New Museum Looks Beyond Paris
A new museum located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower celebrates a world of art that is sometimes overlooked by the Paris cultural establishment: carved African masks, feather headdresses from the Amazon, dangling silver earrings made for Middle Eastern brides.
French presidents traditionally leave their artistic stamp on the city of Paris, and the $293 million Quai Branly Museum, open to the public this week, is Jacques Chirac's first contribution, and the first major museum to open in Paris since the 1970s.
Journalists got a peek at the museum Monday, while the smell of paint still filled galleries and workers rushed to put down flooring. The main building, one of four structures in a garden complex, is modernistic and elongated, and it guides visitors on a circuitous path among glass cases of treasures.
The museum does not claim to offer a well-rounded sampling. There are many works from Mali and only a few from Hawaii simply because some countries – especially former colonies - are better represented in France's national collections than others.
It also offers no explanation of how ritualistic objects were used, one of many sources of debate surrounding the museum. A visitor who admires a funeral mannequin from the South Pacific – a spooky creation of bone, spider webs, pig's teeth and shells – may wonder at its exact purpose. Was it carried in a procession? What did it symbolize?
"The big difference between this museum and ethnological museums is that we are not here to give a lesson about things," museum director Stephane Martin said. "We are here to mediate between us, Europeans ... and the non-Western world."
The goal is a "dialogue of cultures," and the museum mixes pieces together with little to distinguish their origins. Embroidered costumes from Vietnam are on display near stone-encrusted earrings from the Middle East.
Journalists' initial reaction was mixed: Some found the museum dark, cluttered and lacking in context, while the newspaper "Le Monde" said the 3,500-piece collection was "on stage spectacularly." Some historians have recently asked whether the museum might "ghettoize" the works by separating them from other art.
Quai Branly has been controversial since Chirac announced the project, catching up with late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, who left his mark on the capital with the Louvre Pyramid and the Bastille Opera among other projects.
Some complained because Quai Branly stripped works from two other museums, the National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania, which shut down and is to replaced by a museum on immigration, and the Museum of Mankind.
Then there was the question of what to call the new landmark. Any name hinting at "primitive arts" was ruled out because of the term's inherent Western condescension. The state eventually opted for a non-controversial title, after the street on the Seine River where it is located.
At the heart of debate is whether masterpieces from Africa, for example, would be better off in their countries of origin. Much of the French state's collection of nearly 300,000 pieces of indigenous non-Western art was brought back by colonizers and scientific research missions.
Jean Nouvel, the museum's architect, argues that it will help repair the wrongs of the colonial era. "There is no better way to give these civilizations back their virtue and nobility," said Nouvel, who designed another Paris landmark, the Arab World Institute.
Issues about France's colonial past are sensitive here. Just last year, parliament passed a law requiring schoolbooks to highlight the "positive role" of French colonialism. The term was later stripped from the legislation, but the law was an embarrassment for France.
Chirac is a fan of indigenous cultures who successfully pushed to get the Louvre to open a wing dedicated to tribal arts. He says the new museum was "the result of a political desire to see justice rendered to non-European cultures."