Perhaps the most disturbing is Sonia Andrade's untitled self-portrait filmed in 1977 during Brazil's military regime. Accompanied by Degas drawings of medieval warfare and Greek wrestlers, the film shows Andrade slowly wrapping her head with a nylon wire until it is distorted, alienated, almost beyond recognition.
The eternal quality of Morrison's theme is presented through three "routes" highlighting objects in the museum's antiquities department. In one, Greek ceramics from the fifth century BC illustrate the inferior status of women in Athenian society. Eight Egyptian works focus on hostility toward foreigners, while Assyrian reliefs show how conquests caused mass deportations.
Literature picked up the subject of displacement and language through a debate on Saturday between Morrison and three writers: Edwige Danticat, who now lives in the US and writes in English about her native Haiti; Michael Ondaatje, who was born in Sri Lanka, educated in Britain, and lives in Canada; and Boubacar Boris Diop, a Senegalese novelist who writes in French and in his Wolof mother tongue.
France is an example of a country where foreigners are altering the language of their new home. This can be heard in the slang used by urban youths, many of African and Arab extraction, and in the poetry of rap. Some popular rappers participated in a poetry slam in front of Gericault's Medusa as part of this program.
In tapping her own African-American culture, Morrison is eager to credit "foreigners" with enriching the countries where they settle. "After the 'please, please, please let us in,"' she said, "comes the other thing, the creative energy that is carried inside them."
As evidence, she has sponsored a retrospective of movies by the African-American director Charles Burnett, as well as films and recordings featuring black American voices like Paul Robeson, Grace Bumbry, Marian Anderson, and Nina Simone. A live concert by the Malian musician Toumani Diabate will close the program on Wednesday.
So does all this represent a "conversation" among the arts? Foreign Bodies, the Forsythe-Welz-Bacon experiment, certainly does. In other cases, different disciplines have illustrated a common theme without enormous interaction.
Still, Henri Loyrette, the president of the Louvre, said that the project demonstrated that living artists had a place in a museum whose collection ends in 1850. And, just as important, the experiment has offered an unconventional reading of art history, a chance "to go outside a single voice," as he put it.
"And in the case of Toni Morrison," he added, "her very work serves as a meeting point for reflection."
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