The Louvre Museum in Paris, the world’s premiere museum for art and the home of The Mona Lisa, closed its doors Wednesday because organized pickpocket gangs, many of them children who had become more persistent of late, drove museum staff to the breaking point, the French newspaper Le Monde reports.
About 200 security guards and surveillance agents just left their posts, apparently, exercising their right to walk off the job in protest. They are sometimes scared to work, one director was quoted as saying, because they have been threatened by organized and aggressive gangs of pickpockets for more than a year. Many children enter the museum for free. Even a few days after police arrest them, they often return.
Apparently, museum management has reported 150 cases of kids spitting on, insulting, and stealing from museum visitors and employees. Management claims no action was taken in response to their complaints, filed with local prosecutors, and Wednesday was the last straw.
The museum will reopen Thursday, having declared the doors temporarily shut to any individuals who have been identified as pickpockets. About a thousand people work at the Louvre, with about 470 of those working on the premises at any given time. An estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people visit the museum every day at this time of year.
The Louvre just last week named Jean-Luc Martinez, an archaeologist and head of the department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities, as the new director.
In an exhibition running for the next week or so, The Louvre continues to showcase American art as it develops its partnership with several American museums. Shown at right is a picture of Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s “The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix,” from the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.
This year’s theme for the exhibition is genre painting in the US from the first half of the 19th century to the Civil War, a period of economic and territorial expansion. Americans weren’t entirely interested in art at the time, and art, as taught at European universities, had trouble finding a following in the New World.
But a few American artists—George Caleb Bingham, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Eastman Johnson, etc.—met with popular success by painting scenes that depicted the daily lives of people on the fringes of society, those who ventured into the American frontier. Though seemingly naïve in style, these images of trappers or Mississippi boatmen were influenced by European genre paintings, notably those from the Dutch Golden Age and contemporary British works.
