James Gardner makes the walls talk. He traces the many metamorphoses of the Louvre, revealing how from its humble origins as a fortress it has come to occupy the heart of Paris and the center of French—and indeed world—culture. His remarkable achievement is to show us how the building is every bit as spectacular and as fascinating as the treasures it holds.
Ross King is the author of the award-winning The Final Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism and, more recently, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies.
The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum by James Gardner will be published on May 5, 2020 by Atlantic Monthly Press in North America and Atlantic Books in the UK.
James Gardner is an American 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.