At the Quai Branly, ‘Each Exhibition We Do Is a Book Telling a Story’
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — When the Musée du Quai Branly opened here in 2006, there were outraged predictions that this $295 million project was doomed to fail. Its mismatched structures, plunked down in a neighborhood of grand 19th-century apartment buildings on the Seine, a block from the Eiffel Tower, disturbed traditionalists who felt that the ideal of Parisian architectural elegance had been violated. It scooped up African, Oceanic, American and Asian works of art from the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Oceaniens, drawing criticism from anthropologists for gutting two beloved institutions. Even the museum’s identity was suspect. Unlike traditional museums, which organize collections in separate rooms according to subject and century, the Quai Branly took an informal approach, with a multilevel open plan that crossed eras and oceans. Its goal was outrageously ambitious: to treat non-Western art with the same respect that the other greats in Paris devote to the Western canon, including the Louvre, with its Greek, Roman and Renaissance art treasures, and the Musée d’Orsay, with its Impressionist masterpieces. “There is no hierarchy among the arts, just as there is no hierarchy among peoples,” Jacques Chirac, a lover of Asian and African art and then France’s president, proclaimed when the museum opened. Ten years later, the Quai Branly sits as a bold proclamation of globalization and France’s openness to the world. (And to celebrate its 10th anniversary, the name of the museum has been officially changed to Quai Branly Museum — Jacques Chirac.) Its mission, its director, Stéphane Martin, proclaims, is to create a “dialogue of cultures.” Half of the museum’s space is for the display of 3,500 objects from its permanent collection of 300,000 artifacts, and half for temporary exhibitions. The permanent collection has no borders. It mixes African and Oceanic masks, Vietnamese and Moroccan textiles, contemporary Aboriginal paintings, pre-Columbian pottery, Native American art. It’s hard for ordinary museumgoers to understand. Yet the museum also dazzles with its temporary exhibitions, tackling global cross-cultural subjects by creating a world of pop culture activity around them. In 2009, for example, the museum exhibited an art form considered to be indigenous to America: jazz. Called “The Jazz Century,” the show opened with a classic chronological tour through the world of jazz and its effects on painting, photography, film, literature, album covers, sheet music and comic books. But Daniel Soutif, a philosopher and art critic who served as the show’s curator, also organized jazz concerts in the museum and took the exhibition outside its walls, sending visitors to the many jazz clubs in Paris. An exhibition in 2012 on the culture of cooking and eating in China put 150 objects on display, most of them belonging to the National Museum of China in Beijing, which had never lent them to a European museum. The exhibition and its catalog contained recipes, including one for bear paw. The museum offered a gastronomic tasting that included a variety of Chinese dishes, including pâtes vivantes (living noodles) topped with a sauce that included soybeans and pork belly. An exhibition that same year on “The Art of Hair: Frivolities and Trophies” included displays of American Indian scalps, Ecuadorean shrunken heads and Peruvian mummified trophy heads, as well as masks, jewelry, talismans, clothing and weapons made, or decorated with, human hair. It blended in enormous photographs of the actresses Ava Gardner and Gina Lollobrigida, and an image of a very young Jane Fonda with her hair in a half-pageboy, half-flip. Mr. Martin prides himself on using nonscholars to curate many of his shows. He called on Lilian Thuram, a former soccer star who is now an antiracism activist, to put together an exhibition on “Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage” in 2011. The show shocked many museumgoers by bringing together hundreds of bizarre, racist artifacts documenting how colonial subjects were used in human zoos, circuses and stage shows until the mid-20th century. Three years later came “Tattoo.” Sure, it grounded the art of tattooing in antiquity and exhibited 2,000-year-old mummified body parts. But Mr. Martin asked Anne & Julien (they use only their first names), the founders of a punk underground-art review, to oversee the show. Thirteen artists, from countries ranging from Samoa to Switzerland, came to ink their inspiration onto disembodied legs, torsos and arms made in silicone. Since 2011, the Quai Branly has conducted an outreach program called “Nomad Ateliers.” The first event came in conjunction with an exhibition on the Dogon lands of Mali, when museum representatives went into the Paris suburb of Montreuil, home to the biggest community of residents from Mali and of Malian descent in France. Among the offerings were “culinary ateliers” that served Malian food. During the “Tattoo” exhibition, lectures on the art of tattooing were given to men and women in prison. During “The Art of Hair,” the museum arranged visits to hospitals to discuss the representation and importance of hair in art with cancer patients. Hana Chidiac, the curator of a show in 2011 on women’s dress in the Middle East, called “Women in the Orient,” visited hospitals, jails and schools to talk about the meaning and artistic uses of the veil. The museum also organizes storytelling in schools and libraries, lends artworks to various ethnic communities outside Paris and offers free transport to bring their residents inside the museum walls, often for the first time. “You can’t just throw objects together and say, ‘This explains a culture,’’ Mr. Martin said. “We have had to learn to tell stories. Each exhibition we do is a book telling a story.” The most popular current exhibition at the Quai Branly is “The Color Line: African-American Artists and Segregation,” an idea brought to the museum by Mr. Soutif. The show pays tribute to almost 150 years of culture and politics — from the racist themes of 19th-century American vaudeville to the activism of leaders like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. It includes moving 1939 footage of Marian Anderson, denied the right to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington because of her color, triumphing with a performance of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the Lincoln Memorial. But there is another moving, if less dramatic, display there: Among the works is a collection of 30 small pencil drawings by Albert Alexander Smith, an American artist and musician living in Paris between the two world wars. Mr. Soutif happened upon them by accident in a local history museum in the French city of Besançon. Here they are, on public display for the first time in a national museum — not in the United States, but at the Quai Branly. |