The Louvre is a right royal mess at present

Press, 20 July 1987, Page 31

The Louvre is a right royal mess at present

By

SYDNEY RUBIN

NZPA-AP Paris The Louvre museum, for centuries the palace of French kings, is a right royal mess at the moment. Tourists are dodging cranes, trudging along gravel trails and trampling dirt to find the way inside. “Thank you for helping me get in here,” panted a perspiring American tourist to a young guard at the Louvre. “I’ve been wandering around out there for 20 minutes. Why don’t they put a sign on the front door?” “But there is no front door, monsieur,” said the guard with a shrug. The new main entrance to the museum won’t be ready until next spring. The 700-year-old building is getting a facelift, and a multi-million dollar glass pyramid designed by the architect, I. M. Pei, will mark the main entrance. A group of German tourists followed freshly painted arrows to “Le Grand Louvre.” But instead of finding art, they found a temporary shack

containing an exhibit on the construction project. The exhibit was closed because of the construction. “Today the museum is 39.87 per cent closed,” said one of the hostesses at the information counter, after checking a computer chart. She was not exactly sure what that meant. “It changes all the time,” she said. Complicating matters are galleries that open for only part of the day. The hostess said some of the 225 galleries were closed during the lunch hour. “I went in one gallery, and everyone said it was closed. I went back five minutes later, and it was open,” said a New York lover of Oriental antiques. “This is nuts. Nobody knows which end is up.” Armed with his museum book, Michelin guide and map, the New Yorker trudged on in quest of the Venus de Milo. The perplexity was international. The bemusement of a group of Japanese tourists standing before a flowering of arrows and letters (“Mona

Lisa” “Toilette” “Point d’Orientation”) rivaled that of some non-French-speaking Scandinavian boys looking at two large and identical explanatory plaques, both in French, next to the Winged Victory. People spent less time looking at the art than at their museum maps, in which Mona Lisa was spelled wrong in six languages and a colour-coded chart guided visitors to galleries that were closed. Although miserably muddled, the maps were popular with visitors, who used them as fans in the stifling heat of the unventilated galleries. The intrepid tourists tramped sand from the construction areas on to the scuffed wood floors. Dust coated everything ffom baseboard to moulding, and someone wondered aloud how much grime was wafting on to the art. But it was still the Louvre. The paintings seemed more soothing and eternal in the midst of temporary chaos, a statue more beautiful by being hard to find.