In order to preserve and store quarter of a million artworks against flooding, the Louvre museum has moved some of its treasures to a storage site in northern France. Trucks have quietly moved the precious artworks and artifacts from the museum’s basements and other sites to the Louvre Conservation Center, located in Lievin, France. The center already houses 100,000 works:
With museums in France closed because of the pandemic, Jean-Luc Martinez, the director of the Louvre, has time on his hands. On Tuesday, he took a small group of reporters on a tour of the newly operational site, which is intended to become one of Europe’s largest art research centers and to welcome museum experts, scholars and conservators from around the world.
The Louvre sits on low ground along the banks of the Seine. In 2016, flooding in Paris was so severe that the museum itself was threatened, prompting a round-the-clock, emergency operation to wrap, crate and haul thousands of art objects out of underground storage and onto higher ground.
The conservation project in Liévin, costing 60 million euros, or about $73 million, began in late 2017 as a necessary response to the river’s unpredictable, inevitable rise.
“The reality is that our museum is in a flood zone,” Mr. Martinez said on the tour on Tuesday. “You can’t just pick up and move marble sculptures around,” he noted. “There was a danger
that the sewers would back up and that dirty, smelly wastewater would damage the art. We had to find a solution. Urgently.”
Image via The New York Times