A cheerful guide to violence at the louvre

By Mary Blume

As everyone knows, "The Da Vinci Code" provided Paris with an economic boomlet, from the Hotel Ritz where "Robert Langdon's room" is available starting at €670 per night (free bathrobe thrown in) to the Louvre, which rents out "Da Vinci" audio guides for €10.

A guide named Bruno de Baecque has his own Louvre tour inspired loosely by the film – he has already done successful "Amelie Poulain" tours of Montmartre – but "The Da Vinci Code," he says, is merely a come-on and he wouldn't dream of reading or seeing it. The theme of his tour is violence in art. "I want to show the uncomfortable, chaotic side of art. The Louvre is not thought of as violent but many of its artworks are."

De Baecque (pronounced back) ignores historical context and technique. "Too much context closes the eyes," he says. Instead, he invents themes that serve as a pretext to open eyes rather than fill heads. Those who respond to his Web site tend not to be art buffs but people who rarely go to museums, in part because they are afraid to. By the end of the tour they have learned that even an untrained eye can observe and in de Baecque they find a new best friend.

"I get pretty excited during tours, I move a lot, I touch people. A lot of them fall in love with me because I am very seductive in the tour and then I go off and forget them and they forget me."

Before becoming a guide, Bruno, 48, studied law, was briefly an actor and, more successfully, an animateur, or emcee, at a down-market version of the Club Med. As a guide, with his compelling gaze, slangy chitchat and confiding voice, he says he remains an animator although he does have a permit as a guide-interpreter. The language he interprets into is approximate English, learned largely from listening to Bob Dylan.

There are several categories of licensed guides: The Louvre's 67 regu­lars, for example, have a pass from the Reunion des Musses Nationaux and are usually referred to as conferences, or lecturers, which sounds rather more distinguished than guide. Self-taught, Bruno won his professional card in 1994 after an oral exam in French and English on his chosen subject, the rediscovery of medieval art in the 19th century. His category is Guide Auxiliaire a Titre Definitif, permanent auxiliary guide.

There is, he says, a, lot he doesn't know but it is best not to admit it. "If someone asks about a picture you don't know, you mustn't say I don't know, you must say let's look at it together." Before responding to any query, he tends to say encouragingly, "Good question!"

What has made de Baecque stand out, aside from his height (1 meter 90, or 6 foot 3), is his Les Plus Belles Fesses du Louvre, a tour of the museum's prettiest posteriors, female and male. The Louvre is said not to be thrilled at being seen as a repository of "feelthy" pictures but Bruno says it wasn't as naughty as that. To encourage a feeling of transgression he gave each visitor a black paper carnival mask which, lacking funds for something more elegant, he attached to a chopstick.

De Baecque is not without some intellectual pretense – he names as inspirations the leftist philosopher Pierre Bourdieu and rock 'n' roll – but mostly he wants people to have a good time and to realize that what they see matters as much as what they are told. "French museums with their inheritance from the Encyclopedists think you have to describe everything. Lesson-giving is the French malady, there is no sense of play."

The tours usually take place on Wednesday and Friday nights when the mu­seum is open late so that people can come straight from work, and a couple of weeks ago for his second violence tour (he will lead a third on July 19) Bruno as usual stopped at the desk to pay €30, or about $37, for his "droit de parole" pass and to slap a sticker with his tour reservation number on his chest. Then he picked up his group – 14 for the most part youngish people, three of them men in office gear carrying briefcases – and led them to the Richelieu wing to look at some statuary.

Once Bruno decides on a theme he maps out appropriate works: "There mustn't be long tunnels without the theme, when people are intrigued by a theme you can't spend the whole time walking."

This means that for Les Plus Belles Fesses he had to skip the luscious pink bottoms of Rubens because they were on the wrong floor. But for violence it all worked out well – various tortured sculptures on the ground floor, then a nearby escalator to Poussin's "Rape of the Sabines" and a hair-raising end with Bosch's "Ship of Fools."

Along the way, de Baecque decided to emphasize the baroque sculptures of Pierre Puget, particularly his Hercules because the strong man ran famously and frequently amok and is, in Bruno's opinion, the father of modern stress. Right away, before we even reach Hercules, a young woman asks Bruno about the historical context of another work. "Good question!" he replies and ignores it.

"My approach is empirical, too much rationality and you won't use your eyes." Then, as often happens, one of the tourists sets off an alarm by touching a stone thigh. You mustn't touch, Bruno explains, and why bother anyway? Touching is pleasantly transgressive but a trained eye can transgress with much greater pleasure: "Marble is just cold stone."

The key to Bruno's Hercules theory is Puget's portrayal of the hero seated on his club, one massive hand clutching a couple of the apples of the Hesperides. Noting the torsion of the body, the guide asks, "Do you see a man at rest? No, he lives in violence and cannot rest."

"But he is sitting down," objects one of the older ladies.

"Yes, but he isn't resting. Does the 35-hour week bring repose?" Point won. The tour is a hit.

De Baecque has also done gay tours of the Louvre and, for a couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, a tour of paintings about love. Less popularly, he takes people to the Pompidou Center but says the French are afraid of modern art. "I say don't worry, I am here. I am a lifesaver who will pull you out of the water."

He would like to be engaged for corporate seminars, which are well paid, and is working on new Louvre themes for the autumn season. So far, if he has capitalized on "Amelie Poulain" and "The Da Vinci Code," he has organized nothing on the subject of a recent film that has proved a boon to merchandisers of perfumes, plates, and macaroons.

So would Bruno do a tour based on Marie-Antoinette? "Good question!" he replies. "Why not?"

The International Herald Tribune

June 22, 2006