The Napoleon courtyard of the Louvre Museum, and its pyramid, at nightfall, Credit: Benh LIEU SONG via Wikipedia
The Covid-19 pandemic shook up the art world, but the Musée du Louvre's place at the top of visitor numbers can't be moved. Every year, The Art Newspaper asks the world's art museums how many people visited them the year before. Every year, the Louvre says it had the most visitors. In 2022, the Louvre said it had 7,726,321 visitors. This is 20% less than the 9.6 million people who went in 2019, but 173% more than in 2021. The Louvre had over 2.5 million more visitors than the Vatican Museums, which came in second place. In fact, while other museums are still trying to get back to the number of visitors they had before the pandemic, the Louvre has decided to limit the number of visitors to make sure everyone has a good time. They have decided to cap the number of people who can enter each day at 30,000. This should keep the number of visitors stable at between 7.5 million and 8.5 million in 2023. This is about the same number of people who went to the museum 17 years ago, and it's a big drop from the over 10 million people who went in 2018.
Other Paris museums also did very well. The Musée d'Orsay came in sixth place with 3.3 million visitors, which was only 10% less than in 2019. The Centre Pompidou came in ninth with 3 million, only 8% less than the winner. The 2019 figure for the Musée de l'Orangerie and the Musée du Quai Branly was also within 10%. Some places in France did even better than they did before the pandemic. The number of people who went to the Fondation Louis Vuitton went up by a third, from just over a million in 2019 to almost 1.4 million in 2018. The Morozov Collection exhibition, which had a staggering 1.2 million visitors, was a big reason for this. The Petit Palais rose by 14% to 1.1 million.
Jean Dubreil