Burnishing its reputation as a culture capital, Paris is getting a new museum -- an elegant elongated building near the Eiffel Tower -- for France's large and until now scattered collection of primitive art.
The US$265 million Musee du Quai Branly, which builders are racing to complete for its February 2006 opening, is President Jacques Chirac's pet project. The fan and defender of indigenous cultures is following the footsteps of other French leaders in leaving his imprint on the City of Light.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Shortly after his election in 1995, Chirac asked his ministers for ideas for his legacy, and their brainstorming gave birth to the Quai Branly project, said Stephane Martin, the museum's president.
Chirac said in June, when he welcomed a delegation of American Indians to his Elysee Palace, that ``in these times of violence, arrogance, intolerance and fanaticism,'' the museum will show ``France's faith in the virtues of cultural diversity and dialogue.''
Much of the French state's collection of nearly 300,000 pieces of indigenous non-Western art was brought back from Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas by colonizers and scientific research missions. It ranges from Indonesian jewelry and bows and arrows to African figurines and household items such as Mayan pottery.
``It is the traces of France's political, colonial and scientific adventures,'' Martin said in an interview.
The Quai Branly will combine collections currently housed at the museums of Mankind and of African and Oceanic Arts and at the Louvre, which lacks space to exhibit all its pieces.
``The public -- French and international, and particularly the representatives of the countries of origin -- wants to have access to these collections,'' Martin said. ``So we had to imagine a museum in which the collection would be much more accessible.''
Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the long fluid building is being raised on piles, with a partially wood-covered exterior that seems more in keeping with California than Paris. Nouvel designed the building to look like the elongated shadow of the Eiffel Tower, which is just a few minutes walk away.
Thickets of trees -- Martin called it a ``forest'' -- will shield the museum from the noise of traffic on the adjacent Quai Branly that runs beside the Seine. The 10,000m2 of exhibition space will include four separate rooms for temporary exhibitions and a main gallery for the permanent collection.
Nouvel also designed Paris' Institut du Monde Arabe, with its remarkable shuttered windows that open and close like the iris of an eye depending on the amount of light outside. The building on the Left Bank, completed in 1987, was overseen by another president who left a powerful mark on Paris, socialist Francois Mitterrand.
Other ``grands travaux'' -- great projects -- that form Mitterrand's legacy include the Grand Louvre, the Grande Arche at La Defense, the Bastille Opera House and the National Library. President Georges Pompidou, meanwhile, dreamed up the Centre Pompidou, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing left Paris the Musee d'Orsay.
Naming the new museum proved problematic. The term primary or primitive arts was rejected as too limiting and because it neglects the functional aspect of the objects in their original contexts. In the end, the more neutral Quai Branly was favored.
``We chose this name a bit arbitrarily but also partly out of humility because it seemed arrogant to us to claim to exhaustively and positively define within a title what would be the ambition of an institution like the Quai Branly,'' said Martin.
Although the museum is still under construction, curators already are preserving and archiving the nearly 300,000 pieces to make the collection more user-friendly. They are treating organic objects -- feathers or animal hides, for instance -- against insects and larvae and photographing the pieces and marking them with bar codes. Eventually the entire collection, including details such as the weight, size and history of each piece, will also be displayed on the Internet.
Museum's site: www.quaibranly.fr
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and