A Key to the Louvre: Memoirs of a Curator by Misha Beletsky

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In this riveting memoir of the former director of the Louvre, Michel Laclotte oΩers his vivid souvenirs of the triumphs and machinations of the international art world. Essential for anyone interested in art and the museums that display it. —Robert Rosenblum, Professor of Fine Arts, New York University

Michel Laclotte brings [to his recollections] a measure of humanity and of empathy. . . . “I am not an intellectual,” he says. . . . One has to agree: he is the opposite of the detached academic. He is a man of emotion and intuition. He is closer to artists or poets than to mathematicians.

s an art historian, curator, teacher, and museum director, Michel Laclotte has played a starring role in the cultural life of contemporary France. In this remarkable memoir, Laclotte, emeritus director of the Musée du Louvre, reveals the special combination of qualities that made possible his extraordinary career: political savvy, impeccable scholarship, and an ironic but generous sensibility. During his twenty years as chief curator of the Louvre’s Department of Paintings, Laclotte led the team that created the popular Musée d’Orsay in Paris and helped establish the exquisite Musée du Petit Palais in Avignon, while enriching the Louvre collections with masterpieces by Piero della Francesca, Georges de la Tour, and Vermeer. Later, as director of the Louvre, Laclotte oversaw the “Grand Louvre” project, which transformed the museum and made its glass pyramid one of the city’s most distinctive landmarks. Laclotte draws penetrating but balanced portraits of his mentors and contemporaries, whose ranks include André Malraux, a Resistance hero and culture czar of postwar France, the masterful Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, Anthony Blunt, a connoisseur and Soviet spy, and many others. Laclotte’s recollections of encounters with the leaders of France from the 1970s to the 1990s, including Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand, illuminate the high-stakes interplay of art and politics behind France’s unparalleled museum culture. Throughout his career, Laclotte has remained a spirited advocate for public access to the artistic riches of the Louvre and France’s other great museums, benefiting present museum-goers, as well as future generations.

A B O U T T H E T R A N S L AT O R

Mark Polizzotti is publications director at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. 116 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011 1-800-Artbook (in U.S. only) Available wherever fine books are sold Visit us at www.abbeville.com Cover design by Misha Beletsky

Printed in the United States of America ISBN 0-7892-0821-0

U.S. $19.95

51995 EAN

ABBEVILLE PRESS

9 780789 208217

A Key to the ouvre ouvre A Key to the

—Armelle Héliot, Le Figaro

LACLOT TE LACLOT TE

b i o g r a p h y / a r t h i s t o ry

AAKey to the ouvre Key to the ouvre MEMOIRS OF A CURATOR MEMOIRS OF A CURATOR

Michel Laclotte Michel Laclotte

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A B O U T T H E T R A N S L AT O R

Printed in the United States of America ISBN 0-7892-0821-0

U.S. $19.95

51995 EAN

ABBEVILLE PRESS

9 780789 208217

A Key to the ouvre MEMOIRS OF A CURATOR

A Key to the ouvre

—Armelle Héliot, Le Figaro

LACLOT TE

b i o g r a p h y / a r t h i s t o ry

Michel Laclotte

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LACLOT TE

A Key to the ouvre MEMOIRS OF A CURATOR

A Key to the ouvre Michel Laclotte

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A Key to the ouvre

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Michel LacloX

A Key to the ouvre Memoirs of a Curator TranslaWd /om the French by Mark Polizâ&#x2030;Ľo{

abbeville press publishers new york london

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For their help and friendship, the author wishes to thank Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac, Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Geneviève Bouﬂet, Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, Caroline Mathieu, Claudie Ressort, Paul Salmona, and Philippe Sénéchal. Editions Scala particularly wishes to thank Mijo Thomas and Jean Clay. This text is based on interviews conducted by François Legrand, as rewritten by Michel Laclotte in collaboration with Anne Sefrioui. First published in the United States of America in 2004 by Abbeville Press, 116 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011. First published in France in 2003 by Éditions Scala, Passage L’homme, 26 rue de Charonne, 75011 Paris, France Copyright © Éditions Scala, 2003 Photography Credits Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris / Art Resource, New York: inserted pages, Georges de La Tour, The Cheat (photo: Gerard Blot); Giovanni Bellini, The Drunkenness of Noah (photo: Hervé Lewandowski); and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Bolt (photo: Daniel Arnaudet) All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Abbeville Press, 116 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011. First edition 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Laclotte, Michel. [Histoires de museés. English] A Key to the Louvre : memoirs of a curator / Michel Laclotte ; translated from the French by Mark Polizotti. p. cm. Translation of: Histoires de museés. Includes index. ISBN 0-7892-0820-2 (alk. paper) 1. Laclotte, Michel. 2. Museum curators—France—Biography. 3. Musée du Louvre. 4. Museums—France—History—20th century. I. Title. N2030.L17413 2004 708.4'361—dc22 2004052817 Editor: Christopher Lyon • Designer: Misha Beletsky • Compositor: Angela Taormina Set in HTF Requiem Printed and bound in the United States of America.

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For Jean Coural

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Contents 1. Learning the Trade 11

2. An Inspector of Provincial Museums 48

3. In the Paintings Department of the Louvre 101

4. Meetings with Art Historians 204

5. The Musée d’Orsay 228

6. The Grand Louvre 265

7. After 1994: Lavori in Corso 317

Appendix: Four Mentors 326

Notes 357

Index 363

[7]

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Foreword

Any narrative written in the first person, unless it is fiction or the musings of a confirmed flagellant, contains a share of selfcongratulation. I have tried to keep this to a minimum by relating what I personally observed in museums and in the field of art history in France over the last fifty years. In many respects, my story is the rather banal reflection of what many Frenchmen of my generation experienced in the milieus in which I worked. At the same time, I cannot let it be forgotten that throughout my long career, I benefited from a rare opportunity: having been promoted in my youth through the generosity of an exceptional boss and after that being involved at the right time in undertakings such as are rarely seen in the history of museums. It is not my intent in this memoir to speak as a professional historian. This book was written from interviews that draw upon personal recollections, with limited recourse to documentary sources in verifying dates, titles, or quotations. In other words, it presents an inevitably partial viewpoint. Many facts relating to these stories have therefore remained unspoken, generally because I didn’t know, remember, or correctly interpret them. On top of which, needless to say, I was not able to mention everyone I’ve encountered during the past half-century. My hope is that those who could not be cited here will forgive me. [9]

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1 Learning the Trade

ifty years of my life have been devoted to art history and museums, and it would be natural to expect a detailed accounting of those decades. But for me to provide one, I would have to adopt the approach of a professional historian, which I am not, on top of which I lack the necessary perspective. Were you to ask my contemporaries about events in our ﬁeld over the past half-century, their accounts would certainly diΩer from mine. Rather, what I hope to do in this book is to recreate a sense of the times and to spotlight both the high points in the history of museums (their resurgence after World War II, for instance, or the “boom” in large-scale construction projects) and the low points—around 1970 and perhaps today. And also (though here again my own view is partial and even a bit biased), I hope to highlight the eΩorts made, after the gray and timid period that followed the war, to revive art history and scholarship in France, the battles won and lost, and ﬁnally the vitality of a discipline that not everyone looks upon favorably. [ 11 ]

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A Key to the Louvre I was born in 1929 in Saint-Malo and, like any good native of that city, was naively proud of my hometown. The fact that so many Malouins have lent their names to streets, hospitals, islands, and even a commercial temple of information technology* “is not bad for a place whose area,” as Chateaubriand put it in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe, “does not even rival that of the Tuileries.” I have always retained my attachment to the city, so much so that I recently bought an apartment there, within the walls, to enjoy the sea air from time to time. My family left Saint-Malo after my father was killed in 1940, and the following year we settled in Paris. Filtered as they are through our family’s mourning, my memories of the Occupation are naturally rather dark: Germans everywhere, soldiers in the metro stinking of leather and heavy wool . . . My secondary school was the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly. One teacher who stood out in particular was Henri Petiot, better known as the writer Daniel-Rops, who would soon become famous as the author of Jesus and His Times. When teaching history, he made frequent reference to the history of art, which was ignored or neglected in schools at the time (is it very diΩerent today?), and he took us to Notre Dame cathedral to help us understand the Middle Ages. Like all children, I read avidly in those years, starting with bland scouting books and adventure stories, comics featuring the “disastrous housemaid” Bécassine (another Breton contribution), as well as The Jungle Book, Jules Verne, Dumas, and many other titles in the white Collection Nelson editions— the paperbacks of that period—which I found in the family library. And, like anyone else, I studied the classics in school: Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, the Russians, and so on. Paris during the Occupation was extraordinarily rich when it came to shows. I’d had little experience with theater before the war, though I do remember L’Heure espagnole at the *Surcouf, named after the famous Malouin corsair Robert Surcouf. [ 12 ]

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Learning the Trade Théâtre de Rennes, where, of course, I was more taken with the heroine’s burlesque misadventures than I was with Ravel’s music. In Paris, while visiting my grandmother, I’d seen Around the World in Eighty Days at the Châtelet and—prophetically—a ballet by Lifar at the Opera, Entre deux rondes, in which statues in the Louvre came to life at night. I spent a lot of time at the theater in Paris with my mother or some friends. It was there I saw Henry de Montherlant’s La Reine morte and Le Soulier de satin by Paul Claudel at the Comédie Française; Renaud et Armide, beautifully staged by Bérard but based on a rather weak play by Jean Cocteau; and many classics, including Raimu in Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire. I still remember Antigone, the resistor, by Jean Anouilh and also Andromaque directed by Cocteau, starring Jean Marais and Annie Ducaux, which caused quite an uproar. There were also movies. We didn’t go to see German films, although there were two in color—something extremely rare outside of American cinema—that were very enticing: Baron Münchausen and La Ville dorée, about Prague—a German city, as everyone knew . . .We had no idea that Les Inconnus dans la maison or Le Corbeau were produced by Germans. Of the films of the period, I especially remember faces: Edwige Feuillère in La Duchesse de Langeais, Pierre Fresnay as Inspector Wens, Michel Simon as Vautrin, American-style comedies with Raymond Rouleau and Annie Ducaux, Falbalas by Jacques Becker, Le Baron fantôme . . . I also remember two absolutely spectacular films, which at the time were considered “Resistance” movies: Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du soir—in which Jules Berry as the Devil snickers about “the heart that keeps beating”— and Pontcarral. We were frustrated by the unavailability of American films, our interest having been whetted by a friend who had seen some in Switzerland, especially Fantasia and Gone with the Wind. [ 13 ]

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A Key to the Louvre It was also di≈cult to see much art, since most of the museums were closed. Still, I was able to view the monumental sculptures at the Louvre, which they hadn’t been able to evacuate, notably the winged bulls from Khorsabad. I also have another “artistic” memory, from what must have been the summer of 1942, at the Bellou manor in Normandy. I was at a Boy Scout camp in the country, and we were visiting the castle that served as a storage repository for Maurice-Quentin de la Tour’s pastels from the Saint-Quentin museum. Some of them were hung in the rooms. I clearly recall the roguishness of Mademoiselle Fels (which today I ﬁnd a bit irritating) and the smile of Abbé Huber reading by candlelight. But I didn’t come away with an irresistible attraction to the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, a few memories from those years suggest that I was beginning to grow out of my childhood. I can still recall—I must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time—standing in front of a billboard kiosk in Place SaintFerdinand-des-Ternes, excited at the prospect of going to see Gounod’s Faust, the national opera par excellence, until an older friend said, “That’s all well and good, but the real Faust is the one by Berlioz.” I suddenly understood that not all art was of equal value. In a similar vein, I remember our French teacher’s dismayed expression when, having asked us to recite a work of poetry, he found that several of us (myself included) had chosen a tirade from Rostand’s Cyrano or L’Aiglon . . . I also remember another epiphany, somewhat more signiﬁcant and inspired by a sense of shame that I can still feel today. It was during the holidays of 1942 or 1943, which I spent in Laval at my paternal uncle’s, a doctor who was in the Resistance—which I didn’t know at the time. “And what do they think about the Resistance in your school?” he asked me one day. To which I airily replied, “Oh, we’re not really interested in politics . . . ” Arrogant brat! [ 14 ]

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Learning the Trade At the same time, we knew that some of our teachers at Lycée Pasteur (Sartre taught there, though not in my grade) had links to the Resistance—notably our English teacher, Georges Magnane, who had gone back to teaching because he didn’t want to publish under the Occupation. Most of our teachers didn’t spare us their more or less concealed allusions to the war, England, and the Germans, though I don’t recall anyone particularly extolling the virtues of the Vichy regime. I recently came across some class photos from those years: rows of awkward boys, all vaguely cross-eyed or pimply. In the first year (1941–42), I see among the pupils a boy who was one of my best friends, Weys. In the second year (1942– 43), Weys is more or less in the same place, but wearing a yellow star on his smock. In the third-year photo (1943–44), he doesn’t appear at all. I remember the liberation of Paris all the more clearly in that we experienced it from up close (we lived not far from the Arc de Triomphe, which was visible from our balcony): the arrest of a young neighbor, who, as we learned a few days later, was among the hostages shot at the Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne; the arrival of Leclerc’s tanks on Place de l’Etoile; the delirious joy; the sniper shots from “bastards” hidden on the rooftops of the adjoining avenue. Needless to say, our joy was tempered by the fact that my father would not be among those coming home and further dampened by the news of the destruction of Saint-Malo. We went there in September 1944 to find the ruins still smoking, a sight made more horrible in that the bombardments were of no military use. They said at the time that the Germans had set fire to the city as they were leaving after placing explosives in the cellars of the oldest houses. Today we know that it was in fact an Allied mistake. Saint-Malo was rebuilt “in the style of,” stone by stone and facade by facade, especially the largest houses around Porte Saint-Vincent. [ 15 ]

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A Key to the Louvre In the 1950s the minister in charge of reconstruction was Eugène Claudius-Petit, and my mother was in his cabinet: a remarkable man, a true modernist who supported Le Corbusier and the most innovative French architects of the period, who were rare. It was thanks to him, for example, that the “Maison du Fada” in Marseilles was built by Le Corbusier, against all odds. He would have preferred Louis Arretche’s reconstruction scheme for Saint-Malo to be more radically contemporary—though perhaps he was mistaken in this, for apart from some cheaply made buildings on the ramparts, the urban planning, style, integration of surviving architectural elements, and use of granite are overall quite successful. I have been asked what I think of Louis Hautecoeur, who was general secretary for ﬁne arts under Vichy. My opinion, of course, is retrospective, as I was only fourteen when Paris was liberated! I met Hautecoeur many years later, when he was already retired and ﬁnishing his monumental History of French Classical Architecture, and I found him to be an utterly decent man. Hautecoeur belonged, as did the classical scholar Jérôme Carcopino, to a handful of intellectuals who had sided with the Vichy government. Research is now being done to provide a better understanding of the role each of these men played and his share of responsibility. Hautecoeur had to leave France for a time and took over the Musée de Genève; his name was cleared fairly soon after the war. The fact remains that he had been in charge of the arts under Vichy, and as such he paved the way for the reforms that were put into practice beginning in 1945. I became aware of all this only later, in 1949–50, when I started frequenting university and museum circles. My sense today is that among the larger components of the state, the museums, headed by Jacques Jaujard, were relatively “well behaved” vis-à-vis the occupying forces. A small number of curators were no doubt attracted by Vichy without necessar[ 16 ]

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Learning the Trade ily becoming active collaborators. Their main concern was to save the collections, moving them to oΩsite locations to protect them from air raids or from being carried away in German trucks. And they were concerned with saving people. Charles Sterling had managed to reach the United States, but most of the Jewish curators remained in France and were sheltered as much as possible. To my knowledge, not one was deported. The curator Suzanne Kahn, whose parents were deported and never returned, owes her survival in June 1944 to her husband’s broken leg, which kept them from getting on the train that would have taken them to Germany. She later told me what it felt like when, for an exhibition of masterpieces from Berlin and Munich at the Petit Palais, she had to welcome some colleagues from Germany and treat them cordially. I cannot say precisely when I first recognized my museum “calling.” What I do know is that at first (this would be 1945), I wanted to be an architect. But to be accepted in the architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which at the time was the only one available, you had to be good in math— unfortunately not one of my strong suits. And so I opted instead for a career in museums, studying for the liberal arts baccalaureate and then for the exams to become a curator. I had been encouraged in this by Jean Adhémar, whom my mother had known during the war when she worked as an archivist for the Ministry for Overseas Territories, where he was engaged in a cataloguing project. A paleographer with an original mind, he had attended the Warburg Institute in London before the war. He advised me that if I wanted to get a job in museums, I should become a paleographer as well. I was especially influenced by the example of Sylvie Béguin, who was several years older than I. Our families had been neighbors in Saint-Malo; we had met up again in Paris, and [ 17 ]

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A Key to the Louvre she told me of her own career path—liberal arts, then art history and museum studies. One thing is certain: from early on, I was interested in the collections and exhibitions in provincial museums. On my vacations in Colmar, Angers, Laval, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Nancy, and Montpellier, I began visiting all the local museums that had been reopened to the public. I still have the notes in which I completely reorganized the Musée Fabre at Montpellier—a tad presumptuous, to say the least! Why this lifelong interest? This need to index every painting I’ve ever seen, to inventory others I found in every book I could lay my hands on? To itemize all the Rembrandts or Fragonards in French collections? No doubt an adolescent passion for classification. And alongside this went a profound interest in the national patrimony. The result of my family’s traditional patriotism? Perhaps. From my first serious readings in art history, before my studies made them more systematic, I’ve retained a keen memory of Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms and Salomon Reinach’s Apollo—an admirable little pocket guide, the equivalent of which I would love to find today—as well as of several “coΩee table” books. During the war, the publisher Pierre Tisné had continued to produce lavish books with color plates, which was rare in those years. He had published Germain Bazin’s Corot, which I still have, in a collection edited by René Huyghe. It was my first purchase immediately after the war, along with Charles Sterling’s book on the French primitives, a true masterpiece from 1942. Soon afterward I read Bernard Berenson, and for my own inventories used his “lists” from 1932, a repertory of Italian Renaissance paintings. I also bought, for their illustrations, the volumes in the precious Collection des Maîtres published by Braun. In the spring of 1946 in Brussels, after having gone to Bruges with my mother to visit my father’s grave, I saw an extraor[ 18 ]

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Learning the Trade dinary exhibition of masterpieces from Dutch museums, including Vermeer’s View of Delft and The Letter, The Governors of the Almshouse and Lady Governors of the Almshouse by Frans Hals, and Rembrandt’s The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, all of which have remained indelibly etched in my memory. It was the first time I truly saw great paintings up close: the Louvre had reopened, but only partially. From that moment on, this stopped being a simple adolescent pastime. I now wanted to see as many works as possible, of all kinds; to read, to travel— in short, to make it my work. Having decided to follow the museum path, I entered the Lycée Henri IV in 1947 to prepare my entrance exams to the Ecole des Chartes, the school for the training of archivists and paleographers. I stayed there for two years. At the time, to become a curator in a national museum, one had to hold a degree from the advanced section of the Ecole du Louvre. This was one of the reforms begun before the war as part of a large-scale reorganization of museums planned by Henri Verne and Jacques Jaujard and put into practice during the Occupation. The Ecole du Louvre had established a section of its educational program that accepted five or six students a year on the basis of a qualifying examination. The system has taken other forms since, but the number of students remains about the same. Students at the Ecole des Chartes and at certain universities were exempt from this exam. Since I was fairly young and did not have all the requisite training, especially in Latin—to my shame, as my grandfather taught it—I washed out in my first year at the Ecole des Chartes. Meanwhile, the rules had changed: the administration abolished the exemption that ensured paleographers admittance into the advanced section of the Ecole du Louvre. At that point, I had two choices: either continue studying to be an archivist or take the qualifying exam for the Louvre, which is what I decided to do. Despite my failure at the Ecole [ 19 ]

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LACLOT TE

A Key to the ouvre MEMOIRS OF A CURATOR

A Key to the ouvre

Michel Laclotte