Museum Talk: Adventures in the Louvre

Attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces, the Louvre is the most famous museum in the world. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidden fortress.

Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, and to the people who are the museum’s lifeblood: the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure, and the gardeners in the Tuileries.

Blending investigative journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino walks her readers through the Louvre’s front gates and immerses them in its irresistible, engrossing world of beauty and culture. She examines the museum through the prisms of gender fluidity, race, sexuality and religion. Adventures in the Louvre reveals the secrets of this grand monument of Paris and basks in its timeless, seductive power.

RSVP for this event today and learn more about the panelists below!

The Panelists

Paul LeClerc is a scholar of 18th-century French literature who was President and CEO of the New York Public Library from 1993 until 2011. He was Director of Columbia Global Centers | Paris from 2012 to 2021, President of Hunter College from 1988 until 1993, and has had a long career in academia. He currently serves as a board member of the Albertine Bookstore Foundation and Chair of the American Friends of Les Arts Florissants.  

Guillaume Kientz is an art historian and curator currently serving as CEO and Director of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library since 2021. He was Curator of European Art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas for two years, and before that, he spent nine years as the curator of Spanish and Latin American Art at the Louvre, where he curated critically acclaimed exhibitions on Velázquez and El Greco at the Grand Palais. He was also co-curator of a 2013 exhibition on Mexico that brought Mexican masterpieces to the spotlight for the first time in the institution’s history.

Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, She is the author of five previous books, including the bestsellers The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs and The Seine: The River That Made Paris. In 2010, she was decorated a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest distinction of the French state, for her “special contribution” to the friendship between the United States and France. She and her husband have  lived in Paris since 2002.