French President François Hollande inaugurated the first regional branch of the Louvre on Tuesday, a museum set atop a former coal mining yard in the depressed, post-industrial city of Lens.
The Louvre-Lens, a 150 million euro ($195 million) project, is scheduled to open its doors to the public on December 12. It will house a rotating collection of 205 works, mostly from the Louvre in Paris.
It is part of a recent push by France's major museums to bring more culture to outlying areas of the country, and to “open the doors of art while helping to revitalize a territory,†Mr. Hollande said in a speech at the museum on Tuesday.
In 2010, The Pompidou Center â€" home to France's National Museum of Modern Arts â€" opened its first provincial branch in Metz, another post-industrial city in the north of France.
“Lens has been ravaged by all forms of crises,†said Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre in Paris, in a speech on Tuesday. “It's a lso exactly the type of population we wanted to reach out to.â€
The Japanese architectural firm SANAA designed the new museum, an airy space of more than 300,000 square feet clad in glass and aluminum. Major works that will be on view there for the next five years include Leonardo's “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne†(painted around 1508); Eugene Delacroix's 1831 “Liberty Leading the People,†a widely recognized patriotic work in France; and Raphaël's “Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione.â€
The Louvre-Lens is expected to attract 700,000 visitors in its first year, considerably less than one tenth of the annual visitors in Paris. The Louvre has also contracte d to open a new museum in Abu Dhabi.
