Tuileries Garden - The Tuileries Garden in The 20th Century

The Tuileries Garden in The 20th Century

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the Tuilieries garden was filled with entertainments for the public; acrobats, puppet theatres, lemonade stands, small boats on the basins, donkey rides, and stands selling toys. At the 1900 Summer Olympics, the Gardens hosted the fencing events. The peace in the garden was interrupted by the First World War in 1914; the statues were surrounded by sandbags, and in 1918 two German long-range artillery shells landed in the garden.

In the years between the wars, the Jeu de paume was turned into a gallery, and its western part was used to display the series Water Lillies by Claude Monet. The Orangerie became an art gallery for contemporary western art.

During World War II, the Jeu de paume was used by the Germans as a warehouse for art they had stolen or confiscated.

The liberation of Paris in 1944 saw considerable fighting in the garden. Monet's paintings water lillies were seriously damaged during the battle.

Until the 1960s, almost all the sculpture in the garden dated to the 18th or 19th century. In 1964-65, André Malraux, the Minister of Culture for President Charles DeGaulle, removed the 19th century statues which surrounded the Place du Carrousel and replaced them with contemporary sculptures by Aristide Maillol.

In 1994, as part of the Grand Louvre project launched by President François Mitterrand, the Belgian landscape architect Jacques Wirtz remade the garden of the Carrousel, adding labyrinths and a fan of low hedges radiating from the arch of triumph in the square.

In 1998, under President Jacques Chirac, works of modern sculpture by Jean Dubuffet, Henri Lawrence, Etienne Martin, Henry Moore, Germaine Richier, Auguste Rodin and David Smith were placed in the garden. In 2000, the works of living artists were added; these included works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois, Tony Cragg, Roy Lichtenstein, Francois Morrellet, Giuseppe Penone, Anne Rochette, and Lawrence Weiner. Another ensemble of three works by Daniel Dezeuze, Erik Dietman, and Eugene Dodeigne, called Priére Toucher (Eng: Please Touch) was added at the same time.