Arras France Tourism Guide

The Louvre-Lens is a new art museum located in the industrial city of Lens, 20 km north of Arras. It has been open to visitors since December 2012.

It displays objects from the collections of the Louvre museum in Paris that are lent to the gallery on a medium or long term basis.

Though the museum maintains close institutional links with the Louvre, it is primarily funded by the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region.

Picture: Michel Spingler/AP

The building is composed of a series of low-laying volumes clad in glass and stainless steel in the middle of a 60-acre (240,000 m2) former mining site, largely reclaimed by nature. The estimated cost for this building is 82 million euro, or 103.4 million US dollars (at January 2009). The new satellite building was commissioned after an international architectural competition in 2005. The Japanese architects SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) of Tokyo, associated with architects Imrey-Culbert (New York) and landscape architect Catherine Mosbach (Paris), were awarded the project on September 26, 2005. SANAA is a Japanese architectural firm, noted for their ethereal designs. Imrey Culbert is a New York and Paris-based architectural design firm.

President François Hollande inaugurated the Louvre-Lens in December 2012.

Officials hope the museum, set to host masterpieces by Delacroix and Raphael for its first year, will help revive a region blighted by the closure of its last coal mines 20 years ago.

Panoramic view of the Louvre-Lens. Picture: Michel Spingler/AP

La Galerie du Temps (The “Time Gallery”). Picture: Michel Spingler/AP

Eugène Delacroix’s famous commemoration of the July Revolution of 1830, called “Liberty Leading the People”

To know more about this world famous painting, click on this link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Leading_the_People