Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro, also called simply the Musée du Trocadéro) was the first anthropological

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

museum in Paris, founded in 1878. It closed in 1935 when the building that housed it, the Trocadéro Palace, was demolished; its descendant is the Musée de l'Homme

Musée de l'Homme

The Musée de l'Homme was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It is the descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878...

, housed in the Palais de Chaillot on the same site, and its French collections formed the nucleus of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires

Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires

The Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires was a museum of the popular arts and traditions of France. It was located at 6, avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Paris, France, but is now permanently closed to the public...

, also in the Palais de Chaillot. Numerous modern artists visited it and were influenced by its "primitive" art, in particular Picasso during the period when he was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

He followed his success by developing into his Rose period from 1904 to 1907, which introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his work...

History

The museum was founded in 1878 by the Ministry of Public Education as the Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques (Ethnographic Museum of Scientific Expeditions) and was housed in the Trocadéro Palace, which had been built for the third Paris World's Fair

Exposition Universelle (1878)

The third Paris World's Fair, called an Exposition Universelle in French, was held from 1 May through to 10 November 1878. It celebrated the recovery of France after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.-Construction:...

that year. The palace, whose architect was Gabriel Davioud

Gabriel Davioud

Jean-Antoine-Gabriel Davioud was a French architect.Davioud was born in Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Léon Vaudoyer...

, had two wings flanking a central concert hall. The Musée national des Monuments Français

Musée national des Monuments Français

The Musée national des Monuments Français is a museum of French monuments located in the Palais de Chaillot, 1, place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, Paris, France. It now forms part of the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, and is open daily except Tuesday...

was created at the same time in the other wing.

The first director of the anthropological museum was Ernest Hamy, an anthropologist with the Natural History Museum

Muséum national d'histoire naturelle

The Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle is the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France.- History :The museum was formally founded on 10 June 1793, during the French Revolution...

who had urged the foundation of such an institution in Paris since 1874. Other French cities already had such museums, and there were many collections of materials brought back by French explorers, particularly from South America. A temporary museum was housed in the three rooms of the Palace of Industry at the Exposition from January to mid-March 1878, featuring a major collection of Peruvian artifacts recently brought back by Charles Wiener

Charles Wiener

Charles Wiener was an Austrian-French scientist-explorer. Born in Vienna, he is perhaps best known as the explorer who traveled extensively in Peru, climbed the Illimani and came close to re-discovering Machu Picchu.-Biography:...

, Columbian and Equatorial exhibits contributed by Edouard André

Edouard André

Edouard André may refer to:*Édouard François André , French horticulturalist*Edouard C. André, 1898 Belgian consul to Manila, Philippines...

, American exhibits contributed by Jules Crevaux, Léon de Cessac, and Alphonse Pinart

Alphonse Pinart

Alphonse Pinart was a French explorer, philologist, and ethnographer. He was an early champion of the theory that the Americas were first populated by migration across the Bering Strait. To support his research, he made extensive travel in the Pacific, from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to...

, a collection from Central Asia contributed by Charles-Eugène Ujfalvy, Cambodian inscriptions from Jules Harmand, exhibits from the Celebes contributed by de La Savinière and de Ballieu, and items from the Canary Islands from René Verneau

René Verneau

René Verneau was a French antropologist who was important in the study of the paleoanthropology. Among his work is the reconstruction of the Grimaldi man from Liguria, and study of the Guanches....

. These were exhibited with large paintings of locations in Peru and Colombia by de Cetner and Paul Roux

Paul Roux

Paul Roux is a small town in the flatlands of Free State province of South Africa that produces poplar wood for the safety match industry. General farming however remains the main industry. It was established in 1909 by Dutch Reform Reverend Paul Roux on the farm Palmietfontein, and today has a...

and plaster casts of archeological artifacts made under the direction of Émile Soldi. The success of this temporary exhibition and the advantage for a country then in the midst of colonial expansion of encouraging popular interest in distant places persuaded the Ministry to make the museum permanent. It was assigned a budget in 1880. Together with Hamy, Armand Landrin was appointed as a second official and there were five attendants and an official artist and model-maker.

Of the World's Fair buildings, Hamy considered the main building on the Champ de Mars

Champ de Mars

The Champ de Mars is a large public greenspace in Paris, France, located in the seventh arrondissement, between the Eiffel Tower to the northwest and the École Militaire to the southeast. The park is named after the Campus Martius in Rome, a tribute to the Roman god of war...

best suited to the museum, in particular since it could have heating installed in the basement. However, adaptation of that building was judged too expensive by the Ministry, which instead chose to use part of the Trocadéro Palace, against the advice of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was a French architect and theorist, famous for his interpretive "restorations" of medieval buildings. Born in Paris, he was a major Gothic Revival architect.-Early years:...

, the head of the site commission. The Trocadéro building lacked not only heating but lighting, and would not allow for workshops or laboratories.

However, thanks to Hamy's efforts by 1910 the museum's holdings had increased from 6,000 to 75,000 items. It continued to benefit from gifts and from expeditions after his death in 1908, particularly as a result of publicity activities by Paul Rivet

Paul Rivet

Paul Rivet was a French ethnologist, who founded the Musée de l'Homme in 1937. He was also one of the founders of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, an antifascist organization created in the wake of the February 6, 1934 far right riots.Rivet proposed a theory according to...

(its director from 1928) and Georges Rivière

Georges Henri Rivière

Georges-Henri Rivière was a French museologist, and innovator of modern French ethnographic museology practices.Rivière studied music until 1925, when he began museum studies at the Ecole du Louvre, from which he graduated in 1928. During the following years, he cared for the D...

among socialists and humanists in sympathy with the museum's mission of popular education, and among artists who in some cases offered art from their collections. The writer Raymond Roussel

Raymond Roussel

Raymond Roussel was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau...

bore some of the cost of an African expedition that netted the museum more than 3,000 artifacts plus recordings and photographs. The museum promoted itself through a fashion show inspired by the collections and a gala benefit at the Cirque d'Hiver, at which Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...

reputedly shadow-boxed with featherweight champion Al Brown. The museum was offered the first head from Easter Island

Easter Island

Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888, Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapanui people...

, passed on by the Geology Laboratory. Canadian National Railways donated the totem pole from British Columbia

British Columbia

British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

, now an emblem of the Musée de l'Homme. The museum maintained good relations with the Museum of Antiquities in Saint-Germain

National Archaeological Museum (France)

The Musée d'Archéologie nationale is a major French archeology museum, covering pre-historic times to the Merovingian period. It was named Musée des Antiquités nationales until 2005. It is located in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the département of Yvelines,...

and the Guimet Museum

Guimet Museum

The Guimet Museum is a museum of Asian art located at 6, place d'Iéna in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France...

, which passed along those items of more ethnographic than historical or scientific interest.

Nonetheless, the museum suffered constantly from lack of money, requiring, for example, the closure of the Oceanic gallery from 1890 to 1910 and of the French gallery in 1928. Furnishings had to be bought, or made of cheap wood painted black to improve its appearance, sometimes even wood from the packing cases used to ship the objects. According to an 1886 report, the defects of the exhibition space meant that of all the exhibits, only the life-size human figures, particularly the diorama

Diorama

The word diorama can either refer to a nineteenth century mobile theatre device, or, in modern usage, a three-dimensional full-size or miniature model, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum...

of a Breton interior, were attractive:

How we prefer those colored wax models representing various savage types . . . and in a large gallery, this one well lighted, . . . a life-size Breton interior, strikingly true to life. . . . This exhibit, very well set up, has the knack of attracting the public. In the display cases, which are unfortunately very inadequate, household objects have been assembled. . . . This section is a bit neglected, all the interest being drawn by the Breton interior, to the great detriment of those details that accomplish the true objective of the ethnographic museum.

The poor conditions made it necessary to restore exhibits beginning in 1895. Picasso remembered that when he first went there in 1907, "the smell of dampness and rot there stuck in my throat. It depressed me so much I wanted to get out fast". Others saw it as "a junk shop". The problems were exacerbated by Hamy's death and then by World War I, when employees were drafted into the military. In 1919, a member of the Chamber of Deputies

Chamber of Deputies of France

Chamber of Deputies was the name given to several parliamentary bodies in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:* 1814–1848 during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, the Chamber of Deputies was the Lower chamber of the French Parliament, elected by census suffrage.*...

, Jean Bon, said that the museum shamed France. Verneau, who had succeeded Hamy as director in 1908, responded with a plan for improvements, while noting how hard it would be to realize within the then budget and in the then location.

In 1928, Paul Rivet

Paul Rivet

was appointed director of the museum and reassociated it with the anthropology section of the Natural History Museum. Together with Georges Rivière

Georges Henri Rivière

, his assistant director, he set a modernization and reorganization project in motion, but the always inadequate quarters in the Trocadéro Palace were demolished in 1935 to be replaced by the Palais de Chaillot, built for the 1937 World's Fair. The museum reopened there that year as the Musée de l'Homme

Musée de l'Homme

; its French exhibits were transferred to the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires

Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires

, which opened simultaneously, also in the Palais de Chaillot, with Rivière as its first director.

Museographic approach

The museum was initially established as a purely scientific institution under the Department of Sciences and Letters, and in addition was required not to share employees with anthropology museums. To secure its foundation, it had been essential to guarantee that it would not compete with pre-existing institutions. Thus, the ministerial document dated November 1877 that related to the initial form of the museum, the temporary Museum of Scientific Exhibitions, specified that items of historical or artistic interest whose provenance was either Italy, Greece, Egypt or the East would revert to the Louvre, prehistoric or Gallo-Roman items of French provenance would go to the Museum of Antiquities in Saint-Germain, and medallions, books, and manuscripts must be deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The new museum was not permitted to accept objects of an anthropological or natural historical nature, nor to offer instruction; a proposal by Landrin for an "expedition school" was thus denied. However, the museum was able to make exchanges with other museums, both in France and in other countries. In 1884, on Landrin's initiative, it opened the French Gallery that later formed the nucleus of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires.

The primary museographic purpose of the institution was to show the continuing progress of humanity. One of Hamy's arguments for its creation was that ethnology could serve a s a reference and source of important information for the other sciences, as well as for crafts and manufacturing, even for foreign trade. His intention was first to carefully classify objects and then to submit them to methodical analysis in light of their context. He had wished for the museum to have galleries radiating from a central hall in order to demonstrate geographic and ethnographic connections. In 1882, the Revue d'ethnographie was launched as a journal that would emphasize fieldwork and objective research, in contrast to existing journals on specific cultures and on ethnography, which tended to emphasize theory. However, it only survived for seven years before being merged into L'Anthropologie.

Artists

Numerous Fauvist

Fauvism

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

and Cubist

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

artists discovered "primitive" art, particularly Black African art, at the Trocadéro Museum. Picasso said that he discovered there "what painting was all about", seeing it in the museum's African masks, which had been created "as a kind of mediation between [humanity] and the unknown hostile forces that [surround us]", and to have been influenced by the masks in the forms of the figures in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

He followed his success by developing into his Rose period from 1904 to 1907, which introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his work...

, which eventually led to Cubism. Later, during the reform era under Rivet and Rivière that began in 1928, certain Surrealists

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

aligned themselves with the ethnologists in promoting a view of objects within their social and human context, rather than from a purely esthetic perspective. For two years, ethnologists such as Rivet, Rivière, Marcel Griaule

Marcel Griaule

Marcel Griaule was a French anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France....

, and André Schaeffner and dissident Surrealists such as Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...

collaborated in a journal called Documents. However, the disagreements between ethnological and esthetic viewpoints, later to characterize the debate around the creation of the Musée du quai Branly

Musée du quai Branly

thumb|225px|Musée du quai BranlyThe 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 -...

, were strong enough that the Musée de l'Homme, when founded, was avowedly scientific in character.

Sources

Émile Arthur Soldi. Les Arts méconnus: les nouveaux musées du Trocadéro. Paris: Leroux, 1881
René Verneau. "Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro". Extraits d’ethnographie Paris: Masson, 1919
Michel Leiris. "Du musée d’Ethnographie au musée de l’Homme". La Nouvelle Revue française (1938) 344–45
Marie-France Noël. "Du Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro au Musée national des Arts et traditions populaires". Muséologie et ethnologie (1987) 140–51
Jean Cuisenier and Marie-Chantal de Tricornot. Musée national des arts et traditions populaires: Guide. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1987. ISBN 9782711820870. pp. 9–11
Nélia Dias. Le Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, 1878–1908: anthropologie et muséologie en France. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1991. ISBN 9782222044314

External links

Pictures of the French gallery at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro at Musée Europe Méditerranée
Maureen Murphy, Du champ de bataille au musée : les tribulations d’une sculpture fon, Musée du Quai Branly
Musée du quai Branly
thumb|225px|Musée du quai BranlyThe 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 -...

, with pictures of African sculpture on display at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro

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