Most museums will offer online reservations for a certain time slot. Visitors will have to wear face masks
The view of the Louvre Museum. Source: Stijn te Strake/TAN
France Ministry of Culture has announced that museums and public monuments will begin to reopen in June and July as lockdown restrictions ease, the Art Newspaper. reports.
The Louvre-Lens, 200 km of Paris, will be among the first to reopen. The museum will offer the exhibition Black Suns about the black colour in painting, which will run from June 3 to January 25, 2021.
The Château de Versailles will follow it on June 6. Paris's Musée du Quai Branly will reopen on June 9 and the Musée d'Orsay will welcome visitors to a James Tissot show on June 23. The Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais will reopen on July 1, the Musée Guimet and Musée Rodin a week later.
The Louvre’s director Jean-Luc Martinez told the Art Newspaper the museum "is working towards a planned reopening on 6 July". “70% of the space, representing 65,000 square meters of galleries, will be accessible,” he said.
Safety requirement remain in force. Though parks and gardens in France, inducing Versailles and the Tuileries, open on June 6, playgrounds will remain closed and gathering of more than ten people will be banned. Museums will give priority to online reservations booked for a specified time. Face masks will be compulsory.
The Louvre case is unique, because it is the world’s most visited museum with about 10 million visitors a year. The director declined to say how much the museum has lost this year, but the losses will be enormous – during lockdown, the museum had to refund 70,000 online reservations and secure 800 works on loan around the world.
However, the Louvre’s website traffic rose to a record 10.5 million visits in 71 days between March 12 and May 21.
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