Ooh-la-la Masterpieces

Some VIP visitors from Paris got a big pink carpet rolled out for them at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts over the weekend. And why not? Bold-face names such as da Vinci, Michelangelo and Vermeer require a little something special. ¶ "The Louvre and the Masterpiece," featuring several dozen artworks on loan from the world's most renowned museum, opened Sunday at the MIA for a nearly three-month run. The sold-out crowd, kept manageable by tickets timed every half-hour, had an air of gravitas - no loud talking, lots of lingering and musing over each sculpture, painting and object. Nearly everyone was wearing an audio-tour headset, determined to soak up every ounce of experience they could. Clusters gathered around Antoine-Louis Barye's lifelike, one-ton bronze sculpture of a lion fighting a snake, said to be so fearsome in the early 19th century that children would faint at the sight. Other popular loitering spots were near a small da Vinci painting side by side with a Michelangelo drawing, de la Tour's "The Card Sharp" and Vermeer's "The Astronomer," which has gained notoriety as a Hitler favorite.

"My chances of flying to France in the next few months weren't too high, so this is the next best thing," said Wes Darby, one of a group of South Dakota State University students who drove four hours from Brookings to see the show.

Elizabeth Shannon of Edina liked the idea of a mini-Louvre. "This is easier to absorb," she said, pointing toward Ingres' portrait of the Duke of Orleans. "When you're at the actual Louvre, there's so many huge canvases that it's easy to overlook a lot, like the wonderful humanity in this one."

The show's themes provide intriguing background into how curators anoint an artwork a masterpiece, and also how they are sometimes duped, as by a tiny glass blue head thought to be ancient and Egyptian, that was found out to have been faked in the 1920s.

"I like the forgeries, because they worked so hard to make it look real, and they even fooled the museum people," said Sienna Ramos, 13, one of many children and teens who came with their parents.

The exhibit is notable not only for the rare chance to see art from the Louvre without leaving Minnesota, but because it's something of an international art-world coup for the museum and director Kaywin Feldman, just two years into the job. The MIA is the second of only two U.S. museums to secure this show, after the High Museum in Atlanta.

Louvre director Henri Loyrette was in town for opening festivities. "The Institute has been very generous with lending to us over the years," he said. "It seemed time for us to do the same."

"I'm very impressed with the Institute's collection, it's deep," said Loyrette, who also planned to visit the Guthrie theater, designed by Jean Nouvel, the French architect who is also designing a new Louvre in Abu Dhabi. "The European art world tends to focus on just America's East Coast, when there is so much more diversity and possibility across the country."

More than 1.3 million people attended the "Masterpiece" show when it was in Atlanta. The MIA exhibit's run is already more than half sold out.

Jim Phelps, who had previously seen the show in Atlanta, said he preferred the MIA's installation to that of the High Museum. "The gray walls are much better than white for looking at the sculptures, and there seem to be a few more pieces here," he said.

In the special gift shop set up at the end of the exhibit, four varieties of fragrances from the legendary Parisian parfumerie Fragonard were on sale, in less-intense eau de toilette form to suit American tastes. But apparently, more Minnesotans would rather learn about Fragonard than smell like it: the fragrances were selling, said a clerk, but not nearly as well as the adjacent book on the history of Fragonard, which had already sold out by early afternoon.