example, in Egypt, from the origins of writing around 3200 BC until the advent of Islam – for which one’s direction of visit would be lengthways, moving from one presentation to the next. Lastly, another possibility is to allow oneself to be guided purely by the nature of the works on show, as several thematic itineraries run through this chronology: writing and languages of communication; royal and imperial portraits, and the decoration of temples and palaces; and that of funerary goods, the evolution of the human figure, and the gods and heroes of mythology.

Visitors are thus invited to take a long journey back in time to encounter works produced by the great civilisations of antiquity whose names are as exotic as they are evocative: Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Etruria, Rome – echoes of a distant past.

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THE ORIGINS OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS (4TH AND 3RD MILLENNIA BC)

Three sets of objects at the entrance to the “Galerie du Temps” make reference to the birth of the ancient civilisations. These were characterised by the invention of writing, a phenomenon that was itself linked to the blossoming of a centralised power and the emergence of the first cities and monumental architecture. With regard to the centres of civilisation represented in the collections of the Louvre, this period, covering two thousand years, witnessed the ascendancy of the Near East, which for this reason is placed down the middle of the gallery. It was in this region of the world that the first city-states came into being, with the civilisations of Sumer (present-day Iraq), Elam (present-day Iran) and Syria. Egypt at that time, during the Early Dynastic Period (3100–2700 BC) and the Old Kingdom (2700–2200 BC), developed a model of civilisation that, leaving aside its specific characteristics, such as the power of the pharaoh and the construction of the pyramids, was not unlike its contemporary Eastern civilisations. During the same period in the Eastern Mediterranean, the prehistoric Cycladic civilisation (2700–2300 BC) – named after the Cyclades Islands in Greece – had no form of writing, a development that only occurred later in this geographic zone during the 2nd millennium BC, with the civilisations that arose in Crete and continental Greece.

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THE BIRTH OF WRITING IN MESOPOTAMIA

Mesopotamia is the region “between two rivers” (the meaning of this word of Greek origin) in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that runs between the Anatolian plateau (Turkey) and the sea.

It was here from the 6th millennium BC onwards that man found conditions favourable to sedentarisation. The first urban centres were founded in Lower Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), such as Uruk (today Warka). It was against this background that writing developed, initially as a response to the complexity of transactions. The earliest object exhibited in the “Galerie du Temps” is representative of this fundamental invention, the one that ushered the region from prehistory into history. The first written documents were always accounting records. The Pre-Cuneiform Writing Tablet (fig. 1) from Eanna – the temple of the god of the sky – in Uruk is a record of food rations that has been dated to around 3300 BC. Impressed in the clay by a reed stalk (a calamus), the marks transcribe numbers with round holes or notches and foodstuffs by drawings. Thus this tablet is inscribed with words rather than phrases and was used as an aide-mémoire to keep records. This moving and fragile testimony of

man’s activity is indicative of a centrally organised economy and implies a strongly hierarchical power structure. Seals used to sign official documents are evidence of the existence of a central power and a religion established around large brick temples. Contemporary with the clay tablet, the limestone statuette of a Bearded Man, Nude (fig. 2) may represent a king-priest: this figure is found on seals, sometimes shown wearing a long skirt and a turban, and seems to have played a leading role in the city. He is often accompanied by another figure, feeding the livestock of the great goddess Inanna.

Excavations led by Ernest de Sarzec from 1877 on the site of Tello, ancient Girsu, in southern Mesopotamia uncovered the civilisation referred to as Sumer, which had been completely lost to memory.

Called the “land of reeds” by the peoples known as the “black heads”, Sumer corresponds to the lower part of the Tigris and Euphrates valley. From the 3rd millennium BC, in a zone that stretched northwards into Syria, a series of mini states formed, each ruled by a prince who assumed a variety of roles: he was the authority on matters of war, justice and public constructions, and the intermediary

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between the worlds of the gods and humans. The Sumerian royal lists give the names of the mythical rulers said to have ruled after the Flood, such as the hero Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Several dynasties governed the state of Lagash, further south.

Gudea (fig. 3), who reigned around 2120 BC, is the best known of these princes, as excavation work in Tello has revealed twenty or so statues of him in various sanctuaries. Carved in diorite, a hard stone imported from Magan (the Oman peninsula), the statuette shows the king wearing a bonnet (of fur?) with his hands clasped together in an academic style designed to demonstrate power and devoutness.

This dynasty of rulers of Lagash left us long religious poems written in Sumerian, the official language used by the state’s administrative service. Around the year 2000 BC, the Cuneiform Writing Tablet (fig. 4) shows signs of a long literary text, a letter from a mother to her son, created with the use of a wedge-shaped stylus (cuneiform from cuneus, Latin for wedge). This was thus the epoch when, in parallel to legal and diplomatic documents, Oriental literature and a scholarly culture were formed, developed by the scribes in the large sanctuaries.

At that time Susa, the most important city in the kingdom of Elam (present-day Iran), which lay to the east of Mesopotamia, was fully linked to the Sumerian world. The Perforated Alabaster Plaque with Banqueting and Fight Scenes (fig. 5), which was discovered during excavations led by Jacques de Morgan in 1908, is part of a series of perforated Sumerian reliefs that probably decorated the latches of temple doors. It depicts a banquet with a musician and a seated figure dressed in a woollen skirt called a kaunakes, and, on the lower register, a fight scene. Evidence exists of overland contacts

with Central Asia and India via the Arabian Gulf.

To the north of modern Iran, on the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, a civilisation developed in the region later called Bactria through which the River Oxus flows (today known as the Amu Darya).

The Bactrian civilisation was in contact with Elam and Mesopotamia but the materials it used were more precious and its decorative repertoire seemingly more exuberant. Statuettes discovered there show figures thought to be either male genies with bodies covered with snake scales or “princesses” with wide robes decorated with a pattern imitating sheep’s fleece, inspired by Sumerian kaunakes. The Woman Dressed in a Woollen Robe-Cloak (fig. 6) carved from limestone and green chlorite probably represents a guardian of the living or the dead.

At the western end of the Ancient Near East, Syria was a veritable crossroads between Egypt, the Mediterranean world and Mesopotamia. Inland Syria was naturally more linked with the Euphrates valley, which crossed it and joined it with the Mesopotamian plain further south. The site of Tell Halaf gave its name to a civilisation that developed there during the 4th millennium BC on forging contacts with Mesopotamia, and which took up the use of metal and writing and established its own cities. After the manufacture of figurines of large-bodied mothergoddesses, the civilisation there began to produce stylised images in nearly abstract forms. The Eye Idol (fig. 7) is exceptionally large and raises many questions: is this object dedicated to a divinity? Is it a tool used for spinning? Figures of this sort have been found as far south as Susa, signifying the existence of a common culture across this vast zone that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Iranian plateaus.

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Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) c. BC Limestone Bearded Man, Nude: King-Priest?

H . x W . cm AO 

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Uruk (today Warka), Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) c. BC Clay Pre-Cuneiform Writing Tablet Recording Food Rations, Temple of the God of the Sky, Eanna Archives, H . x W . cm AO  Purchase, 

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Girsu (today Tello) Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) c. BC Diorite Gudea, Prince of the State of Lagash H . x W . cm AO  Purchase, 

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Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) c. BC Clay Cuneiform Writing Tablet with a Literary Text in Sumerian: Letter from a Mother to her Son H. . x W . x D . cm AO  Purchase,  GE 

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Susa, kingdom of Elam (presentday Iran) c.– BC Alabaster Perforated Relief with Banquet and Fight Scenes: Part of a Temple Door?

H  x W  cm Sb  Excavations led by J de Morgan, acropolis at Susa (present-day Iran), 

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Oxus civilisation, Central Asia (present-day Afghanistan) c.– BC Green chlorite and limestone Woman Wearing a Woollen Garment (“kaunakes”): Figure Protecting the Living or the Dead?

H . x W . cm AO  Purchase, 

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Halaf civilisation, Syria c.– BC Terracotta Eye Idol H  cm AO  Gift of the Société des amis du Louvre, 

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THE ORIGINS OF EGYPTIAN CIVILISATION

The civilisation that arose in the Nile Valley in Egypt bore a number of similarities with its neighbours in the Near East of the same period. It is undoubtedly true that the annual flood of the “king river”, the Nile, had an immense bearing on the life of the ancient Egyptians, and created a clear boundary between the dark soil fertilised by silt and the vast desert. However, Egypt experienced the same developments as Mesopotamia: writing appeared in the 4th millennium BC to assist the administration of a centralised power that expressed itself notably by the monumentalisation of art through the development of sculpture in stone and imposing architecture. Dating from around 3200 BC, the oldest texts known are slightly more recent than in the East but this does not mean that Egyptian writing, which the Greeks called “sacred” (the meaning of the term “hieroglyph”), was derived from the script in Mesopotamia. Circa 3000 BC, the Funerary Stele (fig. 8) from Abydos in Middle Egypt, a site famous for its sanctuary dedicated to Osiris, is inscribed with the earliest hieroglyphs, which appear to give the name of Horus (a drawing of a falcon) and a proper name Setchnoum (drawing of a ram). It was at Abydos that the first pharaohs were buried, among them the mythical Narmer, who is reputed to have unified Upper and Lower Egypt in around 3100 BC, even though it is now known that unification occurred earlier than that date. Our knowledge of this pre-dynastic period that preceded political unity in Egypt extends to the cities, its ceramic production and many make-up palettes typical of this culture. The Fragment of a Make-Up Palette Decorated with a Hunting Scene (fig. 9) is carved from a hard stone called greywacke and was probably

used in a sanctuary. It has a circular hollow – partly conserved – where the make-up ingredients were crushed.

It was during the period known as the Old Kingdom (c. 2700–2200 BC) that the country’s organisation became centred on the capital, Memphis, and an all-powerful king, the pharaoh, around whom a nobility of high-ranking administrators grew up. The rulers of the 4th Dynasty, among them the famous Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos, chose the plateau of Giza to the north of Memphis in around 2600 BC to build their pyramids and create the nucleus of a veritable City of the Dead. A stoneworking industry grew up (sculpture, architecture) that encouraged development of the canons of Egyptian art. The statue of the Standing Man (fig. 10) was probably a funerary sculpture placed in the tomb of one of the functionaries in the service of the king, though he has unfortunately been rendered anonymous by the loss of the inscription. This object shows several of the portraiture conventions of this period: supported by a pillar at his back, the man wears a wig and appears to be walking forwards, his left leg advanced and his arms hanging by his sides. The relief displayed nearby is from the Decoration of a Funerary Chapel (fig. 11), the public section of the tomb where the family deposited its offerings. The figured elements were not purely ornamental as they illustrate moments that were presumed to occur in the afterworld: the scene depicted is of a brewery. Here, more conventions of Egyptian art are apparent: the carnation red of the male bodies and the juxtaposition of the figures in profile bring the common artisans that served a noble house back to life.

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Abydos, Egypt c. BC Limestone Funerary Stele with Hieroglyphic Inscriptions H . x W  x D . cm E  Excavations led by É Amélineau, Abydos, Egypt, –

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Abydos (?), Egypt c.– BC Greywacke (hard stone) Fragment of a Make-up Palette Decorated with a Hunting Scene H x . x W  x D  cm E 

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Egypt c. BC Painted limestone Funerary Statue of an Unknown Man H  x W  x D  cm A  Purchase, 

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Egypt c.– BC Painted limestone Decoration from a Funerary Chapel: Brewery Scene H  x W  x D . cm E  Purchase, 