Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France

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Musée du quai Branly
Designer Jean Nouvel
Location Paris, France
Date 1999 to 2006
Building Type Museum
Construction System steel, metal, concrete
Climate Mild Temperate
Context Urban
Architectural Style Modern
Street Address 55 Quai Branly
Notes

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Building Details
Client Etablissement public du Musée du Quai Branly
Cost 204.3 million Euro
Area 76,500 square meters (823,000 square feet)
Program Reference collections, Large gallery, small gallery, Media library, Reading room, rare collection room, new publications room, classrooms seating, discovery workshops, study rooms, Media library reserves, auditorium, administration, restaurant, bookshop.


[edit] In the words of the Creator

"Presence-Absence or Selective Dematerialisation

"This is a museum built around a specific collection, where everything is designed to evoke an emotional response to the primary object, to protect it from light, but also to capture that rare ray of light indispensable to make it vibrate and awaken its spirituality. In a place inhabited by symbols of forests and rivers, by obsessions of death and oblivion, it is an asylum for censored and cast off works from Australia and the Americas. It is a loaded place haunted with dialogues between the ancestral spirits of men, who, in discovering their human condition, invented gods and beliefs. It is a place that is unique and strange, poetic and unsettling." - Ateliers Jean Nouvel


[edit] Related Content from Wikipedia

Musée du quai Branly


thumb|225px|Musée du quai Branly

The Musée du quai Branly, known in English as the Quai Branly Museum, nicknamed MQB, is a museum in Paris, France that features indigenous art, cultures and civilizations from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The museum is located at 37, quai Branly - portail Debilly, 75007 Paris, France, situated close to the Eiffel Tower. It is named after its location (not after the physicist Édouard Branly).

History

A commission was established to study the feasibility of building the museum in 1995. When the study was concluded, land was reserved near the Eiffel Tower for the future museum. French President Jacques Chirac was a very influential proponent of the project. Quai Branly opened on June 23, 2006. For the whole story of the MQB (and the introduction of "primitive art" to the Louvre Museum), see Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly by Sally Price (2007).

Building

thumb|left|250px|Rear view of museum's striking architecture and interior garden

The building was designed by architect Jean Nouvel. The "living wall" (200m long by 12m tall) on part of the exterior of the museum was designed and planted by Gilles Clément and Patrick Blanc. The "living wall" at installation was quite healthy and vibrant, however, over time, the inadequate support system for the plants roots, irrigation and drainage have become visually evident. The museum complex contains several buildings, as well as a mediatheque and a garden. The museum's frontage facing onto quai Branly features very tall glass paneling which allows its interior gardens to be remarkably quiet only meters from the busy street in front of them.

Exhibits

thumb|250px|View of its African exhibits

The museum contains the collections of the now-closed Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie and the ethnographic department of the Musée de l'Homme. The museum contains 267,000 objects in its permanent collection, of which 3,500 items from the collection are on display. A part of it is now exhibit at the Pavillon des Sessions of the musée du Louvre, where the master pieces are such as "l'homme de fer".

The museum has also an important library with 3 main departements :

  • book collection with 2 reading rooms : a research reading room at the top floor and a popular reading room at the ground floor
  • picture collection with photographs and drawings
  • archive collection

The library has collections from important ethnologists such as Georges Condominas, Françoise Girard, Nesterenko, or art trader such as Jacques Kerchache.

Australian Aboriginal artists

Australian indigenous artists represented at the Museum include Kathleen Petyarre (Utopia), Paddy Bedford (Warmun), John Mawurndjul ( Arnhem Land), Ningura Napurrula ( Papunya Tula), Lena Nyadbi (Warmun), Michael Riley (urban), Judy Watson (urban), Tommy Watson (Papunya) and Gulumbu Yunupingu (Yirrkala). In the case of Ningura Napurrula, her signature black and white motif appear superimposed on the ceiling of the administration side of the museum's building.

Controversy

Stéphane Martin, the director of the Quai Branly museum, has recently been involved in controversy over the return of Maori warrior heads held in France. This was brought up after a museum in Normandy, France, was doing a respectable gesture by returning this tattooed head of a Maori warrior. Since 1992, the Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand's national museum, has requested the return of Maori remains held around the world - which were a result of international body trafficking. However, Christine Albanel, the culture minister, stepped in to stop the return of human remains to its tribe in New Zealand. Mr Martin boasted about holding four Maori heads in their collection and has refused to return these back to the New Zealand tribes and ideally to allow for proper burials, stating “They are stored in a very special area, and absolutely will not be put on public display”. Nevertheless, this goes against France’s bioethics law, which states that a body part must be returned to its place of origin.

Quai Branly has also received criticism for a perceived reliance on visual appeal and theatrics, as opposed to explanation and context, in its exhibitions. [1]

Australian Art Market Report Issue 23 Autumn 2007 Pages 32–34:

"Twelve months after the opening of Musée du quai Branly in Paris, journalist Jeremy Eccles takes a look at what effect, if any, the museum" (where contemporary Aboriginal art forms an integral part of the architectural structure) " has had on .... Aboriginal art"

In this article, he quotes Bernice Murphy - co-founder of the Sydney MCA and now National Director of Museums Australia and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the International Council of Museums. She told a Sydney symposium on 'Australian Arts in an International Context' that she found the whole of Quai Branly to be a "regressive museology" and the presentation of Aboriginal art "in a vegetal environment" to be "an exotic mise en scène" in the worst taste. "It can't be decontextualised into a glorious otherness".

On more general terms, discontent with the MQB rests on its blunt ignoring of the post-colonial reinterpretation of Western history, that has developed since the 1970s and ultimately affected museums and changed curatorial practices. [2]


See also

Notes

Bibliography

  • Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007.
  • Odile Grandet, "The médiathèque at the musée du quai Branly in Paris : vitual, but more than that". Art Libraries Journal, 2007, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 35-39. ISSN 0307-4722.

External links

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cs:Musée du quai Branly

de:Musée du quai Branly es:Museo del muelle Branly eo:Muzeo de la kajo Branly fr:Musée du quai Branly it:Musée du quai Branly he:מוזיאון קה בראנלי nl:Musée du quai Branly ja:ケ・ブランリ美術館 pt:Museu do Quai Branly ru:Музей на набережной Бранли sah:Бранли музейа fi:Musée du quai Branly sv:Musée du quai Branly uk:Музей на набережній Бранлі vi:Bảo tàng Quai Branly

Above content from Wikipedia available under GFDL retrieved Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:09:15 -0800


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