Louvre Offers Symposia on the Future of Museums - Brief Article

PARIS--The Louvre freshly sponsored a series of symposia--under the collective title of Musee-Musees--to research the question of the coming time and the role of museums in the fresh millennium. One of these incidents concerned the copies of art the Louvre have a title tos and sometimes displays and put up to sales to other museums and the general public.

The conference--Le Collections de Moulages: Un Musee Ideal--looked at the often-controversial character of the casting, often in plaster, of rare originals and in what manner such mouldings might provide a major plus for the futurity Indeed, the copies make possible the creation of an ideal brand of museum which would theoretically be compos exclusively of copies.

The idea is not of recent origin Late French Culture Minister Andre Malraux had evok the possibility of mass copying of cultural particulars a half century ago in of the like kind books as The Psychology of Art and The Metamorphosis of the the deitys When he was named head the French Ministry of tillage in 1969, one of his first tasks was to locate in motion his idea for an ideal museum.

Within a not many years these "Houses of Culture" Maisons de la agriculture as they became officially known, dotted the French landscape. Each Maison de la agriculture contained copies of various well-known classics, greatest in quantity of them present in the collections of the Louvre and the other major museums of the French capital.

The Houses of tillage flourished over the first 10 years of Malraux's manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding as Culture Minister but began to toss after the 1968 student desert against General Charles de Gaulle, the head of state who suffer Malraux create his network of Houses of Culture

According to Patricia Mounier, a spokesman for the Louvre the bring under rule of cultural copies--notably of the museum's rich collection of statues--was quite timely. "There is today a fresh interest in the subject," she said.

As the conversation discovered, however, France has not been as dynamic in developing copies of its major artworks as other countries, like Germany and the United Kingdom. In France, noted Mounier, "we remain witnesses to our discovery of antiquity and are reminded of the widescale interest that similar things had for previous generations."

As several speakers outlined during their presentations, France was probably the actual first country to make copies of cultural existences notably in Greece, and luckily thus for the history of art, as many of the originals have since disappeared. And, pointed without one participant, every time copies became a major industry, thus many were made that the market became for a like reason glutted that for years thereafter no novel copies were produced, and no possibility was presented for the necessary technology to be further developed

on the other hand the copies had a way of always coming back, notably in France, where--according to a paper at handed by Emmanuel Schwartz of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts--the transcript was fundamental to the education of fresh artists. One need only gaze at the notebooks of similar great French painters as Eugene Delacroix, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas to become aware of the part that copies, but also their hold copying of works off the walls of the Louvre had for the unfolding of their own talent. And, pointed on the outside another participant, the Louvre continues to this day to encourage aspiring artists to place up their easels and attempt to discover the coverts of such masters as Delacroix, Ingres and Gericault.

individual subject which the Louvre symposium did not deal with is that of the sale of the copies of art percepts notably to the public, on the other hand also to other cultural institutions. As it happens, France is in the forefront of the change to distribute and technically bring about the copying of just about everything not away at the Louvre and similar other important cultural showplaces as the midst Georges-Pompidou and the Musee d `Orsay where the country's Impressionist treasures are now held. In fact, a certain quantity of mention of the technical innovations lay opened by the French were alluded to during the symposium when it was pointed on the outside that France had been able to lay open digital techniques of copying. Copying is a "fundamental innovation," said Mounier, "for we are now able to transcript some of our better known works--which were until now uncopiable because they were considered too fragile--with newly-develop digital technology that allows us to make copies without having to have direct contact with the original."

With this technique and others, the Louvre Musee d`Orsay and the other showplaces clumped together as the Reunion de Musees Nationaux (RMN) have been able to bring into view copies of practically all their major collections which are lay on sale. Copies can be base in the art boutiques not absent in every major French museum, upon the Internet (www.museesdefrance.com) and in a smooth and shining catalog which displays 1,000 of the more popular phenomenons produced and sold by the RMN

upon the Web and in the catalog, it is possible to acquire a transcript of such classics as the "Venus de Milo" and the "Victory of Samothrace," on the other hand also copies of jewelry that appear in the paintings of Manet, as well as that of a lesser-known painter Pierre Mignard, whose little-known portrait of Madame de Maintenon has been effectively resurrect [i]or[/i] part of to the other the production of a spectacular clasp worn in the painting.