Four thousand years and the 27 hectares of Paris's oldest public gardens, the Tuileries, separate the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde and I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramid. In this timeless enclosure, the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and the Minister of Culture, Catherine Trautmann, this week inaugurated what Jospin called "a living, open museum". With 12 newly displayed 20th-century masterpieces from French museums and private collections, the Tuileries are now the world's finest modern sculpture gardens.
In an effort to "democratise" culture, Jospin even sacrificed Auguste Rodin's The Kiss from the garden of the Prime Minister's office, the Matignon Palace. With six million people tramping through the Tuileries every year, culture has truly come to the masses.
Perched on the terrace in front of the Orangerie (where Clemenceau installed Monet's Water Lilies) and overlooking the Place de la Concorde and the Seine, The Kiss is already a magnet for Japanese tourists, who cannot resist having their photos taken in front of the passionate embrace with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop.
When Jospin arrived with his wife Sylviane on Wednesday evening, the photographers begged him to pose in front of The Kiss. The sight of such unbridled passion must have been a little embarrassing for the staid prime minister, and the photographers kept shouting "closer, closer".
Rodin is the most classical and best represented artist in the new Tuileries. A few hundred metres from The Kiss, three of his human figures, Eve, The Great Shadow and Meditation form a group atop the terrace. Inspired by Michelangelo, the male Meditation leans forward, tree-like, holding his neck. On the far side of the gardens, Etienne Martin's Personage III takes the natural metaphor much further. His block-like, anthropomorphic forms are only vaguely human, more vegetable or organic.
Great sculpture needs a showcase, room to breathe, Trautmann said as we walked through the garden. Not since the late Andre Malraux brought the sculptures of Aristide Maillol here decades ago has anything so monumental stirred the elegant gardens designed in 1664 by Le Notre.
The project was overseen by Alain Kirili, a contemporary French sculptor whose white, mushroom-like Great White Commandment is spread over one of the terrace lawns. Amazingly, Kirili's dream of a permanent outdoor 20th-century exhibition survived three French culture ministers. With a total budget of only six million French francs (IR£722,000), Kirili obtained 10 of the sculptures from French museums, and two from the Giacometti Foundation and the heirs of the American sculptor David Smith.
One couldn't help feeling sorry for Jospin, being forced by a throng of journalists to comment on modern art. While his wife sheltered him from the rain with an umbrella, Jospin contemplated the British sculptor Henry Moore's Reclining Figure. "C'est tres joli," the Prime Minister said. And indeed, the abstract 1951 bronze figure lying suggestively on a yellow marble bed below the terrace wall is very pretty.
The five fantastical figures of Germaine Richier's Chessboard, Big bring to mind dancing animals. One of the surprises of the Tuileries sculptures is just how much humour there is in 20th-century art. Henri Laurens's Great Musician, Max Ernst's Germ Seen Through a Temperament, David Smith's abstract, machine-like Primo Piano II all have a comic touch to them. But it is Jean Dubuffet's playful, huge, red, white and blue Hand- some Costumed One with his beckoning upheld hand who most mocks the classic notion of sculpture.
By contrast, Raymond Mason's The Crowd, a sober agglomeration of bronze figures that seem to melt into an indistinct base, makes one think of this century's holocausts, or of the despair and alienation of modern man. For sheer beauty, there is Alberto Giacometti's Standing Woman, waiting silently among the skeletal winter trees, like her, elongated and naked. In his speech at the Jeu de Paume, Jospin described her as "watching over an unspeakable secret, night and day".
The Tuileries's 12 new arrivals are only the first phase of Kirili's three-stage project. New pieces by Picasso, Miro, and Calder are expected in coming months, along with sculptures commissioned from four contemporary European artists. In a third phase, called "Priere de Toucher" the public will be invited to run their fingers over selected works.