More Paris Institutions Turn to Crowd-Funding

— October 7, 2014 0 2

More Paris Institutions Turn to Crowd-Funding

By DOREEN CARVAJAL / The New York Times

PARIS — The Louvre kicked off its latest crowd-funding campaign on Tuesday with an appeal for a million euros to help fund the €12.5 million purchase of a jeweled piece of 18th-century furniture, known as the “Table of Peace,” which belonged to a French diplomat who negotiated the end of a Bavarian war.

After two years of budget cuts in state aid for cultural institutions, the Louvre is the second major French museum to turn to Internet fund-raising this month to pay for projects and acquisitions. For the first time, the Musée d’Orsay last week called for €30,000, or about $37,600, in contributions to help finance the €600,000 restoration of Gustave Courbet’s enormous painting of his studio, “L’Atelier du peintre.” By Tuesday, it had collected more than €20,000.

Table de Teschen, 1779. Philippe Fuzeau/Musée du Louvre

Other major institutions like the National Library of France are also trying crowd-funding as an alternative. In August, it issued a public appeal for aid to acquire a €2.4 million illuminated manuscript that represents the first emperors of Rome.

But among those institutions, the Louvre has the most crowd-funding experience. Since 2010, it has received more than €4 million from almost 20,000 donors for acquisitions of a medieval painting and ivory statuettes, and the restoration of the museum’s “Winged Victory of Samothrace.”

On Tuesday at the Louvre, its new president, Jean-Luc Martinez, unveiled the neo-Classical table — studded with agates, opals and quartz — and characterized it as a one-of-a-kind work of art with its own literary and geopolitical history.

The work is known as the “Table of Peace” because it was given to the French diplomat Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, known as Baron de Breteuil, as thanks for his efforts to negotiate an end to the War of the Bavarian Succession that started in 1778. It also figures in Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way.” Until now, the table has remained with the descendants of the baron in the family castle about 25 miles west of Paris.

Reference: The New York Times