Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution

35. The Difficult Art of Exhibiting the Colonies

35 The difficult art of exhibiting the Colonies robert aldrich Collecting and colonizing went hand in hand from the early days of european discovery and takeover of overseas domains. The first explorers, adventurers , and traveling scientists as well as the conquerors planting the flags of their nations over faraway lands acquired and returned to europe with hundreds of thousands of exotic objects.1 at a later stage, institutions involved in imperialist expansion—government ministries, the army and navy, geographic societies, religious orders—established collections in order systematically to exhibit ethnographic , artistic, and natural specimens from little-known places. These collections were constituted according to widely varying policies and perspectives, depending upon time and place in the centuries-long global engagement between europe and the rest of the world. occasionally, local populations offered colonizers gifts of art and artifacts as a sign of friendship or with the aim of establishing trade relations; in other cases, europeans obtained objects through purchase or by outright plunder. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, museums and instituts coloniaux in France—for example, the Musée Commercial et Colonial in lille (established in 1854) and the Musée des Missions africaines in lyon (1863)—used these collections intentionally to stimulate scientific knowledge, economic interest, and territorial expansion. Moreover, private initiatives led to the creation of other museums , of which the Musée Guimet (set up in lyon in 1879) remains one of the best examples. such efforts at collecting objects and establishing museums continued throughout the era of colonization, as the creation of colonial museums in Marseille, Paris, and lyon demonstrate. They taught visitors the colonialist message—the proclaimed benefits of empire for both the French and those over whom France ruled—and sometimes inspired colonial vocations, but the displays also sparked the avant-garde movement’s fascination with primitive art and social scientists’ interest in distant cultures. in the 1960s, decolonization brought an abrupt end to the liaison between colonialism and collecting. The question of how to present colonial-era collections still displayed in a colonialist style confronted French museum authorities 438 The Difficult Art of Exhibiting the Colonies | 439 in the postcolonial context.2 debates on this issue animated directors and curators in the decades that followed the independence of the colonies.3 Most of the explicitly propagandistic musées coloniaux quietly closed; other collections were mothballed, and a few simply left in place. over the past fifteen years or so, different initiatives have led to the renovation of often dusty museums and the opening of new galleries for both exhibiting such collections and addressing the issue of how to present exotic objects, a large part of which came from the spoils of colonial campaigns and expeditions, in line with contemporary museographical practice.4 Meanwhile, some societies and peoples from which items originated have occasionally voiced demands, generally unsuccessful, for restitution of ancestral objects.5 Collections of exotic objects in european museums thus reflect a history of overseas expansion and pose questions about the curatorial, political, and moral stakes involved in exhibiting non-european works and acknowledging their provenance and the circumstances of their acquisition. The recognition of colonialism (or its absence) in the Musée du Quai Branly, for example, has provoked much debate, while controversy has caused a project for a museum-cummonument to colonialism in Marseille to be aborted. The omnipresence of empire even the occasional museum-goer in Paris quickly becomes aware of the range of objects from the former colonies housed within their walls, a reminder of the not always visible ubiquity of the colonial in French society. orientalist paintings and sculptures grace the galleries of the Musée du louvre and the Musée d’orsay. The Musée des années trente in Boulogne-Billancourt includes a gallery of colonialist art that, under the pressures of decolonization, was long relegated to storage before being brought out once more in the early 1990s. not far from that museum is the archives de la Planète in the Musée albert Kahn, which possesses an extensive collection of photographs and documentary motion picture footage—largely commissioned in the 1930s by a banker and savant who set up the museum—from around the world. The Musée Guimet, moved by its creator, an industrialist and traveler, from lyon to Paris in the 1880s, holds one of the most valuable asian art collections in europe, with notable pieces from the former indochina. several other connoisseurs also bequeathed their collections to the...