All posts tagged: Louvre

What Were the Most Visited Museums in 2025?

What Were the Most Visited Museums in 2025?

Published by José Betancourt

Some 200 million visitors streamed through the 100 top-attended museums around the world in 2025, according to the latest attendance ranking by the Art Newspaper. That figure is still down a bit from the 230 million who punched their tickets in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic shut museums down for months, indicating that overall museums haven’t quite regained their footing even five years later. Many new museums in the Middle East and Asia, which are relatively new to museum-building, attracted tons of visitors, according to TAN, but so did museums in places like New York and London, already well known for their rich institutional landscape.  Related Articles Paris’s Louvre Museum continues to hold the top spot, with some 9 million visitors. Rounding out the top 10 are the Vatican Museums, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, the British Museum in London, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum, Shanghai Museum East, Tate Modern in London, and the National Gallery in London. …

Louvre to Restore Rubens Medici Cycle in Its ‘Most Ambitious’ Project

Louvre to Restore Rubens Medici Cycle in Its ‘Most Ambitious’ Project

Published by Jenni Sidey

If you want to see one of Peter Paul Rubens‘s beloved paintings in the Marie de’ Medici cycle, head to the Louvre before the fall. After that, these canvases, considered by some to be the high watermark of Rubens’s career, will be off view for four years. The reason they will leave the public eye for so long is a restoration project that was announced by the Louvre on Tuesday. In its release about the project, the Paris museum called the initiative “the most ambitious restoration in the history of the Department of Paintings.” Related Articles Composed of 24 paintings that all hang together in one dedicated gallery, the paintings were commissioned in 1621 by Marie de’ Medici, the queen to France’s Henry IV and a member of the Italian family whose patronage shaped European art history during the time of the Renaissance and the age of Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. The paintings narrate the princess’ life, though in typically Baroque fashion, they are heightened portrayals of real events, replete with flowing fabric and …

Anne Pasternak Speaks Out Over Museum Leadership Gender Inequality

Anne Pasternak Speaks Out Over Museum Leadership Gender Inequality

Published by José Betancourt

At a forum in Washington, D.C. last weekend, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak voiced concern about what she sees as a troubling pattern in museum leadership. In light of recent museum leadership reshuffles, she argued that male museum directors often retire, while women more frequently get fired, the Financial Times reported. Pasternak was speaking at the Making Their Mark Forum alongside guests including Jodie Foster, Christophe Cherix of Museum of Modern Art, Chelsea Clinton, and artists such as Joan Semmel and LaToya Ruby Frazier. Pasternak said she’s worried about the direction of leadership in both the country and the museum sector. Her concerns echo those of other museum leaders. Interviews conducted for the Burns Halperin Report, a study on representation in the art world, found that many women working in the field raised the issue of a potential backlash against female leadership. None of the men interviewed brought it up. Related Articles According to Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., periods of uncertainty can prompt …

The Louvre heist: Security flaws and deeper cracks at France’s top museum – France in focus

The Louvre heist: Security flaws and deeper cracks at France’s top museum – France in focus

Published by Sam Flores

An emblematic monument of French culture, the Louvre Museum embodies nearly 9,000 years of history and houses more than 600,000 works of art across over 70,000 square metres of gallery space. It is the most visited museum in the world, welcoming around nine million visitors each year – well beyond the capacity for which it was originally designed. In recent years, the institution has been shaken by a series of crises, including a major robbery, fraud and labour tensions. On October 19, 2025, the unthinkable happened: robbers entered the museum through a window in the Apollo Gallery and stole the French Crown Jewels, worth an estimated €88 million. The theft exposed serious security weaknesses within the institution. Five months later, David Desclos returned to the scene. The former burglar had been invited to the Louvre in 2020 to record a podcast. Standing near the balcony used by the thieves, he expressed his frustration: “Bars have been installed on that single window, but when you look around, the place is like Swiss cheese. There are no bars …

An ugly year for the Louvre: where does the world’s biggest museum go from here? | France

An ugly year for the Louvre: where does the world’s biggest museum go from here? | France

Published by Sam Flores

Just over a year ago, Laurence des Cars, the intellectually brilliant (if famously prickly) former head of the largest and most-visited museum in the world, wrote a somewhat alarming note to her boss, France’s culture minister. Des Cars, who on Tuesday resigned as president of the Louvre, lamented the advanced state of disrepair of the iconic museum’s buildings and galleries. The Louvre was overcrowded, she said. Facilities were substandard, technologies hopelessly outdated. Water was coming through the ceilings. Violent temperature swings were damaging artworks. The museum had reached a “worrying level of obsolescence”. But she had the answer. Barely a week later, the first woman to run France’s most prized cultural institution stood beside Emmanuel Macron in front of its biggest draw, the Mona Lisa, as the French president proudly unveiled Louvre: New Renaissance, their radical, ambitious, €1bn plan for the museum’s renovation. Des Cars’ immediate future, and that of the Louvre, looked assured. Alas, the year ahead had other plans. Rolling staff strikes, a decade-long ticket scam, an avalanche of ageing infrastructure issues and …

Catherine Pégard Replaces Rachida Dati as France’s Culture Minister

Catherine Pégard Replaces Rachida Dati as France’s Culture Minister

Published by Jenni Sidey

Emmanuel Macron has appointed his close ally Catherine Pégard as France’s new culture minister, replacing Rachida Dati, who is stepping down to run for mayor of Paris in March’s municipal elections. Pégard is far from a surprise pick. She ran the Château de Versailles for 13 years and has been President Macron’s culture adviser since 2024. Before that, she was a political journalist, editing the magazine Le Point, and also worked as a speechwriter for former president Nicolas Sarkozy. At Versailles, she oversaw major renovations, opened up nearly 65,000 square feet of new visitor space, stepped up fundraising, and kept large-scale restoration projects on track. Her appointment wasn’t universally welcomed at first, but some heritage insiders questioned whether she had the traditional cultural administration background for the job. Related Articles Pégard inherits a ministry in rough shape. It’s dealing with budget cuts and the fallout from October’s theft of the French crown jewels from the Louvre. A parliamentary inquiry has pointed to serious security failings, and just a day before Dati resigned, Louvre director Laurence …

LA Artist Judy Baca Accused of Misusing Funds For Historic Mural

LA Artist Judy Baca Accused of Misusing Funds For Historic Mural

Published by Jenni Sidey

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Headlines CRACKS IN THE WALL. Ten former employees, including two managers, who worked on The Great Wall of Los Angeles public collaborative mural, allege the revered Chicano artist Judy Baca has been misusing millions of dollars in grants.She designed and leads the project, and the grants were earmarked for expanding the mural, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times. Workers also accuse Baca, the co-founder and artistic director of Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), a non-profit that organizes the mural production,of inappropriately profiting from the center’s facilities, the sale of archives, and artwork related to the community-made mural. Baca and SPARC’s board chair have strongly denied the claims. The mural depicts the history of California “as seen through the eyes of women and minorities,” and is one of the longest of its kind in the world at 2,700 feet, earning it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. LOUVRE STING. The chaos at the Louvre has cost its former …

New Louvre director tasked with leading a beleaguered landmark out of decades of crisis

New Louvre director tasked with leading a beleaguered landmark out of decades of crisis

Published by Sam Flores

The world’s largest museum has a new boss. French President Emmanuel Macron appointed Christophe Leribault as the new director of the Louvre Museum on Wednesday. The appointment comes a day after his predecessor Laurence des Cars, the museum’s first female director, resigned. The former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, Elaine Sciolino, wrote in her book “Adventures in the Louvre” that des Cars “brought impeccable credentials as director”. Yet the winds were not in des Cars’ favour. She was accused of rushing the sweeping, €800 million “Nouvelle Renaissance” modernisation of the museum, one of French President Emmanuel Macron’s pet projects. But disaster struck when thieves took less than eight minutes to steal crown jewels valued at €88 million ($102 million) from the Louvre in October. The heist stunned visitors, exposed glaring vulnerabilities and left one of France’s most symbolically charged collections in criminal hands. In a succinct communiqué released Tuesday, Macron’s office announced that des Cars had offered her resignation, which the president accepted. “She has too few friends and too many enemies,” Sciolino said …