A curator at home on two continents

While French museums remain rigidly run by the state and regions, economics dictate that they can no longer snub American-style sponsorships: the begging bowls are out. The Louvre, its director Henri Loyrette told the newspaper Liberation, must now raise 40 percent of its funding by itself and so the Galerie d'Apollon was restored thanks to an oil company, Total. At Versailles, gold invitations summoned guests to the L'Oreal-funded opening of the bathroom of Louis Quinze.

"The American and French systems are very different and I am not sure they understand each other, but they are constantly spying on each other, the French especially for anything financial and economical," says Sylvain Bellenger, one of the few top curators with long experience in both countries.

"As often happens when the French imitate America, it's not always for the best. That the Louvre gave over one-third of its bookstore to 'The Da Vinci Code' is a sign. I don't know of any American museum that would have done that."

Bellenger, 51, is an open-faced Norman who began as a philosophy teacher scarcely older than his unruly lycee students and earned pocket money by lecturing at the Pompidou Center. "I learned in the morning what I spoke on in the afternoon," he says. He switched to a doctorate in 19th-century art and has received several American grants. From 1999 to 2005 he was in charge of European paintings and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which he left with regret when the museum closed for rebuilding.

Back in Paris he curated last winter's Girodet show at the Louvre, a surprise hit which went on to the Metropolitan and the Chicago Art Institute and will be in Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts next month. Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) is a celebrated and forgotten painter whose star seems to rise in restless times. A favored student of David, he encompassed Neo-Classicism, Romanticism and several unacknowledged isms a crosser of all boundaries, including those that didn't exist. When he died, 2000 people attended his funeral, among them Ingres and Delacroix, who made a sketch of the grieving Chateaubriand. Then came oblivion tempered by occasional spurts of interest: Baudelaire praised the singularity of his talent, the Symbolists and Surrealists admired his weirdness.

Bellenger's first curatorial post was in the artist's birthplace, Montargis. To acquire Girodet's "Portrait of Mustapha" in 1988, he boldly hit the private sector for half the funds, most coming from a local bank where the welcoming party for the picture was held. "The directeur des musees de France said it was the first time he had seen people eating and drinking in front of a painting." Bellenger says. He left Montargis to become director of the Loire chateau of Blois and while in Washington as a fellow at the National Gallery of Art was invited to Cleveland. "I wasn't sure so I asked my new friend Susan Mary Alsop and she said you must go, it's just like Poland."

It was. "All those rusted factories look like the suburbs of Cracow," Bellenger says. He loved it and returned to Paris with several paintings from the little known Cleveland School. At first everyone asked why on earth he had given up the Loire river for the Cuyahoga and the simple answer was for the museum.

One of the finest in the United States, the Cleveland is, Bellenger says, more a collection than a museum. "It has few publications and doesn't originate many major exhibitions but it has one of the most refined collections in North America. There is a Cleveland style that is hard to define but a Cleveland object in a traveling show is always something special."

Bellenger arrived at Cleveland with the august French title of conservateur en chef du patrimoine territorial. "My American colleagues couldn't figure out if I was a museum guard or the minister of culture."

The idea for the Girodet exhibition originated at Cleveland and was aborted when the museum had to close, but his American experience informed Bellenger's concept for the Louvre show. "I believe that the entire exhibition the vision, the labels, the hanging is connected to my American experience and the more complex vision that I have of the public."

American museums, he adds, do not refer to the public. "You say the community or specific communities." The differences between curating in the United States and France, he says, can be summarized in an American sense of civic responsibility lacking in France, where notions of responsibility are subsumed by the state.

"I cannot imagine any museum in America which would not have education as its primary goal and the economic goal, which is now so important here, would come later."

Education, Bellenger says, is so important because most art shown in American museums is not part of the native culture. "There isn't the historical link that you have at the Louvre so the entire landscape is different. Once you have acquired a work of art, you give something like 10 talks to all the groups the women's council, the education department, the black community and for each group you say different things."

Boards of trustees, the norm in America where most museums are privately funded, are rare in France and in Bellenger's view French trustees would spend more time in infighting than in service. Admittedly his experience with trustees in Cleveland was different from that of colleagues at, say, the Metropolitan, where gifts confer power and social rank and one of his curators friends breaks into a sweat each time he puts on black tie to face an imperious trustee. When he began to organize the Girodet show at Cleveland, Bellenger quickly found the three venues necessary to make it financially possible. Girodet proved to be exactly the right artist at the right time major but neglected, not excessively productive and definitely in tune with the zeitgeist, being, as Bellenger says, transgressive and weird.

Only Girodet's "The Sleep of Endymion" (1791), Bellenger says, won unreserved approval from the authorities of his time; today the soft and waxy male nude is the subject of gender studies. Bellenger doesn't much like the reductive nature of such inquiries but thought them sufficiently relevant today to include a chapter in the catalogue called "Is Endymion Gay?" The Louvre, he says, was shocked.

The Girodet show's success will probably be a template for future exhibitions of forgotten masters, being less complex and a good deal less costly than the blockbusters which monopolized the international scene a couple of decades ago.

But Bellenger suggests it may be too soon to write off the blockbuster, referring to a show that just opened at the vast Grand Palais in Paris. It is cleverly curated and features 400 works by international artists. "The subject," he says, "is the world of Walt Disney."

(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved