"Every Place in the World on the Same Level!": Examining the Display of Non-Western Art at the Musee du Quai Branly

The Musée du Quai Branly opened under the long shadow of the Eiffel Tower in 2006 to spectacular criticism. Initiated primarily at the behest of then-President Jacques Chirac (b. 1932, held office from 1995-2007), the museum possesses an eclectic family tree, a complex history, and a controversial curatorial practice. Built to house the majority of France’s comprehensive collection of non-Western art, the museum stemmed not only from Chirac’s deep interest in non-Western art,1 but has origins in two previously established museums and gallery spaces devoted as well to non-Western art. These spaces, the former Musée de l’Homme and the Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre, are both worthy of note in their own right and create a genealogy that leads toward the Musée du Quai Branly, shedding light on the story of how non-Western cultures are displayed in France.

Curatorial and exhibition systems are confronted with the fact that all discourses are located, that is, they are formed and begin somewhere, they have a temporal and spatial basis, and they operate synchronically and diachronically. The located nature of cultural discourses, along with their history of discontinuities and transitions, confronts curatorial practices with the fragility of universalized conceptions of history, culture, and artistic procedures.2

In context, Enwezor’s insight pertains to the Tate Modern’s curatorial practices, but it can also be used to elucidate the curatorial systems of the three spaces dedicated to non-Western art. The “location” of the French curatorial practice as pertains to non-Western art can be found in three things: the national identity that was created in 1789 with the French Revolution, the republicanism that also sprouted from the Revolution, and colonialism. I will then examine the museums that have been created around these elements. These three display spaces each approach non-Western cultures in a different way, creating a history of display textured with colonial ideologies, ethnographic study, and the coolness of pure aesthetics. I will look at the Musée de l’Homme, opened in 1937, and the strictly ethnographic approach it took to the display of non-Western art until it closed in 2004 for reorganization.

I will then move to the Pavillon des Sessions, a small set of rooms that opened in the Louvre in 2004, where non-Western art was viewed from a singularly aesthetic point of view. I will end with the Musée du Quai Branly, opened in 2006, which offers a vague amalgamation of both presentations. Viewing the three spaces from a linear perspective, one might imagine some semblance of progress. Indeed, as will be explained throughout, it can be argued that each museum was built in an attempt to ameliorate issues or concerns with the previous setting. Given the globalized world in which we now live, where information is available to achieve an accurate and honest understanding of another culture, one might assume that the way a museum director of the 1930’s viewed non-Western art must be radically different from the way someone at a museum today would view similar content. However, I will contest that these three French exhibition spaces prove this assumption difficult to verify. Both criticism and support have descended upon the Musée du Quai Branly since its opening Despite the idea of evolution behind the disbanding of the former and outdated Musée de l’Homme and the creation of the Pavillon des Sessions and the Musée du Quai Branly, I will argue that France has not progressed in the way it presents non-Western cultures.

The Museum Makers

Republicanism and National Identity

Since the opening of the Louvre in 1793, Republicanism has largely defined the way French museums display their content. The opening of the Louvre to the public heralded a new beginning for the country, one in which the modern republican values of liberté, égalité and fraternité (liberty, equality and brotherhood), would be espoused through public access to the riches of France. Art historian Carol Duncan explains that, in being “open to all” as a public institution, the museum both created and reflected a national identity. “Now presented as public property, [the objects displayed] became the means through which a new relationship between the individual as citizen and the state as benefactor could be symbolically enacted.”3 The majority of the collection of the Louvre was compiled during Napoleon’s pillage-and-plunder campaigns across Europe and the Middle East, some of which were advertised as scientific expeditions.4 Not only was the French citizen united in free access to this collection, but he was to see the power of his country in it as well. Duncan goes on to explain that for other dominant, Western countries looking to the Louvre as a model, the opening of a museum was a safe and relatively easy way to assert national power; citizenship could be conferred without also have to relinquish the central power of the government.5 The opening of the Louvre was a nation-building project.

The republican values of liberté, égalité and fraternité were first introduced in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, drawn up in 1789 as the constitution that established the country’s new laws.6 This decree gave ultimate rights to the citizen, rather than to the individual, allowing, for instance, access to the Louvre for all members of society despite their social rank. The term “citizen” was the ultimate equalizer. However, since citizenship was the main factor for equality, this meant that particular religions, ethnicities or languages—common marks of individuality—were explicitly different from the characteristics shared as a citizen of France, and were thus not allowed to be publicly acknowledged.7 In her essay “Cultural Difference and Cultural Diversity: The Case of the Musée du Quai Branly,” Nélia Dias offers an explanation of French citizenship in this regard:

The notion of [French] citizenship implies the sense of belonging to
a nation and the idea of a public space based on common interests;
to be a citizen requires a principle of inclusion, what is known in France
as the ‘republican contract.’ The French nation has since the Revolution been conceptualized around abstract, universalistic, and voluntaristic principles of citizenship, rather than on the particularistic, ethnically
based notion of nationhood.8

This preference toward citizenship and universality makes the topic of cultural diversity and cultural difference, and especially the portrayal of such diversity and/or difference in a museum, particularly complex and intriguing.

Under the umbrella of French citizenship, the concept of égalité (previously described as “equality”; Dias translates this as “equivalence”9) purports that in theory, all cultures and religions are equal. Likewise, laïcité, the French version of secularism, works similarly to égalité in that publicly, no religious belief can be given a preference over another. As Séverine Le Guével, head of international relations at the Musée du Quai Branly, offered to anthropologist Sally Price,

We at the Quai Branly…respect the principle of laïcité. Therefore,

we do not take into consideration any claim based on religion or ethnicity…We’re a public institution, a secular institution operating in the public domain. If you allow the legitimacy of one religion, you allow them all, and then they cancel each other out. That would put every place in the world on the same level!10

One is therefore free to do as one pleases on one’s own terms and in private, but in the public sphere, everyone must adhere to the universality of the republican values—even though this “universality” only seems to adhere on the state level, and not on an individual level.11 This inclusive/exclusive value system plays out most interestingly in the creation of a museum of non-Western art, which we will see later.

Colonialism

The French colonial mission civilisatrice, extending from roughly the 1850’s to 1930, was motivated by the idea that “primitive” cultures needed “saving” and/or “cultivating” in the image of the French in order to be civilized. The history and effects of French colonialism play an integral role in how non-Western cultures are presented today. The phrase “nos ancêtres les Gaulois,” which was commonly taught to children of colonized countries, was meant to draw every person who “believed” it under the umbrella of “French” by evoking ancient French roots.12 France was essentially attempting to create an identity for a community of people united only through a forced political bond.13