Mysterious in effect, the Louvre is delightfully mysterious in history, too, as James Gardner shows… Gardner’s muscular, impatiently expert prose recalls Robert Hughes in his city books, “Barcelona” and “Rome.” He indulges in a few polemics along the way but has unusually firm, if retardataire, views on architecture and a shrewd, watchful, knowing eye… His account reminds us that we always make one era responsible for what belongs to the one before, and among the truths of French history is that we give the Revolution credit—or blame—for historical processes and institutions that were under way long before 1789.
The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum by James Gardner is published by Atlantic Monthly Press in North America and Atlantic Books in the UK.
James Gardner is an art critic and literary critic based in New York and Buenos Aires. He is the author of six books, including Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the British Spectator. He was the art critic at the New York Post and wrote architecture criticism for the New York Observer, before serving as the architecture critic at the New York Sun. He is now a contributing editor at The Magazine Antiques.