History of Paris new Ministry of Finance in Bercy (the old Ministry had been housed in a wing of the Louvre), also opened in 1989. The Grande Arche in La Défense was also finished in 1989, a massive hollow cube-shaped building 112 metres high that completed the long perspective from the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel through the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Élysées. The most famous project of all, the "Grand Louvre", included the expulsion of the Ministry of Finance, the reconstruction of large parts of the museum, an underground gallery, and the addition of a glass pyramid by I.M.
Paris in the 18th century Robert; Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, whose work combined classicism and romanticism; and a major neoclassical sculptor from the earlier generation, the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, famous for his busts of George Washington and Voltaire. The idea of making the Louvre into an art museum had first been proposed in 1747 by Lafont de Saint-Yenne and supported by Diderot in 1765 in the article on the Louvre in the "Encylopedie". The idea was accepted by Louis XVI, who in 1789 began work on the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. The Revolution intervened, and on 27 July 1793 the Convention decreed the creation of a