New (French) Musée du quai Branly opens ...

Paris's New Branly Museum Will Explore Cultures Outside Europe

By Celestine Bohlen

June 20 (Bloomberg) -- Paris, which already has more than its fair share of great museums, gets a brand new one on June 23, dedicated to art from Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific region -- in other words, Everywhere but Europe.

Musee du Quai Branly, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower on the left bank of the Seine, has been a pet project of President Jacques Chirac since 1995. Now, as the 232.5 million-euro ($292.7 million) museum nears completion, it promises to be Chirac's most visible legacy on the Parisian landscape.

It will surely be his last, as he finishes his second term next year. Chirac has worked at boosting France's role in Asia and Africa, particularly among its ex-colonies. The Branly reflects those ambitions, according to Stephane Martin, its president.

``The Quai Branly Museum is linked to a political idea,'' Martin said in an interview. ``If not for the initiatives taken by President Chirac, there would be no museum today.''

The goal is to explore cultures that predated and coexisted with European civilization, well beyond the confines of France. That makes it unusual among major arts projects, Martin said.

``It is important to see art works outside the prism of Old World and New World, beyond the idea that all culture stems from the Mediterranean basin,'' Martin said. ``It is the first time in a long time that a museum is asked to talk about things other than national cultural identity.''

What makes the Branly unusual for Paris is that it gives a contemporary architect -- in this case Jean Nouvel, who designed the 1986 Institute of the Arab World -- the chance to make a bold statement. With the exception of the Centre Pompidou, which opened in 1977, museums in Paris have historically tended to take shelter in existing buildings such as palaces and mansions.

The French architect, speaking Monday at a press preview, said his goal had been to ``create a territory,'' with several buildings, rather than a single architectural monument.

Finding a name for the Branly wasn't easy. Words like ``primitive'' or ``tribal'' were rejected as pejorative, Martin said. ``Arts premiers,'' a commonly used French term meaning first or early arts, was floated, and then also withdrawn because it too suggests a Western point of view.

In the end, the museum took on the name of its address, much like the Musee du Quai d'Orsay, situated less than a kilometer upstream. The Louvre, France's largest museum, is further up river, located on the right bank.

While the Branly collection of 300,000 objects is drawn mainly from two other Paris museums, the biggest debt is to France's long-standing passion for primitive art, which was a source of inspiration for artists such as Pablo Picasso and collectors like the late Jacques Kerchache.

African Art

A friend of Chirac, Kerchache, who died in 2001, helped found the museum and bequeathed it part of his own considerable collection of African art. The museum has a reading room named after him, completed with help from the Sony Europa Foundation.

The museum has also turned to private companies for help with acquisitions, Martin said. Axa SA, the Paris-based insurance company, gave 4 million euros to buy a 1.91-meter statue in a style known as ``djennenke'' from Mali, made in the 11th century.

Branly attracted other major corporate sponsors, including Gaz de France SA, which paid for a garden of pools and winding paths designed by Gilles Clement, which lies in front of the museum, on Rue de l'Universite.

Naoki Takizawa, creative designer of Issey Miyake, and Cie. de Saint-Gobain SA, Europe's biggest distributor of building materials, teamed up to create giant curtains that hang at the museum's entrance on Quai Branly. Schneider Electric SA helped with the creation of the ``river,'' an undulating leather-covered wall in the exhibition space embedded with audiovisual screens.

Art of Glass

The glass column at the center of the exhibition space, which houses a collection of musical instruments, was donated by Caisse des Depots & Consignations, a French state-owned bank. A group of French companies with investments in Australia, including Veolia Environnement, helped pay for five ceiling paintings by Australian aboriginal artists.

The flank of one building, facing the Seine, is covered by thick green foliage from 150 varieties of plants. On the other side of a sharp triangular corner is another wall, covered with rows of orange daggers, looking more like toothpicks than the Japanese weapons they are meant to suggest.

At the back of the building is a sunken amphitheater, below a giant ramp that leads visitors to the main halls. There is a restaurant on the rooftop terrace, which is surrounded by basins of water that reflect the Eiffel Tower overhead.

The basins were constructed with the help of another donor, Pernod Ricard SA, the maker of Perrier-Jouet champagne.

The point was to create a museum that invites people to visit, spend the day and above all, come back, Martin said.

``We want to establish a relationship with the visitor,'' he said. ``A museum is a collection of places with the visitor at their core. Before, it was a passive experience; now, more and more, it's a public service.''

Chirac eyes his legacy as indigenous Paris museum opens

· €230m project on Seine took 11 years to build
· Critics question colonial stereotypes of exhibits

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Wednesday June 21, 2006
The Guardian


The French president, Jacques Chirac, unveiled his great cultural legacy to the country yesterday, a new museum for indigenous art which he promised would inspire "peace and tolerance" in the world.
But even as Mr Chirac announced in the presence of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, that he was giving a voice to "peoples humiliated and scorned", questions lingered over whether the museum was rehashing colonial cliches, why exhibits appeared to be scantily labelled and whether the €230m (£160m) project, which has already overrun and overspent, would be finished before opening to the public on Friday.

How does your gallery grow?

Chirac's new museum of 'primitive art' may have caused controversy. But Jonathan Glancey finds himself seduced by a building with its own forest and 15,000 plants growing up the walls

Monday June 26, 2006
The Guardian


In 1989, Jean Nouvel unveiled plans for a "Tour Sans Fin", a tower without end. Had it been built, this truly revolutionary design might have changed the face of skyscrapers the world over. Its structure was to have become increasingly light, then filigree, and finally transparent as it reached into the sky. Given the all-too-solid nature of the existing office blocks at La Défense in Paris, where it would have stood, and of the long-necked architectural dinosaurs recently given the go-ahead in the City of London, it's a pity Nouvel was not able to realise his dream.
Since then, Nouvel has made his reputation with buildings that seem smaller and more delicate than they really are, as tantalisingly "not there" as any large mass of concrete, steel and glass can ever be. His Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, completed in 1987, is like an exquisite piece of glass and steel jewellery. The Fondation Cartier, completed in 1994 and also in Paris, is a sequence of architectural screens, some transparent, others translucent, with plants and trees between them: it is hard to tell where the solid core of this beautiful art gallery begins and ends.

Nouvel has woven gardens into his many buildings, so that nature and artifice are happily entwined. Where most architects need heavy metal louvres to keep the sun from their office designs, Nouvel plants bamboo instead. His ingenious ways of reducing the bulk and pretention of major civic and commercial buildings are all combined in the new Musée du Quai Branly, dedicated to art from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Stretched along the left bank of the Seine, it sits cheek-by-jowl with haughty Hausmann-era apartment blocks in the long shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
The gallery is Jacques Chirac's equivalent to François Mitterrand's "Grands Projets" of the 1980s and 90s. It is a museum, he believes, that disaffected young immigrant Parisians will come to appreciate and even love. According to Le Monde, and a large number of commentators, the museum is the best thing Chirac has ever championed in Paris. But there are those who say the gallery upholds the spirit of French colonialism, and others who demand that the collections should be returned to their disparate and far-flung homes.

Low-lying and half-hidden by fast-growing foliage, the Musée du Quai Branly is, says Nouvel, "a building nestled in the landscape and awaiting discovery, intended to serve as a home to these different forms of arts rather than as an example of western architecture". In recent years, architecture photographers have become increasingly used to whizzy "iconic" or "look-at-me" buildings, easily captured in one lazy, headline-stealing snap - and then given a populist nickname by journalists. Significantly, this is true of all the new office towers planned for the City of London, except the proposed Walbrook Square, by Nouvel and Norman Foster. This is a truly orginal design for a commercial office building that is as much a cluster of streets as it is a building, and not a particularly high one at that. It will be a bit like a loaf that has been quartered, with the quarters brought back together and narrow gaps left between. These gaps will be lined with shops ("no chains", the developers promise) and interrupted by squares, trees and fountains. It should work partly as a riposte to the Shanghai-style towers now bludgeoning their way across the London skyline.

The Musée du Quai Branly has a banal name designed to match its superficially low-key ambition. In fact, the name has been the subject of much deliberation, following the political and cultural controversy generated by the gallery. The museum is meant as a subtle challenge to the very French idea that all great art is, well, French - or at least must meet with official French approval. "It is the first time in a long time," says the museum's president, Stéphane Martin, "that a museum has been asked to talk about things other than national cultural identity." Words like "primitive" or "tribal" have been rejected, as was "Musée d'Arts Premiers", because, says Martin, "it, too, suggests a western point of view". The philosophy of the museum (it must have a philosophy, this is France) is based largely on the pronouncements of Chirac's late friend Jacques Kerchache, an art historian, who believed "no hierarchy exists among the arts".

Nouvel's aim in the 11-year project was to "create a territory with several buildings rather than a single architectural monument". Inside this territory are some 300,000 captivating objects, including carved African masks, feather headdresses from the Amazon, ambitious silver earrings from the Middle East, exquisite musical instruments and truly inspirational wooden sculpture from 11th-century Mali.

The end result is a walk in the woods, through a flow of buildings set back from the rue de l'Université that nevertheless form a whole. They are connected by bridges and lobbies adorned with new ceiling paintings by eight Aboriginal Australian artists. From the outside, the main building blocks, in the guise of two-storey glazed walkways, are raised 10 metres over ponds, paths and a sunken amphitheatre. These corridor-like structures are punctuated by projecting and variously sized geometric concrete blocks the colours of sand, earth and, I think, aubergines; inside, these serve as display galleries.

The wall of one block, facing the Seine, is already smothered in the dense foliage of no fewer than 15,000 plants of 150 different varieties. The public restaurant looks out towards the Eiffel Tower, which is also reflected in great basins of water. The garden has yet to mature but will eventually encircle the buildings. Designed by Gilles Clement, it features oaks and maples, offset by magnolia, cherry, wisteria, rambler rose, wild clematis and giant Chinese creeper. When they are fully grown, Nouvel's work will be glimpsed between leaves, blossom and branches. It will not quite vanish like the Tour Sans Fin, yet its impact will be very much less than that of any other French presidential project.

The sheer diversity of the architecture, and the inside-outside nature of its plan, means that museum fatigue is kept to a minimum. There is no sense here of walking aimlessly along endless vistas of glass cases stuffed full of objects that quickly blur into one. True, the galleries at the heart of the museum are necessarily dark and happily mysterious - yet these lead back to daylight and to the paths through the growing forest outside.

In Paris, Nouvel has again proved that he can bring different cultures to engaging life; as with the Institut du Monde Arabe, so with the cultures embodied in the new Musée du Quai Branly. Even his most monumental buildings - such as the Congress and Cultural Centre, overlooking the lake at Lucerne, Switzerland, and home of the internationally acclaimed Lucerne festival of music - have a subtlety of touch missing from so many new "iconic" designs. The Lucerne building, boasting one of the finest new auditoriums in the world (its acoustics can be adjusted to serve rock bands and string quartets equally well), is gathered under a glorious projecting roof that appears to reach out and embrace the entirety of this Swiss city, and even the snow-capped peaks seemingly just beyond its walls. Beneath the generous spread of its vast canopy-like roof, the sounds of ships' hooters resound, while the lapping of the water is reflected in its underside. Since Nouvel completed this building in 2005, Lucerne has become a major European cultural centre, a city of just 50,000 people that can play to a world audience.

Nouvel made the Fondation Cartier a major name in the international arts world. He helped make Arab art and culture truly accessible and popular at a time when the west needed to start understanding it. With Walbrook Square, he is helping reinvent the office block in London. Now he has shaped a cluster of buildings in the heart of Paris that should encourage visitors from all over the world to see what they have been brought up to call "primitive art" as something special in its own right, not as a creative tool for Picasso and other European artists, but as an art sans fin.