The Louvre became the planet’s foremost museum for the sixth time!

The Louvre Museum of Paris led the ranking again for the fantastic sixth time, confirming its status as the cultural institution having no equals anywhere on the planet. Almost 10 million people visited the Louvre in 2012, setting the new record of museum attendance at 9.72 million art admirers, or almost a million visitors more than in 2011. The Louvre itself frankly admits that such a dramatic increase in visitor numbers came with the long-awaited opening of a huge new wing devoted to the Islamic art in 2012. The Louvre houses Europe’s largest collection of the Islamic art now. It includes almost 3,000 exhibits, some dating as far back as the 7th century. It is part of a wider trend of surging interest in the Islamic art in the West.

The second-ranked was New York’s Metropolitan Museum where visitor numbers increased by 100,000 people from 2011, coming to 6.12 million. The Islamic art played a major role there, too. However, the New York museum was able to expand the space devoted to it greatly without building an additional wing.

The next three positions in the ranking of the most visited museums went to London museums in 2012, confirming the city’s reputation as the museum capital of the planet. By the way, Paris museums occupy three positions out of the first ten, too, but Centre Pompidou and Musee d’Orsay came at the bottom of the ranking with 3.8 million and 3.6 million visitors respectively. The Art Newspaper’s experts awarded the third place to the British Museum (5.58 million visitors), the fourth to the Tate Modern (5.3 million visitors) and the fifth to the National Gallery (5.16 million visitors). They were followed by the Vatican Museum (5.06 million visitors), the Imperial Palace Museum in Taiwan’s capital Taipei (4.36 million visitors), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC with 4.2 million visitors and the two Paris museums. Newizv.ru site notes that the sustained dominance of European museums is noteworthy.

The Art Newspaper has identified the most visited art exhibition of 2012, too. It was the Old Dutch Masters exhibition held at the Tokyo Museum of Fine Arts from June to September 2012. The exhibition consisted of paintings borrowed from the Royal Art Gallery (Mauritshuis Museum) in The Hague which is closed for renovations until summer 2014. As much as 758,266 visitors, for the daily average of 10,500, came to admire Jan Vermeer’s masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring and the works of other Dutch painters.