Last week many of the pieces that first fascinated Picasso were revealed at the opening of the vast new Musée du Quai Branly on the banks of the Seine, along with thousands of other works from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. They make up the most spectacular permanent exhibition of non-Western art ever assembled: some 3,500 pieces are on display, with another 300,000 stored in the basement. Designed by architect Jean Nouvel, the €235 million building is meant to be a place of emotion as well as scholarship, mystery as well as learning.
French President Jacques Chirac, who has a passion for so-called primitive art, launched the museum project soon after he was first elected in 1995. In 2000, to whet the public’s appetite, an outpost was set up with 120 dazzling works in a far corner of the Louvre. Some 3 million people have visited those rooms since then, and those works are now a permanent fixture in the same wing as the Mona Lisa. But what’s on show at the Louvre is just a taste of the extravagant experience created across the river at the Quai Branly.
The outside of Nouvel’s complex of buildings, a couple of blocks from the Eiffel Tower, is as full of color and surprises as a peyote eater’s dreams, and sometimes scarcely more coherent. One wall, fronting the Seine, is a mass of 15,000 living plants constructed into a vertical garden by the imaginative botanist Patrick Blanc. A high glass palisade lines the road, meant to reflect the trees and river, while behind it more trees have been planted; the main building itself rises above the ground on huge pylons that are meant to suggest trees.
The jungle metaphor is so overdone that it starts to seem silly, or condescending. A collection of large boxes in orange, red, yellow and purple protrude from the museum’s outside walls, and resemble darkened huts from the inside. And the way into the museum follows winding, irregular outdoor paths in an attempt to make a visit feel like an expedition.
The other side of the building looks out toward the Eiffel Tower–or, perhaps, the Eiffel Totem. Nouvel’s building seems to worship its presence. Mirrors in the windows of the administrative offices give extra views of the tower. A major break in the lines of the main building has been calculated to frame a dazzling perspective. And the museum’s vast rooftop terrace and restaurant, which looks straight up at the tower, is sure to become a favorite hangout for people who couldn’t care less about the art beneath their feet.
But for those who could, the interior of Nouvel’s building may well be a place of wonder. The space is almost entirely open, apart from a low wall called “the serpent,” which offers written and digital information about the collection. The works are grouped geographically, but not one area, from Easter Island to the Arctic Circle, from South Asia to West Africa, is cut off from the others. There are small gems like a 2,000-year-old sculpture from the mysterious Chupicuaro culture in Mexico: a fertility figure that’s rotund, harlequined, vaguely cherubic and utterly original. A wonderful carved Malian masque evokes the grace of animals, the dignity of humans. Visitors are left to free-associate in the face of primal art that touches the great themes of sex and birth, death and the afterlife–and often reaches out for the faces of the gods. Picasso would have understood. The “virus” that he caught looking at such art changed the way he saw the world. Visitors to the Quai Branly may catch the same thing.
