Sacre Bleu! It's the Louvre Inc.

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The Pyramide of the Louvre museum

Pascal Le Segretain / Getty

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Even by her own standards, the black-tie gala that Houston socialite Becca Cason Thrash organized in Paris on June 10 was exceptional. The 272 guests, who paid up to $10,000 each to attend, included a smattering of European royalty, Bianca Jagger, Wall Street grandees Wilbur Ross and Stephen Schwarzman and the cream of Houston high society. Cason Thrash flew her Los Angeles decorator in and says she was so nervous about the arrangements that "by 6 p.m., I was looking for a cyanide capsule." This wasn't any old fund raiser: it was held for the Louvre, in the Louvre, in the vaulted Galerie Daru beneath the Winged Victory of Samothrace. There, seated at two long, mirrored tables and surrounded by 2,000-year-old statues of Roman Emperors, the guests dined on asparagus soufflé and veal noisettes before moving on to a charity auction and a Duran Duran concert held under the Louvre's landmark glass pyramid. The evening raised $2.7 million.

Until recently, France's iconic museum wouldn't have dreamed of rolling out the red carpet for international partygoers, however rich, let alone--quelle horreur!--allowing food and drink to be served in a gallery. Fund raisers may be standard practice at American museums, but then no American museum is like the Louvre, which has served as the state-funded bastion of high culture in France for much of its 800-year history. A succession of French Kings built their art collections there, and in 1793, shortly after the French Revolution, it was turned into a museum that is now easily the most popular in the world. Last year it drew 8.3 million visitors--more than a million of them American.

But times are changing, state funds are tight, and the Louvre has an ambitious director named Henri Loyrette, who is seeking to pull the venerable institution into a new era. Tapping rich people around the globe for funding is just one of the changes he's brought about since becoming director in 2001. Armed with a vision of the Louvre as a beacon of culture that is both accessible and global, he has set in motion a dramatic opening to the outside world. So far, that includes signing a deal to create a Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi--a franchising concept pioneered by the Guggenheim--and staging exhibitions of the museum's treasures in such places as Kobe, Japan, and Macau. U.S. museums are particularly benefiting, and not just the usual Louvre partners like New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Loyrette set up an unprecedented three-year partnership with the High Museum in Atlanta and has sent exhibitions to cities like Seattle and Oklahoma City. He's also overhauling the museum's internal workings to make it financially viable and better able to cope with a huge increase in visitors--up 60% since 2001. As part of this transformation, he and his chief administrator, Didier Selles, have trademarked the Louvre name and cut a deal with labor unions to end the strikes that used to shut down the place for a couple of weeks every year. Most controversially, he has invited contemporary artists to exhibit at the Louvre and even decorate it--provoking howls of protests from French detractors.

Loyrette, 56, says his goal is not to be controversial just for the sake of it. But he insists, "In a house like this, you need to open the windows. We hadn't aired for a long time." He is an art historian by training who previously ran the Musée d'Orsay. Some of what he's doing is experimental, he acknowledges. He calls the Abu Dhabi project, which is set to open in 2013 and for which the Louvre will receive $900 million for the use of its name and for temporary loans of up to 300 works, a "leap into the unknown." As for contemporary artists, he points out that they've long had a place at the Louvre; both Eugène Delacroix and the Cubist artist Georges Braque painted ceiling panels in the museum, and Loyrette recently commissioned American artist Cy Twombly to do the same. "I'm not inventing or adding anything," he says. "I'm just renewing what has always been done."

There are some limits. The Louvre still takes its public-service mission very seriously, and its lending policy isn't limitless either: earlier this year, the Louvre pulled out of a show that a private promoter was mounting in Verona, Italy. The Louvre would have received $6.4 million for its participation, but the idea of working on a commercial basis with a private operator rather than a museum caused some concern among curators. Even Cason Thrash ran into restrictions on what she could do at her party: the museum drew the line at using candles and turned down her request to hold the event in a painting gallery. "They do that at the Met," she gripes. Still, she gushes about Loyrette. "Henri's a visionary. He totally gets it," she says. "It's time for the Louvre to spread its wings."

Not everyone shares her enthusiasm. Just ask Marc Fumaroli, who chairs the Society of Friends of the Louvre, a 111-year-old French association that helps finance some of the museum's acquisitions. With 70,000 members, most of whom pay a $100 annual subscription, it still packs some clout. Fumaroli is frank about the criticism. "The Friends of the Louvre is a milieu that is both cultured and demanding, and it easily gets into a bad mood," he says. There's particular concern about the way the museum is sending out its treasures. "Some think there is excessive exportation" is how he puts it, although he acknowledges that "as one of the biggest museums in the world, the Louvre cannot escape the consequences of globalization."

The other big complaint is about the contemporary art. Fumaroli wrote an indignant article about the biggest show to date, an exhibition earlier this summer of works by Belgian artist Jan Fabre that was held in galleries containing Dutch and Flemish masterpieces. Among the highlights: a gigantic earthworm wriggling on upended gravestones in the Rubens room. The show was part of a series designed to give visitors a new perspective on old works. "It's important to have polyphony around the collection," Loyrette says. But Fumaroli dismissed it as pantalonnades--pantomime.