Paris Museums

The Musee du Quai Branly – what a hodgepodge! In a stab at the ‘new museum,’ galleries have been eliminated, and the visitor is expected to flow through continents, like some Nile-Amazon combination. Then, what impresses is not quality, but quantity. Instead of one great Kota reliquary figure, we find eleven lined up in a row. I’m sure there are many masterpieces present, but there is so much of everything and so much of the same thing that one is more impressed with the grasp of French colonial acquisition than the eye of a curator. Much the same can be said of the other Paris museums we visited: the Louvre, the d’Orsay, the Guimet.
There were personal highlights: a Chumash headband from Santa Barbara, a fan (the most pleasing shape and braiding of five displayed) from the South Pacific, a monumental Djenne wooden statue that validated the MIA’s, and a Benin five-figure plaque (the two bronze heads on display were later than and artistically inferior to the MIA’s). Interestingly, I saw nothing from the Nok or Ife cultures – maybe the French collecting was done too early. The ultimate in excess, though, was the center core of hundreds and hundreds of similar musical instruments, thankfully not open to the public, but a testament to the overly inclusive nature of the collection.
The Pompidou Centre, by contrast, was all about curatorial selection. The 4th floor, which was all we had time for after the Eileen Gray special exhibition, covered the period 1960-to-present and, the label informed, is rehung every two years. Coincidentally, perhaps, this is the same era covered by Liz Armstrong’s Until Now show at the MIA in2010. With all the world of contemporary art to choose from, I detected only two artists who had been selected for both shows: Warhol, an obvious choice, and Pistoletto. There are so many artists, and even art movements, for this half-century that no canon has been established. (Conversely, I am certain that if we had toured the 5th floor – pre-1960 modern are – I would’ve been familiar with most, if not all, the artists represented.) One hundred years from now, when the work of this era has to be compressed into several galleries, who will be shown?
There was one room of semi-iconic Americans: Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Ryman. In the hall outside was a large Sean Scully and a larger Joan Mitchell. The rest, I believe, were mainly Europeans. Other than Joseph Beuys, whose two-room felt-roll wall installation was unusually moving, most were new to me. Our two favorites were a room of 50? praying Muslims, headless hollow sculptures by Adnan Khatta (estimate) and a video in which two gallery assistant types struck poses between, in front of and finally inside three pairs of ‘wearable sculpture’ by a name I’ve forgotten. Our concept of what is art has obviously expanded since 1960, which is all the more reason it is so hard to say, what is best, what will last.

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