The Louvre in Tokyo

The Louvre in Tokyo

National Art Center - Tokyo

In April, I interrupted my diligent Louvre visits for one week to go to Japan. I thought I would take my mind off of things. But once I was there, my friends firmly recommended an exhibition that gathered sixty or so paintings from the Louvre on the theme of love. The advertisements played upon the words Love and Louvre, identical except for two letters. Since everything related to the Louvre is universally desirable, it wasn’t easy for me to book a ticket at the National Art Center, Tokyo. But I managed to go there on the morning of my last day, and was captivated by Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion, Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche, and Fragonard’s The Lock—a painting I remember from when it was acquired by the Louvre not so many years ago, along with the tremendous effect it had on me at the time as an extravagant expression of the simultaneity of desire. But today, people would have me believe that this painting depicts a rape. I would have liked to know the opinion of the Japanese visitors beside me who were contemplating the painting (I can’t show them to you in front of The Lock, because photographs were forbidden).