The Paris Louvre opens a regional offshoot today in a former mining town in northern France, hoping to revitalize a region better known for football fans and takeaway chip stands than the noble pursuit of art.
The 150-million euro ($195 million) art centre in Lens, to be inaugurated by President Francois HolLande today, will house a rotating collection of 205 works from the Louvre museum in Paris, along with temporary exhibitions.
Its design - four sprawling rectangles in glass and polished metal structures - bears some resemblance to the modern glass pyramid in Paris. But all similarity ends there.
While the Louvre looks out onto the elegant Tuileries Gardens, with manicured lawns and flowerbeds, Lens offers views onto the Bollaert stadium, home to local football club RC Lens.
In the other direction, slag heaps crowd the skyline.
The building itself sits on a disused coalmine, homage to a once-thriving coal industry, and a reminder of an industrial decline that has sapped the region of jobs.
The last mine in Lens, situated in the tip of France near the port of Calais, closed in 1986.
Today, the unemployment rate stands at 16 per cent, well above the national average of 10.2 per cent.
Tellingly, the town's 36,000 residents last hit the headlines in 2008, when their football club played Paris Saint-Germain. Fans in Paris unfurled a giant banner in the stadium, branding the Lensois "Unemployed, Paedophiles and Inbreds."
The incident came a few months after a popular movie poked fun at the region.
The Lens branch is the first regional offshoot of the Louvre, which is also planning a new museum in Abu Dhabi for 2014.
Louvre president Henri Loyrette said it was time the internationally renowned museum emerged from its privileged cocoon in Paris and played its role as a truly national museum.
"It was very important for the Louvre to be in a place where you didn't have any culture before," he told Reuters.
"Lens has been ravaged by all forms of crises. It's also exactly the type of population we wanted to reach."
The Paris Louvre is one of the most-visited museums in the world with about nine million visitors a year.
