In every great museum of the world, you climb the stairs to the paintings galleries, and
the reason is it's the light that is the life of pictures.
You can only get natural light on the top floor of a museum where you can take the roof
off and put skylights in place.
It's only in natural light that one can get the full range of colors, the quality of depth,
and serenity.
The quality of light in the galleries has a psychological effect.
We've become so used to the dramatic effects of artificial light, but a light engineer
has come in and they've a decision of how that picture should look,
and they impose that vision on the pictures.
It's the natural light that liberates paintings from that tyranny, because it gives you variety.
As the light changes in the galleries with the seasons, with the times of the day, the
pictures themselves take on an active life.
They're not simply pictures fixed in time, but they respond to the changes of light.
Up above the glass ceiling that you see in the galleries is a whole mechanism, a whole
world.
There's a greenhouse with a system of louvers, very much like Venetian blinds, to bounce
the light, to control it.
Of course, there are limitations to viewing pictures under natural light alone.
There's always a cloudy day, too late in the afternoon.
There's a whole system of artificial light to make sure there's always light in the galleries,
regardless of time of day, regardless of season.
At present the light in the galleries varies from gallery to gallery,
sometimes to a frustrating degree.
And you can see it just by looking through the sequence of doors.
This lack of consistency in the galleries is directly the result of the deterioration
of the system above.
We can no longer adjust the louvers, some of the louvers, indeed, have deteriorated
to such a point that the light is entering unfiltered.
This means that in some galleries we get too much light,
in other galleries, insufficient light.
This has necessitated a complete replacement of the entire skylight system.
They've been updated periodically over the years.
The last time was in 1939, and we're about to embark on a project
to replace all these skylights.
We will have to store a great number of the works, but we will make sure that the masterpieces
are on view at all times.
It's only at the end of four and a half years
that we will be able to reopen all forty-four galleries.
At the end of this project, the light that we will experience in these galleries will
be one of consistent serenity, and it's that meditative quality that I think is absolutely
necessary for an in-depth relationship with pictures.