Chapter 7 The Louvre on Celluloid
Curating, Disseminating, and Preserving the Louvre’s Collections in Mid-Twentieth-Century Art Documentaries
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Abstract
The 1940s and 1950s saw the massive production of interesting art documentaries, many of them highly experimental in nature. This essay investigates to what extent these art documentaries can be understood as answers to ICOM’s attempts to merge new museological and curatorial practices with innovative conservation philosophies. Strikingly, a substantial number of those art documentaries centred on museum collections. Focusing on art films on the Louvre’s collection, this essay investigates the complex relationships between the museum’s material collection and the art documentary, thereby revealing the institution’s vision on conservation and display and the museum’s shortcomings. They were ‘filmic, immaterial exhibitions’ and related to their physical counterparts by documenting and reproducing (parts of) the collections: with extreme close-ups to amplify their display, with animations and split screens to analyse individual works of art, or compare them to others, and with additional footage and information (interviews, registering their restoration, or showing the artist at work) to contextualize the works shown.