Grand Louvre

The Grand Louvre refers to the decade-long project initiated by French President François Mitterrand in 1981 of expanding and remodeling the Louvre – both the building and the museum – by moving the French Finance Ministry, which had been located in the Louvre's northern wing since 1871, to a different location. The centerpiece of the Grand Louvre is the Louvre Pyramid designed by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, which was also the project's most controversial component. The Grand Louvre was substantially completed in the late 1990s, even though its last elements were only finalized in the 2010s. Background Following Louis XIV's move to Versailles in the 1660s, the Louvre Palace ceased to be mainly used as a royal palace and became inhabited by artists, civil servants and the occasional royal, as well as hosting various bodies and institutions. Even after the Louvre Museum was first established in 1793, many other activities still existed in the palace. This mixed-use reality was perpetuated in Napoleon III's Louvre expansion, which resulted in the entrenchment of administrative offices in the Louvre's North Wing, from 1871 mainly the Ministry of Finance. The expansion of the museum's collections, combined with the gradual shift of curatorial practices towards less cluttered displays, meant that the Louvre Museum was increasingly short of space, despite the periodical release of some of its holdings to other museums in Paris. Thus, the pre-Columbian artifacts of the musée américain left in 1887 to the newly created Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro; in 1905 the ethnographic collections of the Musée de Marine were divided between the Trocadéro museum, the National Antiquities Museum and the Chinese Museum (Fontainebleau); the rest of the Musée de Marine followed in the early 1940s, to the Palais de Chaillot; the Louvre's extensive Asian art collections were handed over to the Guimet Museum in 1945; and most of its French artworks created after 1848 (except those which had to remain in the Louvre because of binding bequest provisions) were headed for the Musée d'Orsay by the early 1980s.