Vive la France.(Current and coming)(High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Musee du Louvre in Paris exchange)

In a partnership that is to span three years, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Musee du Louvre in Paris began an exchange in October that is proving to be as beneficial as both participants wished. This symbiotic endeavor is an outgrowth of discussions between two colleagues who have had a long professional relationship and who are fairly new to their present positions: Michael Shapiro, director of the High Museum, and Henri Loyrette, president and director of the Louvre. The Louvre is lending the High Museum a great number of works from its collections, which are or will be featured in a series of nine exhibitions, each devoted to a specific theme. In return the Louvre has received $6.4 million of the $18 million raised for the exhibitions, which it will use for the restoration of its eighteenth-century French decorative arts galleries. Moreover, as the Louvre is also building a branch of the museum in northern France, Loyrette sees the Atlanta exhibitions as a way to try out new ideas for displaying the museum's works of art. He notes, for example, that the Louvre does not juxtapose genres in the way that the High Museum has for Kings as Collectors, which includes paintings, some sculpture, and antiquities acquired by Louis XIV, XV, and XVI. Already the Louvre exhibitions have helped to increase the High Museum's family ...