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PARIS — The square at the center of the Louvre, dominated by I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, was desolate early Friday morning, save for a few tourists taking selfies.
The museum was closed to visitors, as Paris experienced its worst flooding since 1982 — but inside, staff members and volunteers had worked around the clock to remove artworks from the threat of the rising waters of the Seine River.
I was part of a small group of journalists whom the French culture minister,Audrey Azoulay; the museum’s president, Jean-Luc Martinez; and other officials took on a tour of the strangely vacant museum on Friday afternoon. (Broadcast journalists were given priority; we scribblers tagged behind, straining to hear what was said.)
We were led through the Denon Wing, home of the “Mona Lisa” and usually the most crowded of the museum’s three wings. Rooms packed with Renaissance and Baroque Italian masterpieces were ghostly. The “Winged Victory of Samothrace” was bereft of its usual admirers.
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Artworks were packed to be moved from the Louvre Museum’s storeroom to the exhibition halls, where they would be less vulnerable to rising flood waters.Credit
Inside the galleries containing Greek and Roman antiquities, the situation was more chaotic. Near the 2,200-year-old “Venus de Milo,” storage boxes were piled atop one another. Boxes completely encircled some sculptures, like one of a crouching Aphrodite from the third century B.C.
At the other end of the room, the goddess of wisdom, Athena, kept an eye on the metal drawers stacked to her side. The Hellenistic gallery had become just another storage room for treasures from elsewhere in the Louvre.
Some 150,000 artworks in storage rooms, and an additional 7,000 pieces in galleries, were deemed vulnerable to flooding, and many of them were moved to higher floors starting on Thursday evening.
Museum officials activated a flood-protection plan established in 2002. The plan includes, among other things, an inventory of all works that would need to be transferred to upper floors of the museum and plans to slow the spread of any water entering the museum.
DETAIL
Paris
Élysée Palace
Paris
Pont de l’Alma
Louvre Museum
CHOISY-LE-ROI
Musée du Quai Branly
Musée d’Orsay
Eiffel Tower
1/2 Mile
Seine
Pont de Bir-Hakeim
Cathedral of Notre-Dame
Water Level of the Seine in Paris
1910
25 feet
1955
20
June 3
5 p.m.
15
2010
10
5
0
3
2
June 1
31
30
29
May 28
Although the Seine was expected to crest by Friday evening at around 20 feet, and no water had entered the museum thus far, officials were taking no chances.
The works that were in storage were the easiest to handle. “It took us less time than we thought, because the artwork was already in containment boxes, so we just had to move them from one floor to an upper one,” said Adel Ziane, the museum’s deputy director of communications.
The most painstaking work involved the removal of works from display cases. Yannick Lintz, the head curator of Islamic art at the Louvre, posted to Twitter images of the display cases, emptied after a long night of work, and of the plastic storage crates where the objects were wrapped and packaged.
In some galleries, it looked as though a family was about to move in — or out. Boxes were subdivided by foam boards, creating spaces for vases and other precious objects. A seemingly abandoned ancient frieze sat on a wooden pallet on the floor of one gallery, half wrapped in plastic sheets.
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As the Seine rose to unusually high levels outside the Louvre on Friday, workers packed pieces of art into protective cases. “For the artwork which was exhibited and not in storage, like for the department of Islamic art, we had to move the pieces from their window displays,” Mr. Ziane said. “We have a team of exhibition-space managers who take care of handling the artwork, and a team of curators who watch over everything.”
For all its complexity, it was nothing like 1938-39, when the museum was stripped of its masterpieces ahead of the German invasion of France in 1940. “Walls of Louvre Blankly Stare While Treasures Rest in Vaults,” aheadline in the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune declared. The museum was partly reopened during the German occupation, but without its top masterpieces, which were hidden in secret locations across France. (Nazi officials eventually discovered the location of most of them, but decided to leave them in place.)
The 2002 flood-protection plan, for all its detail, does not prioritize among works of art. How, in a palace of treasures, can one select the very best?
“It is difficult to say which one is more valuable,” Mr. Ziane said. “They are all priceless, and we decided the evacuation according to their risk of exposure.”
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The level of the Seine river had reached 18 and a half feet by midday Friday in Paris — nearly waist-high on the statue of the Zouave at the Pont de l’AlmaCredit
Besides Islamic art, the staff also moved works from Coptic displays and most of the Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities in storage.
Mr. Martinez, the museum’s president, said it was difficult to estimate the total number of works moved, but he said it amounted to “thousands and thousands.” Officials were monitoring the levels of the Seine constantly, he said, to see if they needed to move even more works.
“The situation is changing hour per hour — it is still difficult to know when we are going to reopen,” he said.
Earlier this year, the museum did a training exercise, simulating a flood situation, involving in the Islamic art department. That helped the process this week move more smoothly.
But in the long run, the Louvre plans to move more artworks that are not on display to another location. By 2019, it intends to store nearly all those works in the regional branch of the Louvre in Lens, about 125 miles north of Paris.
Tourism is a big driver of the French economy, and Ms. Azoulay, who became culture minister in February, took pains to emphasize that things were under control.
”For now, the artworks of the Louvre are not in danger,” she said. “We have anticipated the situation and the emergency plan worked quite well.”
Other institutions, however, were less fortunate, particularly those in the Loire Valley.
The Musée Girodet in Montargis, devoted to the work of the Romantic painter Anne-Louis Girodet, was heavily damaged.
In the Loire Valley, bridges sustained damage and antique furniture was destroyed at the 16th-century Château de la Ferté-Saint-Aubin, which only recently reopened after a renovation. About 25 miles away, the Château de Chambord, a Unesco World Heritage site, was heavily damaged.
And the gardens of the Château de Fougères-sur-Bièvre, about 130 miles southwest of Paris, were completely submerged. “It is such a waste, because we had just finished two years of restoration work,” said Philippe Bélaval, the president of the National Monuments Center of France.
In the late 1960s, the artist Vito Acconci wandered into a movie theater near Times Square hoping to catch an art film and was confused to see a group of ragged-looking musicians take the stage. That group turned out to be the Velvet Underground, whose first album sold poorly but whose influence was so profound, as Brian Eno later said, that everyone who bought the record started a band.
The same sentiment might be expressed about Mr. Acconci’s influence in the contemporary art world. The genetic impact of his performances, photographs and video works from just an eight-year period — 1968 to 1976 — is so pervasive that it is difficult to trace. But Mr. Acconci, who turned 76 this year, has not had a retrospective in the United States in more than three decades, and his most important work can now sometimes seem more like legend than fact.
That is set to change on June 19, when MoMA PS1 in Queens opens “Vito Acconci: Where We Are Now (Who Are We Anyway?), 1976,” which traces his career from his early days as a poet through his art-world heyday and around the corner of a radical turn in the mid-1970s, when he abandoned the gallery world and remade himself as a highly unorthodox architect and designer, to the confusion of many.
In a series of interviews over the last three months as the PS1 show was being planned, Mr. Acconci spoke about his perpetual unease in the art world, and before that the poetry world, where he said he always felt like an outsider, someone with a relentless creative drive for which a genre had not — and still has not — been invented. Almost because of this, he has opened bold new avenues over the years for artists as important and widely varied as Laurie Anderson, Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley and Tania Bruguera.
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An image from Vito Acconci’s “Soap & Eyes,” from 1970.
“I hated the word artist,” he said. “To me, even in the years when I was showing things in galleries, it seemed to me that I didn’t really have anything to do with art. The word itself sounded, and still sounds to me, like ‘high art,’ and that was never what I saw myself doing.”
As far as the art world was concerned, his leap into architecture — designs for things like public parks, airport rest areas and a man-made island — was almost as if Mr. Acconci decided to enter the witness protection program. But he disappeared right in the art world’s midst, continuing to teach generations of art students (at Brooklyn College and at Pratt Institute); working in a cluttered, book-saturated studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn; and lecturing so often over the years that his shambling-eccentric presence — his long unruly hair, his all-black wardrobe, his gravel-bed voice with its distinctive loping stutter and, before he quit, the endless cigarettes he would light and stub out and light again — became a kind of ongoing work in itself.
Born in the Bronx into a Catholic Italian family, the overprotected only son of a bathrobe manufacturer and a mother who later worked in a public-school cafeteria, Mr. Acconci came of age in the politically agitated years when artists began trying to find ways around the making and selling of objects. They turned to their bodies, their ideas and their actions as the currency of a new realm. Along with peers like Chris Burden, Adrian Piper, Dan Graham and Valie Export, Mr. Acconci began conceiving and documenting performances — at a rate of sometimes one a day in what he called “a kind of fever” in 1969 — that were conducted on the streets or for audiences so small that they seemed almost not to have happened.
In Mr. Acconci’s case, the work grew out of an experience as an aspiring poet and fiction writer whose fascination with the physical space of the page eventually led out into the world. In 1962, in thrall to postmodern writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and John Hawkes, he enrolled in the graduate writing program at the University of Iowa, taking along with him a short story he had written, titled “Run-Around,” that when read anonymously in the class provoked a minor riot. Its subject, a horrifying surrealist-sculptural vision, was a recently limbless man. It began: “They cut him up and since the chairs had just been varnished for the celebration, he was set down on a giant floor urn. The chalice-shaped jar was waist-high for most people, but not for Rockram, because he had no legs.”
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Vito Acconci’s “Applications” from 1970.Credit
“When the professor asked for reactions,” Mr. Acconci recalled, “one guy said that whoever wrote it should be chucked out the window into the Iowa River.”
Back in New York City after getting his degree, in the wastelands of the Lower East Side, the East Village and SoHo, Mr. Acconci began experimenting with using the city as another means of making literature.
In one of his most-cited early works, “Following Piece,” from 1969, he spent each day for almost a month following a person picked at random on the street, sometimes with a friend following Mr. Acconci to record the action. The rules were only that he had to keep following the person until he or she entered a private place where Mr. Acconci couldn’t go in. During years when crime and urban paranoia were spiking, the work might be seen as a creepy metaphor for vulnerability, but Mr. Acconci saw it essentially as an open-ended and in many ways optimistic narrative.
“It was sort of a way to get myself off the writer’s desk and into the city — it was like I was praying for people to take me somewhere I didn’t know how to go myself,” he once told the musician Thurston Moore. (The band Sonic Youth was formed not long after Mr. Moore first met Mr. Acconci and began playing in various arrangements with Kim Gordon and Mr. Acconci’s girlfriend at the time, Anne DeMarinis.)
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Vito Acconci’s “Pryings” from 1971.
The dozens of performance pieces that followed through the early 1970s, many of them now little-known, contained varying elements of existential unease, bodily discomfort, exhibitionism and gender play — elements he shared with some other artists of the time, particularly with female artists — but also a kind of wit and a Svengali aura that were Mr. Acconci’s own.
In “Trademarks,” (1970) Mr. Acconci sat naked on a floor and bit himself wherever he could reach, then applied printer’s ink to the marks and stamped them on paper and other surfaces.
In “Pryings” (1971), Mr. Acconci and Kathy Dillon engaged in a disturbing pas-de-deux, in which she clenched her eyes shut as he grabbed her face and tried to force them open. (Ms. Dillon, with whom Mr. Acconci lived for a time, is a powerful presence in his early performances; after they separated they fell out of touch. “Or a better way to say it would be that she thought she had to get away from me because I was taking too much of her life, which I guess I was,” he said.)
In “Seedbed,” (1972) — undoubtedly Mr. Acconci’s best-known piece, which has in a sense unfairly overshadowed much of his other work — he constructed an angled false floor at the Sonnebend Gallery in SoHo and hid himself beneath it with a microphone, speaking luridly to the people who walked above him, masturbating as he spoke. The piece became a touchstone of performance art in part because of its sheer, outlandish audacity. But it also drew a remarkable line through the preoccupations that began Mr. Acconci’s career and carry it up to the present day. The idea for the act under the floor arose linguistically, after he turned to a thesaurus to find synonyms for the word “foundation” and was struck by the poetry of “seedbed.” And in constructing the floor, he was already beginning to explore his interests in architecture and public space, in this case a space in which he could merge with the building, ceasing to be a discrete human presence and becoming instead a kind of quantum field.
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An image from the film “Seedbed,” by Vito Acconci, from 1972.Credit
“I wanted people to go through space somehow, not to have people in front of space, looking at something, bowing down to something,” Mr. Acconci said of the performance. “I wanted space people could be involved in.”
Holly Block, the executive director of the Bronx Museum, which commissioned an architectural environment from him in 2009, said: “A lot of people don’t understand Vito’s turn to architecture, but I think he wanted to be more ambitious and make pieces that lived in the world — and in people’s lives — in a different way than artworks usually do, and it was a risky and courageous thing to do.”
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The show, which is being designed by Acconci Studios, the firm that Mr. Acconci runs in close collaboration with his wife, Maria, has been a kind of fragile work-in-progress over the past months, threatening at times to collapse under his unpredictably evolving ideas and inspirations. “You have to think about him deciding ‘Maybe I should go to China tomorrow,’” said Mr. Biesenbach. “That’s just how Vito is. With great artists — and Vito is one — sometimes you have to have unprecedented flexibility.”
But the tension also comes from Mr. Acconci’s longstanding desire not to have his career bifurcated into pre- and post-architecture. “There are people who like to keep Vito in what I call a prison of a few years, and it’s not right,” said Maria Acconci, 36, a writer who met Mr. Acconci after seeing his work at a retrospective in Barcelona in 2004 and is a fierce defender of his prerogatives.
Mr. Biesenbach said he believed the show would strike a delicate balance to reveal the connections between the early work and Acconci Studio — the “two Vitos,” as he calls it — though even as recently as late May he remained uncertain whether the exhibition would open as planned.
Mr. Acconci, around the same time, seemed to be leaning toward it actually happening — legend becoming fact. “I never liked museums,” he said. “They always seemed artificially separated from real life. But you have to be seen, and I guess I’ve never cared enough about that. Maybe I should have.”
Rembrandt’s “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” circa 1629, at the Morgan Library & Museum.
“Are you looking at me? I certainly hope so.” If pictures could speak, these would be the words delivered by a small bust-length ink drawing of a youngish man with a big nose, small eyes, the ghost of a mustache and artfully tousled hair, at the Morgan Library & Museum. He frowns a little, as if wary of attention, but you can tell he’s kidding-serious, trying out a pose of artist as prodigy.
The drawing is a self-portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn, a quickie done around 1628-29, when he was in his early 20s, still living in Leiden, his hometown, and gearing up for the big time, an Amsterdam career. His pose wasn’t just bluff. He really was prodigious, and he knew it, because he’d been told so by smart people, and because he had already produced, or was about to, an exceptional painting, which is the center of a rich, salon-size show at the Morgan called “Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece.”
Born to a prosperous mill owner in 1606, he studied art in Leiden, a university town, and looked closely at what the local talent, past and present, had to offer. His initial model for printmaking was the 16th-century engraver Lucas van Leyden, some of whose compositions, blending classical poise and real-world detail, he repeated, with tweaks. He briefly studied painting with a contemporary artist, Pieter Lastman, who had been to Rome, where he may have met Caravaggio, and whose example brought Rembrandt as close to Italy as he would ever get.
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“Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” circa 1629, pen and brown ink and gray wash over black chalk.
Finally, in 1627, his apprenticeships done, Rembrandt buddied up with a fellow Lastman student, Jan Lievens, to share a studio, and there began to sort out a mature style. Luckily for history, someone was on hand to document the early results. In 1629, the roving diplomat and connoisseur Constantijn Huygens dropped in on the Lievens-Rembrandt workshop and recorded the visit in his autobiography. (The original manuscript, on loan from the Royal Library in The Hague, is in the Morgan show.)
In it, Huygens reviews both artists at length, judiciously noting their flaws and considerable strengths. Then when he comes to a particular, fresh-off-the-easel painting by Rembrandt, he loses his cool and just raves, astonished that “a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller” could produce a work that compares to “all the beauty that has been produced through the ages.” The picture is the one around which the Morgan show turns.
Titled “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” it depicts a scene that appears in only one of the four gospels, and then as a mere footnote to the Passion narrative. At the Last Supper, Jesus announces that one of his disciples would betray him into enemy hands. The culprit is Judas, who has already been paid by the chief priest and elders of the Jerusalem temple to lead soldiers to the doomed man and identify him by a kiss. Once the deed is done, however, Judas is crushed by remorse. He rushes to the temple and throws the payment money down in front of those who hired him, as if that might absolve his guilt, though he is beyond believing it will. In the painting, we see him kneeling and wailing with grief, his clothes disheveled, his scalp bloody where he has torn out his hair. The elders back off in shock; the chief priest holds up one hand as if to block out the sight of the man, push him away, disappear him. Judas will leave the temple and hang himself.
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A self-portrait by Rembrandt, circa 1629, in pen and brown ink and gray wash.Credit
The painting, on loan from a British private collection and in the United States for the first time, is powerful in ways that Rembrandt’s great work turned out to be, with its operatic, Verdian largeness of gesture, its sense for light as both specific and cosmic, and its piercing, unembarrassable instinct for human emotion. Considered beside the earlier Lastman-inspired work by Rembrandt that preceded it, the ranking of this picture as his first masterpiece seems plausible enough. (None of the Lastmanesque pictures are at the Morgan, though what may be the artist’s earliest surviving etching, a scene of the infant Jesus’ circumcision from around 1625, is.)
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The picture has other distinctions, too. It is among the very few Rembrandt paintings of any period for which several preparatory drawings exist. Five are in the show, two on reverse sides of a single sheet, all joining the painting for what is believed to be the first time since they were together in Rembrandt’s studio. They include what looks like a very preliminary study, a lightly touched, barely illegible pen-and-ink sketch of the kneeling Judas and a single figure, with the flip side a fuller, more emphatically drawn version that maps out the composition’s architectural setting. The most beautiful drawing, lent by the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam, is almost entirely tonal, atmospheric: an image of a handful of the painting’s subsidiary figures dwarfed by what looks like an enveloping cloud of light, with a torrent of shadow spilling down behind them.
The curators responsible for the show — it was conceived by Per Rumberg, formerly of the Morgan and now at the Royal Academy, London, and installed by John Marciari and Ilona van Tuinen of the Morgan’s department of prints and drawings — expand its scope further by using it to demonstrate Rembrandt’s lifelong interest in biblical themes. Technically, such subjects fell into the category of “history painting,” at the time the most esteemed of genres, the one that any upwardly striving artist — and the young Rembrandt was certainly that — would want to pursue.
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“The Circumcision,” an etching by Rembrandt from around 1625.
But for him, there must have been some other, further allure. He is not known to have been devout, though he seems to have sustained connections to a Mennonite community in Amsterdam. Most likely, the gospel narrative was attractive as a source of personal stories, vignettes of everyday people feeling their way through life, working, loving, losing, sinning, making amends, or trying to, and at some point waking up — or not — to the reality that they are participants in an epic of redemption.
And the show is really about such stories, from self-portraits in which Rembrandt is inventing a public persona to nearly two dozen drawings and prints that depict gospel scenes and that are installed in the chronological order they take in the New Testament, from the youthful “Circumcision” etching to four depictions of the “Descent From the Cross.” (The Judas painting is positioned in its logical place in the sequence.) And here we also have Rembrandt early, middle and late, erasing the line, as he consistently did, between high and low, sacred and profane, the gross and the transcendental.
Two of the “Descent From the Cross” images, both late, from around 1654, 15 years before his death, give a strong sense of his range. One is an etching in which the tableau of Jesus’ body being lowered from the cross is monumentally composed, theatrically illuminated, observed from a distance. The effect is of ritualistic gravity, Homeric weight.
The other is a small sheet of rough ink studies of individual elements of the same subject. In one sketch, we see, close up, Jesus’ descending body supported by a single male figure. Their faces touch. The contact is accidental, yet they appear to be exchanging an ever-so-tender kiss of peace. You have to look, and maybe look again, to see the touch, and a third time to take in the drama of spiritual love that’s unfolding. But making us look, and making looking a form of thinking and feeling, was this artist’s stellar, lasting gift.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Mostly Mozart Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall. Opera said on Thursday that the Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin would be its next music director. Here are some facts about him.
FIRST THINGS FIRST It’s pronounced yah-NEEK nay-ZAY say-GHEN.
CURRENT JOBS Music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 2012 and of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra since 2008. Artistic director and principal conductor of the Orchestre Métropolitain in his hometown, Montreal, since 2000. He’s also a frequent guest with major European ensembles like the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics.
WHEN HE STARTS There’s the rub: Not until 2020. (He will be “music director designate,” starting with the 2017-18 season, conducting two productions a year.)
HIS SPECIALTIES He’s a galvanizing force in the standard repertory, with a flair for the dramatic. Since his Met debut on New Year’s Eve, 2009, he has mostly led mainstream operas like “Carmen,” “Otello,” “Faust” and “La Traviata.” Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and Dvorak’s “Rusalka” have taken him off the beaten path, but only slightly; those are both classics, too.
A COMMUTING LIFE He announced on Thursday that he was extending his contract with the Philadelphia Orchestra through the 2025-26 season, so he’ll be spending a good deal of time shuttling along Interstate 95.
EARLY DREAMS Born in 1975, he began piano lessons at 5, and at 10, he decided he wanted to be a conductor.
A BIT OF INK He has a turtle tattoo on his right shoulder, acquired while on vacation in Tahiti.
PERSONAL LIFE His longtime partner, Pierre Tourville, is a violist in the Orchestre Métropolitain.
OUTSIDE INTERESTS The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that he’s a fan of Belgian beer, Björk, Prada, Champagne (particularly Laurent-Perrier demi-sec) and tennis (particularly Rafael Nadal).
