Sacre Bleu! It's the Louvre Inc.

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Loyrette doesn't have to worry overly about traditionalists because under his direction, the Louvre is becoming less dependent on the French establishment. The state still subsidizes the museum to the tune of about $180 million a year, but these days that's only about half the total budget. The rest is raised by the Louvre itself, from ticket sales and donations by French companies and American and other philanthropists. It's a process that started under Loyrette's predecessor, Pierre Rosenberg, in the early 1990s, when the government handed the Louvre some limited autonomy. Loyrette and his deputy, Selles, have taken that and pushed hard, wresting management of the museum's finances and staff from government bureaucrats and in exchange signing a deal with the Culture Ministry that commits it to meeting certain performance targets. "We used to live in an absurd system, a universe that was completely archaic," Selles says.

The bottom line is that the Louvre now has a lot more money than ever. Its annual acquisition budget jumped from $4.5 million in 2004 to $36 million last year. Changes to French tax law in 2003 have helped, but Loyrette has also expanded the three-man fund-raising department that Rosenberg set up in the late 1990s into a full-time operation with 19 staffers. And the Louvre is about to set up a U.S.-style endowment fund--the first in France--using the money from the Abu Dhabi deal to ensure that it can finance a bevy of ambitious projects in the future.

If you ask Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, the crusty chief curator of the Louvre's sculpture department, what has changed in the Loyrette era, she'll grumble a bit about the heavier load of administration that comes the way of the museum's seven departments. She's also not convinced that appointing department heads for just three years at a time is a smart move. (Until Loyrette came along, they were appointed for life.) But then she'll start to talk about the "very expensive" $3.7 million Austrian bust that the Louvre was able to buy in New York for her department and the ambitious exhibition of French bronzes she'll be putting on later this year, not to mention the restoration budget, which is "incomparably bigger than it was a decade ago."

Ultimately, this may be the big difference: for the first time in ages, the Louvre has cash to spend. Its fund-raising activities are very new, but Loyrette is constantly looking to broaden them. He persuaded Christopher Forbes of the wealthy publishing family to start the American Friends of the Louvre at a time when the U.S. and France were sparring over Iraq. It has taken off and just given birth to the International Friends of the Louvre.

Which raises the question, Why should anyone give money to a French museum that already receives a hefty government subsidy? A few days after Cason Thrash's party, one of the attendees, a wealthy Floridian named Max Blumberg who made his money in lighting, was sitting in his Paris pied-à-terre opposite the Tuileries Gardens--with a view of I.M. Pei's pyramid--and provided the answer. "The name of the Louvre has magical powers in the world of art," he said. And then, of course, there's Loyrette. "He's a great seducer," Blumberg said, "because he believes so much in what he's doing." Running the Louvre, it seems, is quite an art in itself.

CULTURE AND CASH How the world's most popular museums stack up

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine.]

  Visitors per year Incoming resources† Public funding   Louvre, Paris 8.3 million $390 million* 49% (2007) British Museum, London 6.1 million $170 million 53% (2007-08) Pompidou Center, Paris 5.5 million $193 million 69% (2006) Tate Modern, London 5.2 million $203 million** 34% (2006-07) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 4.5 million $291 million 9% (2006-07)

Source: The Art Newspaper; museums' latest accounts. †Includes state grants, commercial activities, gifts and endowments. *Excludes the $240 million first payment for Louvre Abu Dhabi. **Funding for all Tate galleries.