Alice Walton’s newly opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas will join the Louvre, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art in a four-year project to explore four themes in American art. The first exhibition “will explore the birth of American landscape painting through the works of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand,” according to a press release, and will debut in Paris on January 14, before traveling to the other museums.
We reported on a panel on traveling exhibitions like these back in May and Henri Loyrette, president and director of the Louvre, made a comment that may explain the Louvre’s participation in such a thoroughly American project:
“We are an American museum,” said Mr. Loyrette. “We are the third American museum in the world! We have more American visitors in the Louvre than you have in Philadelphia or Boston.”
