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A Twombly ceiling.

Article Excerpt
Oe morning in late January, after a ride on the Paris metro to its terminus in the eastern suburb of Montreuil and a cold 10-minute walk through an industrial zone, I arrive at a nondescript, unheated warehouse. Inside, laid out on the floor of the large, open space, is a 33-meter-long white canvas, composed of 11 strips stapled together. The canvas is still mostly blank, with unfinished spheres in shades of blue, white, and yellow. Music plays softly in the background as three painters perform the immense task of painting what will portray a vast skyscape. These unromantic working-class environs are an unlikely place to find what might be one of the more romantic possibilities in art: a painting for the ceiling of the Louvre.

As part of its mission to add contemporary artists' work to its vast collection of paintings and crafts dating back to antiquity, the Louvre asked the American artist Cy Twombly to paint the ceiling of one of its galleries, the Salle des Bronzes. Twombly agreed, and for the first time since Georges Braque in 1953, a living artist's work will adorn a ceiling of the iconic museum. There are other foreigners adding to the Louvre's decor as well, most recently German artist Anselm Kiefer; sculptures and a painting of his were permanently installed in a stairwell on the northeast corner two years ago. Braque's contribution--in the Salle Henri II, the room adjoining the Salle des Bronzes, as it hap pens--incorporates three separate paintings of birds on a dark blue sky into an existing Renaissance-era ceiling that covers the rest of the surface area.

Twombly's task is on a grander scale, since it will encompass the entire length and width of the ceiling's surface. The opportunity is striking: not just to make a mark on the Louvre in such a major way, but to be the first American to receive this kind of honor. Marie-Laure Bernadac, the Louvre's contemporary art curator, says that Twombly was chosen by the museum's Living Art committee, comprised of experts in the field--curators, a culture ministry representative, the director of a museum of modern art, and others from beyond France. "We wanted an internationally known painter," Bernadac explains, "a major artist who ideally had experience in decorative arts of monuments." The committee soon agreed on Twombly, who had in 1989 conceived a curtain for the Bastille Opera in Paris. He visited the Louvre in 2006 to see the hall, and months later, after his return home to Lexington, Virginia, where he lives part of each year, sent sketches of his design, which the committee approved.

Not long after, he mentioned the project to a friend in Lexington...

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