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<\/p>\nOn any given day, around 25,000 visitors crowd into Paris\u2019s Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, but the vast majority manage to stay clear of the sleepy north-east corner of the Richelieu Wing, home to key works by the French Classicist painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). That may change this spring, when the museum\u2019s former president-director, the art historian and curator Pierre Rosenberg, brings new attention to the artist with the publication of his long-awaited four-volume catalogue raisonn\u00e9 of Poussin\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n
Nominally a specialist in French and Italian art of the 17th and 18th centuries, Rosenberg, now 89, is a kind of living embodiment of the whole museum.<\/p>\n
Born in Paris in 1936 to German-Jewish parents who fled the Nazis, his family survived the war in hiding in south-western France. Rosenberg first arrived at the Louvre in 1962, at the invitation of Charles de Gaulle\u2019s minister of culture, later heading up the department of paintings during the museum\u2019s dramatic relaunch in the 1980s and early 90s, symbolised by the 1989 completion of I.M. Pei\u2019s sculptural entrance, the Louvre Pyramid. He finally took over the top job, stewarding the expanded museum from 1994 to 2001. All the while, he has also been curating major shows on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Grand Palais in Paris to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. To this day, he still holds the title of the Louvre\u2019s honorary president-director.<\/p>\n
Living legend<\/p>\n
Open and affable, but marked by a measure of formality, he is spoken about by colleagues with a mixture of genuine affection and frank wonderment.<\/p>\n
The French art historian Neville Rowley, a curator at Berlin\u2019s Gem\u00e4ldegalerie, says Rosenberg is \u201ccertainly a living legend\u201d. The British art historian Colin B. Bailey, the director of New York\u2019s Morgan Library & Museum, who has known the Frenchman for over four decades but concedes that \u201cI\u2019m still in awe of him\u201d. And the US art historian Christopher Wood, whose 2019 book A History of Art History is an authoritative overview of the profession, refers to him simply as \u201cthe great Rosenberg\u201d.<\/p>\n
Rosenberg and his wife B\u00e9atrice de Rothschild usually divide their time between a house in Paris\u2019s Sixth Arrondissement, and Venice, where the couple have an apartment in a Grand Canal palazzo. This winter, the two were staying put in Paris while B\u00e9atrice recuperated from an illness. Invariably wearing a necktie, Rosenberg receives his visitors in the glass-enclosed foyer, where an ornamental door handle recalls the building\u2019s origins as a public bathhouse.<\/p>\n
\u2018Eight kilos\u2019 of thinking<\/p>\n
Rosenberg worked on his first Poussin exhibition in the early 1960s, when he was a very young curator at the Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts in Rouen. The new Poussin catalogue represents six-and-a-half decades of thinking about the artist, and he is pleased to measure the accomplishment not in years, or even pages, but weight\u2014\u201ceight kilos\u201d.<\/p>\n
Louvre-goers, even if they make it to the right place, tend to speed past the Poussin masterpieces. Does their lack of interest surprise him? Not really, he says: \u201cPoussin is a very difficult painter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in Normandy, Poussin spent most of his career in Rome, where his intellectual interests and deeply allusive approach mean that true appreciation can require a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of classical and Biblical sources. In France, the artist is still associated with the rarified work of the poststructuralist philosopher Louis Marin (1931-92), while in the Anglo-American world he is wedded to the controversial career of the British art historian, and notorious Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt. Rosenberg\u2019s new publication is nothing if not comprehensive and manages to absorb the often abstruse reflections of Marin, while engaging with, and sometimes correcting, Blunt\u2019s own 1966 single-volume catalogue of Poussin\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n
The challenge of doing this kind of catalogue raisonn\u00e9, says the University of Chicago\u2019s Richard Neer, an art historian specialising in 17th-century French painting, is addressing \u201cimportant issues of attribution\u201d connected to the artist, who had many followers and imitators. Among the works rejected by Blunt but now accepted by Rosenberg is the Kimbell Art Museum\u2019s Venus and Adonis (around 1628-29). Among those accepted by Blunt but rejected by Rosenberg is the Toledo Museum of Art\u2019s The Holy Family with Saint John (around 1627).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Poussin’s Venus and Adonis (around 1628-29) in the Kimbell Art Museum<\/p>\n
Fateful encounter<\/p>\n
The new catalogue also reflects Rosenberg\u2019s evolving ideas. The Louvre\u2019s Mars and Venus (around 1625) is a picture that he had long considered a copy. Then, in 2012, he had a fateful encounter with the work. \u201cI was walking through the galleries by chance, and I saw the picture in very strong sunlight. It was filthy, covered by varnishes, and I suddenly asked, \u2018Is this not by Poussin?\u2019 The picture was sent to the lab, cleaned, and studied by me more seriously. And now, I\u2019m sure.\u201dBlunt had attributed the work to an unnamed French Baroque painter called the Hovingham Master.<\/p>\n
Rosenberg can still speak with some regard for Blunt, whose complicated career, including decades of service at Buckingham Palace as Surveyor of the Queen\u2019s Pictures and public exposure as a spy, was covered in the Netflix series The Crown. He says Blunt\u2019s review of his Poussin show in Rouen, which appeared in the Burlington Magazine, helped launch his own career\u2014\u201cit was the beginning for me,\u201d he says. And he can vividly recall a private lunch at London\u2019s Courtauld Institute, where Blunt, the longtime director, served him undercooked chicken. Blunt \u201cspoke French better than I do\u201d, he says. \u201cBut he was a terrible cook.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
One of the works in Pierre Rosenberg\u2019s collection, Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Northern Lapwing Hanging by One Leg (1750)<\/p>\n
Grand Si\u00e8cle Museum; Photo: Julien Garraud<\/p>\n
As his Paris house amply demonstrates, Rosenberg is not just a curator and scholar, but an inveterate collector. He keeps his private library, comprising tens of thousands of volumes, in a low-ceilinged basement, with a documentation centre, open to enquiring scholars, on an upper floor. In between, on just about every available bit of wall space, he displays art amassed over the decades. Though concentrating on 17th-century works\u2014among them several Poussin drawings\u2014his holdings extend across centuries, including a 1750 still life by Jean-Baptiste Oudry; an obscene drawing by the Swedish Neoclassical artist Johan Tobias Sergel; a 19th-century Poussin-inspired study by Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix; and an Italian Futurist sketch from the 1920s.<\/p>\n
A curious passion<\/p>\n
One surprising passion: glass animals from Venice\u2019s Murano workshops. These curious, comical objects crowd tabletops and cabinet shelves, and seem to come from another world than the refined works on the walls. Bailey, however, sees a connection\u2014\u201cvirtuosity\u201d. Rosenberg says the animals \u201cmake me smile\u201d.<\/p>\n
Rosenberg cannot recall exactly how many catalogues raisonn\u00e9s he has worked on, but puts the number at six or more. In addition to Poussin\u2019s drawings\u2014co-edited with the French art historian Louis-Antoine Prat\u2014he has worked on volumes about Antoine Watteau\u2019s drawings and Jean Sim\u00e9on Chardin\u2019s paintings, among others. For Rowley, this kind of herculean effort is synonymous with a particular generation of art historians who fell between the less exacting connoisseurship of the pre-Second World War era and today\u2019s ideologically minded younger art historians. Done right, a catalogue raisonn\u00e9, he says, is not only \u201cabout seeing, but also checking, double-checking, and triple-checking\u201d. Rosenberg\u2019s ability to combine this level of scholarship with his curatorial career, assembling decades of landmark shows, \u201cis just absolutely amazing\u201d, Rowley says.<\/p>\n
Now that the paintings catalogue is complete, Rosenberg is readying another legacy\u2014a new and ambitious museum just outside Paris, in a derelict 19th-century building in the western suburb of Saint-Cloud. Working with its director, the French architectural historian Alexandre Gady, Rosenberg is the motor behind the Mus\u00e9e du Grand Si\u00e8cle, covering France\u2019s 17th-century heyday under Louis XIV. Taking shape in a one-time royal barracks overlooking the Seine, it will display Rosenberg\u2019s holdings, down to the Murano animals. The \u20ac120m project is on track for a 2028 opening.<\/p>\n
Thinking bigger<\/p>\n
The museum project comes at a time of bad headlines and bad omens for the Louvre itself, which, in addition to the shocking robbery last autumn, is coping with strikes, building leaks and increasingly unmanageable crowds. Looking back on his tenure, which predates the current crises, would he do anything different?<\/p>\n
Yes, he says, citing an inability to see how exploding visitor numbers might impact the institution. In planning for the Louvre\u2019s expansion over the course of the 1980s and 90s\u2014a long-term project called the Grand Louvre\u2014\u201cwe made a great mistake\u201d, he says. The goal was to create a museum for four or five million visitors annually, he says, not more than twice that, which is what the Louvre is often dealing with now. One new controversial solution is to relaunch the museum again, with, among other interventions, a third main entrance. Rosenberg is in favour but would not comment on a controversial suggestion to isolate the Mona Lisa in its own area as a form of crowd control.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, while figuring out what will go where in the Saint-Cloud museum, Rosenberg is also working on another new project\u2014Poussin\u2019s letters, which are \u201cquite beautiful\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On any given day, around 25,000 visitors crowd into Paris\u2019s Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, but the vast majority manage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,165398,86007,165397,165399,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-460044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-french-art","tag-musee-du-louvre","tag-nicolas-poussin","tag-the-grand-siecle","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}