MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN.- The Louvre Museum in Paris has decided to work with the Milwaukee Art Museum in a series of idea and art exchanges. A French delegation, headed by Henri Loyrette, the Louvre’s director, was in Milwaukee on Friday to get things rolling. Loyrette and David Gordon, Milwaukee Art Museum’s director, said their discussions ranged from educational programs to an exchange of exhibitions. Loyrette and Gordon were very secretive about the sorts of shows that might emerge from such collaboration. Milwaukee and Atlanta are the only two midsize American cities that the Louvre is developing relationships with, said Yannick Mercoyrol, the cultural attache in France’s Chicago consulate. The Louvre, he noted, is "the second-largest American art museum in the world," with 1.1 million American tourists visiting it annually. That’s one out of every 10 visitors - a figure greater than the number of Americans who go through the Museum of Modern Art in New York in any given year. "We’re interested in raising the interest of Americans in French art," he said, "and raising the interest of France in American art - American art we don’t know." What most likely will emerge out of the discussions, Mercoyrol said, is a number of relatively small, carefully focused exhibits, drawn from the two museums’ permanent collections and centered on specific artists or a single major work of art. Also, an "American Friends of the Louvre" organization is in the making in the Midwest.

With European governments encouraging non-profit institutions to seek new revenue sources, the Louvre may learn something about development from a museum that has succeeded in raising $115 million to date for its lakefront expansion project. Gordon and a group of museum staffers, including Laurie Winters, the Milwaukee museum’s curator of European art, will go to Paris in May to talk further with Loyrette and his associates about mutually beneficial activities.