The closing of the exhibition “The Louvre and the Masterpiece” last weekend marked the culmination of “Louvre Atlanta,” the High Museum ’s unprecedented three-year partnership with the Musée du Louvre in Paris. During the course of the partnership, the High welcomed over 1.3 million visitors to the museum for seven exhibitions that brought a combined 493 treasures from the Louvre’s collection to Atlanta. Masterworks from all eight of the Louvre’s curatorial departments have traveled to the High, including rare works by artists including Raphael, Titian, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Velázquez.
Georges de La Tour. The Card-Sharp with Ace of Diamonds, 17th century. Oil on canvas. Musee du Louvre, Dept of Paintings. Photo: Gerard Blot. c. Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
The exhibitions attracted visitors from all 50 U.S. states, and nearly 140,000 students visited the exhibitions. Since “Louvre Atlanta” opened, the High’s membership has grown to more than 50,000 households, placing the museum’s membership in the top 10 among American art museums.
The High launched its historic partnership with the Musée du Louvre Museum in October 2006 to critical acclaim. The multi-exhibition partnership continued the High’s longstanding strategy of collaborating with international institutions to bring great art to Atlanta . Over the course of “Louvre Atlanta,” curators in Paris and Atlanta collaborated to present hundreds of works of art through a series of long-term thematic exhibitions exploring the range, depth, and historic development of the Louvre’s collections. “Louvre Atlanta ” opened on October 2006, with the exhibitions “Kings as Collectors,” “The King’s Drawings” and “Faces of History and Myth: Busts from the Musée du Louvre.”
In its second year, beginning October 2007, the exhibitions included “The Louvre and the Ancient World,” “The Eye of Josephine,” and “Houdon at the Louvre: Masterworks from the Enlightenment.” The final-year exhibition, “The Louvre and the Masterpiece,” which opened in October 2008, explored how the definition of a “masterpiece,” as well as taste and connoisseurship, has evolved over time. A portion of the exhibitions from the first and second years traveled to the Denver Art Museum , and “The Louvre and the Masterpiece” will now travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. With more than 11,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American art; significant holdings of European paintings and decorative art; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. The High’s Media Arts department produces acclaimed annual film series and festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In November 2005 the High opened three new buildings by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum’s size, creating a vibrant “village for the arts” at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta.
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