new museum in Paris

an excerpt from article in the Economist -

Quai Branly
Gallic grandeur
Jun 15th 2006 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition

Amid controversy over immigration and the proper role of ethnography, Jacques Chirac prepares to open a major new museum in the city that launched his career


IT HAS become a tradition under France's fifth republic for each president to leave his architectural imprint on the Paris skyline. Georges Pompidou had his Pompidou Centre, completed after his death. François Mitterrand sprinkled across the French capital a pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, the Bastille opera house, a grand arch and a national library. Now, in the twilight of his presidency, Jacques Chirac too is about to have his turn.

On June 20th the French president will inaugurate the Musée du Quai Branly, the city's biggest newly built museum since the futuristic-looking Pompidou Centre opened nearly 30 years ago. Standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Quai Branly is devoted to the "art and civilisation of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas".


The museum startles in many senses. It is a modernist architectural gem in the heart of historic Paris. It is a controversial project devised by a president who is better known for his conservatism. And it is a symbolic effort to reach out to non-European civilisations at a time when France is having particular trouble digesting the offspring of such cultures at home.

Eleven years in the making, the euro232.5m ($293m), state-financed project began as Mr Chirac's bid to counter "the arrogance and ethnocentrism" of Europe's museums and to create a prestigious home for the world's "forgotten civilisations". Long fascinated by statues and masks from Africa and Asia, Mr Chirac has been known to portray himself as the defender of the world's downtrodden against the march of American-led Western cultural imperialism. "Against those who preach confrontation, violence, hate," he declared two years ago, the museum would send "the humanist message of respect for diversity and the dialogue of cultures".

From the start, the plan was to exhibit works that were already to be found in Paris, split between the Musée de l'Homme and the Palais de la Porte Dorée. Some 300,000 objects?-masks, stools, statues, musical instruments, textiles, costumes, jewellery, ceramics?-have been assembled, cleaned, documented, tagged, photographed and put online for the use of researchers. Like the Pompidou Centre, Quai Branly is designed not only to attract one-off tourists but regular visitors and students with research interests, providing them with a library and classrooms. Of the stock, some 3,500 items will be on permanent exhibit at once, and many of those in storage will be visible in a glass-fronted central circular vault.

On the banks of the Seine in the capital's swanky seventh arrondissement, the museum insolently interrupts the neighbouring streets of 19th-century Haussmann apartments. Perched on ten-metre-high (33 feet) curved supporting pillars, rather like a grounded spaceship, it is set back from the road in a landscaped garden. Created by Jean Nouvel, designer of the Institut du Monde Arabe, also in Paris, and of the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, it is a startling architectural composite. Inside, a wide white suspended ramp, winding gently upwards across the main exhibition hall, recalls Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York. Outside, a horizontal row of two dozen giant, Lego-like boxes protrude from the riverside façade, painted in earthy tones of aubergine, ochre and tan.

Geometric shapes meet flowing curves; plate glass meets natural wood; concrete meets vegetation. Detractors lament the architectural medley. But the overall result is oddly harmonious, perhaps because of the linking theme of nature. Once the trees planted on it mature, the site will be shaded and woodlike. There is even an extraordinary 800-square-metre "vegetation wall": a vertical garden in which 150 different plant species have taken root on polyamide felt, stapled to waterproof PVC slabs and fed by automatic hosepipes. Mr Nouvel said he wanted to create space organised around "the symbols of the forest, the river and the obsessions of death and oblivion".

The museum's permanent collection is made up of traditional artefacts, arranged mainly by geographical region. It includes familiar items, such as Kota reliquary figures in wood, brass and copper from eastern Gabon, as well as rare treasures, such as the tenth- or 11th-century Djennenké pre-Dogon statue from contemporary Mali, carved in wood and standing nearly two metres high. No dusty corners or cramped drawers of curiosities here, just dimmed lighting and big white spaces. The central idea is to dignify traditional art, and, says Stéphane Martin, the museum's director, "to put non-European culture on an equal footing with other civilisations". To this end, Quai Branly's original working title "Museum of Primary Arts" was dropped because of its association with the primitive and replaced with a neutral reference to the museum's location.

The project has stirred much controversy, however. Inevitably, ethnologists have decried the décontextualisation of artefacts that were never designed as aesthetic objects, but for practical, mystical or ritual purposes. Scholars from the two museums that surrendered their collections are particularly disgruntled. Yet why treat an ancient Greek vase as art and not a Zulu headrest? It was a collection of African masks in Paris, after all, that in 1907 inspired Picasso to explore abstract representation. He was moved, he said, by "the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by the anonymous artists of Africa."

Point for reflection
More awkward, perhaps, is the symbolism of Quai Branly.

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