“Building the Louvre” – CFP – Special issue of L’Esprit Créateur
Edited by Patrick M. Bray and Phillip John Usher
Like no other French architectural structure, the Louvre has crystallized discourse on city space and national power for over a thousand years. From its origins as a medieval fortress depicted in medieval Books of Hours, towering over the peasants who work the fields of the agricultural land that then surrounded it, the Louvre has evolved into a tourist site and postmodern logo that has been sold to other museums around the world, including recent, controversial licensing of its name to a museum in Abu Dhabi, demonstrating the building’s enduring image as embodiment of cultural prestige and power. In traditional works on the Louvre, this history—of both transformation and permanence—is often relegated to the presence of anecdotal quotations. The present project, the first of its kind, makes such questions central to its inquiry.
The chapters of this volume will trace the evolving connection between art and politics as articulated by the Louvre as physical site and productive concept by bringing together perspectives from art and architectural history, literature, and cultural studies. What emerges trans-historically is a pattern of constant interaction that collects and legitimizes forms of authority. Rather than a history of the Louvre, we practice an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to initiate a dialogue between previously disconnected perspectives in order to read the Louvre as a structure that cannot be separated from cultural objects (books, films, artworks, the Louvre’s own architectural details, etc.) which, as witnesses to the Louvre at different periods, allow an understanding of how the Louvre’s meanings are created, rather than inherent to the stone and marble from which it is built. With multiple functions (fortress, palace, museum, school, shopping mall, etc.) and with varied structures of numerous architectural styles, the essence of the Louvre can be categorized neither by a coherent appearance nor by its role as a single institution Like the mythical ship Argos, it has renewed its components, both structural and institutional, many times over the centuries while its name and function have largely remained the same: to produce and project political and aesthetic authority.
We seek article proposals (for completed articles max. 6000 words) from all periods of the Louvre’s long history, but we are particularly interested in the formation of the Louvre as museum around the French Revolution and in the period around the First and Second World Wars. Successful articles will take an interdisciplinary approach, taking into account historical and political context and close readings of cultural works, especially the plastic arts and literature. Proposals of 300-500 words are due to the editors (bray.49@osu.edu and pu116@columbia.edu) by July 1st – completed articles will be due on September 1st 2013.