Behind-the-scenes of “Roman Art from the Louvre”
From Sunday’s Living section of The Oklahoman. To view a NewsOK slideshow, click here.
ROAMIN’ TREASURE
Louvre collection marks historic visit
Detailed relief sculptures carved along a marble water well rim play out a mythological scene of satyrs and women dancing as they worship Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and revelry.
As he maneuvers through work going on in the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s second floor galleries, Daniel Roger pauses in front of the cylinder, and then asks a museum worker to rotate it.
“This figure, she has a nice head. I think we should turn it because it’s quite nice,” instructs Roger, curator of the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities for the Louvre.
When it comes to arranging 184 ancient statues, sarcophagi, frescos and other pieces, attention to detail is a must.
Roger and two other Louvre employees, a representative of the American Federation of the Arts, and a crew of Oklahoma City Museum of Art staffers have been hard at work for the last few weeks installing the landmark special exhibition “Roman Art from the Louvre.”
The exhibit opens at the Oklahoma City museum, its third and final U.S. venue, on j19Thursday. It will be on display through Oct. 12.
Two floors of art
Spanning the museum’s first-floor special exhibition gallery and the entire second floor, the special exhibit is the largest to ever come to the museum, said Matthew Leininger, registrar for the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Museum staff spent two weeks taking down the artwork previously displayed in the spaces, and Oklahoma City company Statewide Painting gave both floors a new color palette.
The colors chosen for the gallery walls range from plum to pale green to Oklahoma red clay. They were carefully chosen to complement the array of artworks.
“This if very interesting for us, because the Louvre is a palace, so you have these beautiful settings and painted ceilings with the gold and the columns and the marble on the walls,” Roger said. “And so it’s difficult to exhibit artworks in such a beautiful setting, so here we have the possibility of displaying them the way we would like to make it in the Louvre. So, you have the colors which are designed especially for the exhibition and with the lighting and so on. So, it’s very exciting.”
The museum, along with the American Federation of Arts and the Louvre, has been planning for the challenging installation for more than two years, said Oklahoma City Museum of Art Associate Curator Alison Amick.
But work on assembling the exhibit started at the Louvre back in 2003, said Roger, who selected the artworks with his colleague Cecile Giroire. The co-curators tried to give the exhibit a broad scope, with antiquities from different eras, materials and styles.
“We try to show the diversity not only of the Louvre collection but also of Roman art,” he said.
The 184 artworks represent 10 percent of the Louvre’s vast Roman collection, Roger said.
“Half of these artworks here come directly from the galleries, and the other half comes from the storage. They are artworks we would love to exhibit but we don’t have enough space,” he said.
Special care required
Among the antiquities not displayed at the Louvre because of space constraints is a 5,800-pound, elaborately carved marble lintel, which was hoisted onto a platform about 12 feet above the Oklahoma City museum’s second floor.
Some of the sarcophagi and relief sculptures in the exhibit also weigh thousands of pounds. The museum hired riggers from Methods and Materials in Chicago, the same company that helped with the large sculptures in the 2006 Egyptian exhibit from The British Museum.
All of the antiquities have been put in place by workers trained to handle precious artworks, Leininger said. But other museum staffers, especially the security crew, have helped with tasks such as hauling sandbags for the art case.
“The morale’s just been extremely high. Everyone wants to help because this exhibit is so amazing,” he said.
Before the special exhibit was installed at any of the three U.S. venues, detailed plans had to be devised for safely transporting the invaluable antiquities overseas.
The colossal statues have spent their trip from Paris and entire U.S. tour on the same steel palettes, and the moving crates are assembled and taken apart around them.
“This is much safer because we don’t have to push and pull and strap and so on,” Roger said.
While many of the antiquities are huge, others are tiny enough to fit in a child’s hand. They all date back to the early first century B.C. to the sixth century A.D., so they are fragile and priceless.
That includes a mythology-theme mosaic, which Roger called the Louvre’s finest.
“If we lose it, we could have all the money you can imagine, but we won’t be able to find anything like that in all time.”
“Roman Art From the Louvre”
When: Thursday-Oct. 12.
Where: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 415 Couch Drive.
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Admission: $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and students, free for children 5 and younger and museum members.
Information: 236-3100 or www.okcmoa.com.
-BAM
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Comments
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