Ketty Gottardo returns to the Louvre to lead prints and drawings department

Ketty Gottardo, new director of the Louvre's Department of Prints and Drawings © twobytwo.

PARIS.— The Louvre has announced the appointment of Ketty Gottardo as director of its Department of Prints and Drawings, following a ministerial decree issued by France’s Minister of Culture. Gottardo will take up the post on October 1, 2026, for a renewable three-year term.

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The appointment was announced by Christophe Leribault, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre, marking a return to the institution where Gottardo began her career in 1999.

An art historian specializing in Old Master drawings, Gottardo studied in Udine, Italy, before continuing her education in London at the Courtauld Institute, where she earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate in art history.

She began her professional career at the Louvre in the Department of Prints and Drawings before moving to the United States, where she worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and focused on the museum’s collection of French drawings.

Her career later took her to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she worked in the Department of Paintings and Drawings, and then to Christie’s in Paris, where she headed the Old Master Drawings department for several years. In that role, she oversaw numerous specialized sales and was involved in the dispersal of the celebrated Yves Saint Laurent collection in 2009.

In 2016, Gottardo joined the Courtauld Gallery in London as curator of drawings. There she organized a number of monographic exhibitions devoted to Renaissance artists including Parmigianino and Antoine Caron, as well as exhibitions focused on the drawings of Henry Fuseli, Henri Michaux and Louise Bourgeois.

She also curated thematic exhibitions exploring subjects such as the image of the artist at work, 18th-century Venetian drawings and the Oskar Reinhart collection in Winterthur, Switzerland.

During her tenure at the Courtauld, Gottardo also contributed to the expansion of the drawings collection. Among the notable acquisitions made during this period was Paul Gauguin’s celebrated final illustrated manuscript, Avant et après, as well as a group of English watercolors.

She is currently preparing a catalogue of Flemish drawings in the Courtauld collection, which is expected to be published soon.

Gottardo’s appointment brings her career full circle. More than two decades after beginning her professional life at the Louvre, she will return on October 1 to lead one of the museum’s major curatorial departments and oversee one of the world’s most important collections of works on paper.