Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert

In a dark, half-ruined museum, an expert investigates its subterranean levels in an attempt to catalog all of it's abandoned treasures.

Grade 10 Up–Mathieu, working in a Victorian array of sepias, creates a tale that takes readers into all those areas of a grand museum that are generally off-limits to visitors: the mechanical rooms, of course, but also the storage areas for statue molds, framing workshops, copyists' studios, guard-training facilities, and so on. But he has also provided a delightful and clever plot: readers are accompanying an expert who is investigating the subterranean levels of a building whose name has been forgotten. (It is called by various anagrams for Louvre.) Its depths are mythic–there is even a ferrywoman to help cross a flooded floor–and the time is, well, all the years that remain in the expert's life. Teens interested in art history will delight in the visual puns as well as the real insight the story offers on art-preservation efforts. Endnotes include references to works cited (usually visually) within the story and a brief history of the Louvre's passage from medieval castle to prestigious museum.–Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia
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The second of a four-volume series copublished by NBM and the Louvre invites artists to create a story involving the museum. Mathieu's follows an expert hired to catalogue a vast, half-ruined museum; he encounters inhabitants living in the lower reaches who have no understanding of the location or its contents. A Kafkaesque catalogue of paradoxes ensues: paintings kept in the dark so the light will not damage the colors that no one will ever see; statues restored then broken then defaced to keep their states "authentic"; a frame maker who considers his contribution the true definition of painting. As years go by, the expert becomes old and unkempt as further and further levels of absurdist cataloguing are discovered. Eventually, he discovers the deepest layers and the secret behind the Mona Lisa, even as he passes his journal on to another "expert" for a continuation of these meaningless attempts to quantify art without perceiving its beauty. The story is rendered in grim, gray tones, which make the endless rounds of the museum workers look all the more fruitless. Like the expert, readers will be glad for the rays of real light and art at the end of this dark satire. (Feb.)
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Like the first product of its publisher’s intriguing collaboration with the Louvre, Nicolas De Crecy’s Glacial Period (2007), the second plays out in the future, despite which the main characters appear casually Edwardian, while the ancillary ones would fit in any mid-twentieth-century-set French movie. The original name of the vast museum has been forgotten, but its functions haven’t. They occur in the seemingly infinite layers of subbasement beneath what’s visible at ground level, and Eudeus Volumer is just beginning to survey them and the collections they deal with as Mathieu’s exquisitely rendered black-white-and-gray graphic novel opens. The chapter titles note the days of Volumer’s progress and the departments visited; for instance, “Day Forty-Six: The Flooded Gallery.” Like Alice’s progress through Wonderland, that of Volumer and his assistant becomes curiouser and curiouser and more and more fascinating, thanks to the variety of grotesque, quintessentially French faces Mathieu gives the characters (one’s a Sartre clone, for sure) and the intricate architectural and art-reproduction detailing amid which he places them. Very droll, highly delightful. --Ray Olson