ARTS
Power building in Paris
Nicholas Powell on how President Chirac plans to add to the cultural landscape During his traditional televised inter- view at the no less traditional Elysee Palace cocktail party on Bastille Day, with the country still reeling in collective insanity after its World Cup win, President Jacques Chirac proudly announced news of a pro- ject dear to his heart. The final location had been decided, he said, for his long- mooted museum of primitive art, more properly called le Musee des Arts et des Civilisations, or MAC. Even if it was all but drowned in the shouting, the flag-waving and his own triumphalist talk of 'tine France tricolore et multicolore', that piece of information ended two years of uncer- tainty and curatorial angst — and stirred up new worries for the future.
The site finally chosen from a shortlist of seven for the MAC is Eiffel-Branly, 60 acres or so of undeveloped ground over- looking the Seine, near the Eiffel Tower. It is currently occupied by an immense white tent, a temporary exhibition space put up in 1994 to provide refuge for art and trade fairs while their normal venue, the Grand Palais, just across the river, was closed for emergency repairs. The latter have yet to be carried out and no one knows where the trade fairs will now go. As a vacant lot, Eif- fel-Branly has been jinxed for years. In 1986 President Mitterrand put forward a plan to build an international conference centre which immediately ran into opposi- tion not only from rich and influential neighbours, worried it would ruin their view, but also from Paris City Hall, con- trolled at the time, of course, by mayor Jacques Chirac. After years of political sparring and a cost to the taxpayer of Fr400 million (£40 million), including Frl million on a publicity brochure of which only 10,000 copies were ever printed, the con- ference project was finally put down by Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in 1993.
The socialist government was not whole- heartedly behind their Gaullist President's choice of Eiffel-Branly for the MAC: the culture minister, Catherine Trautmann, would have preferred to see it set up in the Palais de Tokyo, an unused wing of the immense Palais de Chaillot, on the Right Bank. The education minister, Claude Allegre, however, not to mention the study group set up to launch the MAC project chaired by Chirac's close friend, the former UAP insurance boss Jacques Friedmann preferred Branly. As, indeed, did Chirac himself.
The museum is the only major project with which Chirac, in the grand French Republican tradition, can hope to leave his cultural mark on Paris. He had, of course, an almost impossible act to follow: Presi- dent Pompidou, Chirac's political godfa- ther, launched the arts centre (currently closed for renovation), which bears his name. Valery Giscard d'Estaing had the Orsay railway station converted into a museum of 19th-century art. And, with Stalinist intensity and two seven-year man- dates to fulfill his ambitions, Francois Mit- terrand spent billions doubling the exhibition space in the Louvre and erect- ing, among other grands projets, the Arche de la Defense, the ungainly Bastille Opera, and the new mausoleum-like Bibliotheque Nationale, which bears the bookish presi- dent's name.
It was in 1996, a year after his election, that Chirac announced his own ambitious addition to Paris's cultural scene. Yet even with art primitif rebaptised unconvincingly but respectfully art premier, it seemed a curiously impersonal choice. Chirac is very knowledgeable about the history of ancient China, and also a connoisseur of Oriental art. A fervent spectator of Sumo wrestling, he has discreetly built up a small but impressive collection of ancient Chinese art, ranging from fine Tang (618-907) ter- racotta statues of horses to a 6th-century terracotta camel from northern Qi. But Paris already has a museum for Far East- ern art — the Musee Guimet, currently closed, like so much else in the city, for renovation.
In one fell stroke, the President's deci- `One for the superhighway?' sion to have his own museum did away with both Paris's Musee de l'Homme on the Place du Trocadero, absorbing its collec- tion of 400,000 pieces in the process, and the Musee des Arts Africains et Oceaniens, out in the east of Paris, near Vincennes, which houses 20,000 more. It was even feared at one stage that Chirac's art premier could bring about the disappearance of the Musee de la Marine, which caused much emotion among former sailors, including Chirac's arch-enemy, the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Then came the suggestion to put all the tribal art in the Louvre, a plan which appalled curators who having put up with years of enforced rebuilding and enlargement feared they would have to accommodate the conse- quences of yet another regal whim from the Elysee.
An international competition will now be launched to pick an architect for the MAC, the cost of which has been fixed at Fr1.1 billion. Work is scheduled to start in 2001 and should last three years, when Chirac, unless his political fortunes are miraculous- ly transformed, will probably be out of office. The institution will employ 250 peo- ple and have an annual running budget of Fr150 million. In addition to permanent exhibitions of tribal art from Africa, North and South America, Asia and the Pacific, the MAC will organise temporary shows, as well as putting aside room for research, teaching and other, as yet undefined, 'cul- tural activities'.
Chirac will be able to derive a little glory from the operation while he is still in office. Work under the direction of the architect Jacques Wilmotte, the man behind so many new European museum interiors, has begun on the Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre — a ground-floor exhibition space on the western, Seine-side of the museum — to display some 120 pieces of art premier. All are considered to be masterpieces by Chirac's longstanding amanuensis in tribal art, Jacques Ker- chache, who has promised they will `enlarge the aesthetic vocabulary of visi- tors'. The MAC project as a whole, Ker- chache says, has 'a philosophical content based on the absence of hierarchy between cultures and an opening-up towards other civilisations'. The Pavillon des Sessions should open in December 1999.
Most Louvre curators will be happy to see the back of the masterpieces, which will probably be transferred to the MAC once it is complete. As Kerchache used to be a major dealer, questions are being raised in the meantime about the generous acquisi- tions budget which has been allotted to the new museum — some Fr150 million a year. Significant purchases are considered neces- sary to fill the gaps in the collections of the Musee de l'Homme and the Musee des Arts Africains et Oceaniens, which com- prise objects from France's former colonial possessions. The buying has already start- ed; the MAC secured its first object, a Dogon statue from Mali for Fr460,000, at a Paris auction in June. Yet the whole mar- ket in tribal art is at present a minefield. Last year, ardent Elysee advisors tried to please the President by offering him an African object. Informed it had been ille- gally exported, they returned it to its coun- try of origin with embarrassing speed.
Chirac's addition to the cultural land- scape comes at a time when Francois Mit- terrand's projects require at least Fr2 billion every year to keep them afloat. One of the project directors of the MAC com- pared that sum dismissively to the cost of ten kilometres of motorway. Or that of half an aircraft carrier, such as the pride of the French fleet, the Charles de Gaulle.
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