France’s new paean to primitivism

Parisians and tourists had their first chance Friday to visit Paris’ new primitive-art museum, which opened to the public for three days of free entry.

But visitors to the Quai Branly Museum had a long wait to get in -- 2 1/2 hours Friday afternoon, according to a counter on the museum’s website. Entry is free through Sunday; a standard ticket will usually cost $10.65.

The $293-million museum, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and tucked in a garden near the Eiffel Tower, houses art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. French President Jacques Chirac began pushing for the project soon after he took office in 1995.

The Quai Branly showcases the so-called tribal arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, at a time when France is engulfed in debate about how to heal the scars of its colonial past and accept a multicultural vision of its present.

The main building -- one of four structures in the complex -- is modernistic and elongated, and it guides visitors on a circuitous path among glass cases of treasures.

The museum does not claim to offer a well-rounded sampling of tribal arts. There are many works from Mali, for example, and only a few from Hawaii, simply because some countries -- especially former colonies -- are more represented in France’s national collections.

It also offers no explanation of how ritualistic objects were used, one of many sources of debate surrounding the museum. A visitor who admires a funeral mannequin from the South Pacific -- a spooky creation of bone, spider webs, pig’s teeth and shells -- may wonder at its exact purpose. Was it carried in a procession? What did it symbolize?

The museum says the art needs no explanation: Its beauty should speak for itself.

“The big difference between this museum and ethnological museums is that we are not here to give a lesson about things,” museum director Stephane Martin said. “We are here to mediate between us, Europeans ... and the non-Western world.”

The goal is a “dialogue of cultures,” and the museum mixes pieces together with little to distinguish their origins. Embroidered costumes from Vietnam are on display near stoneencrusted earrings from the Middle East.

Journalists who saw the museum earlier this week had mixed reactions: Some found the museum too dark, cluttered and lacking in context, while Le Monde newspaper said the 3,500-piece collection was “on stage spectacularly.” Some historians have recently asked whether the museum might “ghettoize” the works by separating them from other art forms.

Quai Branly has been controversial since Chirac announced the project, catching up with the late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, who marked the capital with the Louvre Pyramid and the Bastille Opera, among other projects.

Some complained because Quai Branly stripped works from two other museums -- the National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania, which shut down and is to replaced by a museum on immigration, and the Museum of Mankind.

Then there was the question of what to call the new landmark. Any name hinting at “primitive arts” was ruled out because of the term’s inherent Western condescension. The state eventually opted for a noncontroversial title, after the street on the Seine River where it is located.

At the heart of debate is whether masterpieces from Africa, for example, would be better off in their country of origin. Much of the French state’s collection of nearly 300,000 pieces of indigenous non-Western art was brought back by colonizers and scientific research missions.

Jean Nouvel, the museum’s architect, argues that it will help repair the wrongs of the colonial era.

“There is no better way to give these civilizations back their virtue and nobility,” said Nouvel, who designed another Paris landmark, the Institute of the Arab World.

Issues about France’s colonial past are still sensitive here -- just last year, parliament passed a law requiring schoolbooks to highlight the “positive role” of French colonialism. The term was later stripped from the legislation, but the law was an embarrassment for France.

Chirac, completing what is likely the final year of his 12-year presidency, is a fan of indigenous cultures; he successfully pushed to get the Louvre to open a wing of tribal arts. He says the new museum was “the result of a political desire to see justice rendered to non-European cultures.”

Paris’ last newly built major museum -- the Georges Pompidou Center for modern art -- opened in 1977. The Musee d’Orsay, a former train station, opened as a showcase for 19th century art in 1986.