Laurence des Cars

Laurence des Cars is president and director of the Louvre Museum. After studying art history at the Sorbonne and the prestigious École du Louvre, Des Cars started her career in 1994 as curator of paintings for the Musée d’Orsay. In the following decades she was successively appointed Scientific Director of France-Muséums, director of the Musée de l’Orangerie and president of the Établissement Public du Musée d’Orsay et du Musée de l’Orangerie. She became the first female president and director of the Louvre in 2021. Des Cars curated successful exhibitions on Édouard Vuillard, Gustave Courbet and Guillaume Apollinaire among others, and has additionally written or contributed to multiple books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, such as The Pre-Raphaelites. Romance and Realism (2000). In 2019 she was responsible for a widely acclaimed exhibition on the representation of black figures in modern and early modern art: Black Models. From Géricault to Matisse. She is a Knight of the French Legion of Honour, a Knight of the French Order of Merit and a Commander of Arts and Letters.