Museum Series No. 5 Musée du Louvre x Getty Trust

Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership are thrilled to host an exceptional transatlantic conversation on the future of museums between Laurence des Cars, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre and Katherine E. Fleming, Director and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

This discussion will be moderated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Director and Co-Founder of CCL.

The event will be streamed live on Villa Albertine’s YouTube Channel, starting at 6 pm EST.

The Speakers

Katherine E. Fleming, Director and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust

Katherine E. Fleming, a historian, is President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world’s wealthiest art institution, which is dedicated to advancing the visual arts. At Getty she oversees all operations and employees and is responsible for strategy across its four programs. She was trained at Barnard College of Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley. From 2016 until 2022, Fleming was Provost of New York University (NYU); from 2012 until 2016, she was President of the Board of the University of Piraeus, Greece; and from 2007-2011 she was at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Ulm), where she directed the Institut Remarque.

The author of several works on the modern history of Greece and the broader Mediterranean, she holds the Alexander S. Onassis Chair at NYU. In Greece, she is the founder and co-director of a major public history project, Istorima. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor, and holds the Silver Cross in the Greek Order of Beneficence.

Laurence des Cars, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre

Laurence des Cars has been named President-Director of the Musée du Louvre – starting 1 September 2021 – by French President Emmanuel Macron, following the recommendation of the French Minister of Culture, Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin.

Laurence des Cars (born 1966) has been President of the Établissement Public du Musée d’Orsay et du Musée de l’Orangerie since March 2017. A general curator of heritage and specialist in 19th and early 20th century art, Des Cars was curator at the Musée d’Orsay from 1994 to 2007, Scientific Director of France-Muséums from 2007 to 2014, and Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie from 2014 to 2017.

With degrees from the Sorbonne, École du Louvre and Institut National du Patrimoine, Laurence des Cars was appointed curator of paintings to the Musée d’Orsay in 1994. She curated several exhibitions including Edward Burne-Jones (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Birmingham Art Gallery; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 1999); Édouard Vuillard (National Gallery of Art, Washington; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Grand Palais, Paris; Royal Academy of Art, London, 2003–2004) and Gustave Courbet (Grand Palais, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée Fabre, Montpellier, 2007–2008). Des Cars published Nineteenth-Century French Art, 1819–1905 (Flammarion, 2006) under the direction of Henri Loyrette, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre from 2001 to 2013, and in collaboration with Sébastien Allard, now the Director of the Department of Paintings at the Musée du Louvre. Des Cars then became involved in the Louvre Abu Dhabi (LAD) project as Scientific Director of France-Muséums, the French museum consultancy in charge of developing the newlycreated Emirati museum. From 2007 to 2014, as per the intergovernmental agreement signed between France and the United Arab Emirates, Des Cars helped establish the list of loans agreed by the 13 partnering French museums, prepared the exhibition programme, and implemented the LAD acquisitions policy by carrying out the very first purchases. This initial group of works making up the LAD national collection was unveiled in 2014 in Paris and Abu Dhabi during the exhibition Louvre Abu Dhabi. Birth of a Museum (Musée du Louvre, Paris; Saadiyat Al Manarat, Abu Dhabi, 2014). Des Cars also curated Jean-Léon Gérôme, which presented the painter in a new light (Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 2010–2011).

In 2014 Des Cars became Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie. In addition to curating Sade. Attacking the Sun (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2014–2015) and Apollinaire. The Vision of the Poet (Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, 2016), she also presented American Painting in the 1930s (The Art Institute, Chicago; Royal Academy of Art, London; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (2016–2017). In March 2017 Des Cars was appointed President of the Établissement Public du Musée d’Orsay et du Musée de l’Orangerie, breathing new, vibrant life into these two museums which house the world’s most important collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, respectively. Notably, she rolled out an impressive programme of exhibitions, live performances and a new presentation of works with all types of audiences in mind and open to today’s artists. The exhibitions The Origins of the World. The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century (2021), Black Models. From Géricault to Matisse (2019), Degas at the Opéra (2019–2020), Berthe Morisot (2019), Picasso. Blue and Rose (2018–2019) at the Musée d’Orsay, Félix Fénéon (2019), The Water Lilies. American Abstraction and the Last Monet (2018) at the Musée de l’Orangerie, were all hailed for their historic accuracy as much as for their relevance in today’s art and society. In March 2019, Laurence des Cars unveiled the vast transformation project ‘Orsay Grand Ouvert’ (Orsay Wide Open) which is designed to give back as much space as possible to visitors and to the collections on display in the former train station, the better to welcome the public and enhance the visitor experience. Laurence des Cars paid particularly close attention to enriching the collections of the Établissement. In 2019, both the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie recorded a record number of visitors: more than 3,600,000 and more than one million respectively. Laurence des Cars is Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour, a Chevalier of the French Order of Merit and a Commander of Arts and Letters.

Elizabeth W. Easton, Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Curatorial Leadership

Elizabeth Easton is the Director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL), a non-profit organization she co-founded with Agnes Gund in 2007 to train museum curators in the fundamentals of management and leadership. Now in its sixteenth year and with almost 400 alumni around the world, CCL continues to provide curators with the tools necessary to assume and succeed in leadership positions.

She previously served as the first elected president of the Association for Art Museum Curators from 2003-2006, and as chair of the Department of European Paintings and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum from 1999-2007. Easton earned her Ph.D. at Yale University, writing her dissertation on Edouard Vuillard’s interiors of the 1890s.

She is the recipient of the Wilbur Cross Medal—the highest honor accorded to alumni of Yale University’s Graduate School—and in 2008 was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government. She is a trustee of MASS MoCA and is also on the Visiting Committee of the Department of Paintings Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

About the Villa Albertine Museum Series

The Villa Albertine Museum Series, launched by Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership, is a new platform to explore the future of museums on both sides of the Atlantic. It will bring together 24 women leaders from premier cultural institutions in France and the US for monthly conversations in 2023 on how museums must reinvent themselves to meet the challenges of the present.

The Villa Albertine Museum Series Spring Dialogues are made possible thanks to the generous support of Cartier and the Firends of Villa Albertine, notably Béatrice Stern, Sana Sabbagh and Denise Littlefield Sobel.