Paris | Quai Branly Museum | Jean Nouvel

[Gonçalo Cardoso Dias]

Museu Quai Brainly

Desde os tempos antigos que a arquitectura sempre assumiu a vertente de simbolo de poder. Este museu, concebido por Jean Nouvel, acaba por sofrer por isso, e gera controvérsia... Guardian NYTIMES


Para poderem ver um pouco mais deste museu ficam aqui os resultados da busca sobre este museu no Flickr e no Google.

E ainda um video.

[pinTas]

amanhã já vejo isto...hoje não gosto de nada francês ou que venha da frança..:\

[Pedro_Ribeiro]

é o jean nouvel. depois de comprar um livro sobre projectos dele... nada me surpreende, as formas, texturas, cores materiais. é tudo pensado ao milimetro. óptimo projecto, óptima capacidade de relação com o exterior e com a torre eifel numa clara oposição harmoniosa há mesma (verticalidade/horizontalidade) e óptimo o modo como de um modo moroso e talvez temporal, aquele edificio consegue ganhar a sua identidade não se valorizando sob a Torre Eifel, mas criando uma linguagem e uma volumetria própria. gostava de saber mais coisas sobre a obra eheheh

[Gonçalo Cardoso Dias]

Sim, mas cumpre a sua função? Pelo que dizem os artigos nem por isso.

[Pedro_Ribeiro]

epa só pelos primeiros paragrafos, acho que a critica que escreveu o artigo tem...um especial mau estar ou pelo arquitecto, pela obra em si, ou não suporta os 2 lol por isso... também falamos mal do siza, do souto moura, etc. mas eles são Sr da arquitectura mundial. o Jean nouvel também o é por isso. não se pode agradar a gregos nem a troianos eheh

[Gonçalo Cardoso Dias]

Não... pelo que li nas duas criticas, não se trata apenas criticar por criticar. Fiquei mesmo com a sensação que aquele espaço tem um problema grave de protagonismo excessivo e acaba por não servir à sua função de museu.

[JVS]

Mais uma obra polemica, desta vez em Franca. De Jean Nouvel. A Obra Presidencialista de Chirac.

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To Timbuktu, and beyond



Critics have declared it clumsy, misguided and even racist. But, argues Jonathan Jones, Paris's new Musée du Quai Branly is quite simply thrilling

Captain Cook was impressed by the art he saw in the Pacific. Power and Taboo, an exhibition at the British Museum of sacred objects from the Polynesian Islands, includes stupendous things brought back from his voyages - that is, by the first Europeans to make contact with the peoples of these islands. Among them is a wooden bowl supported by the arms of two figures with big round eyes. It's probably the artefact Cook describes with his brand of cool approval in his journal: "A large cava bowl ... neither ill designed nor executed."

To Timbuktu, and beyond



Critics have declared it clumsy, misguided and even racist. But, argues Jonathan Jones, Paris's new Musée du Quai Branly is quite simply thrilling

Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian


A home for masterpieces ... Paris's new Musée du Quai Branly. Photograph: Remy De La Mauviniere/AP


Captain Cook was impressed by the art he saw in the Pacific. Power and Taboo, an exhibition at the British Museum of sacred objects from the Polynesian Islands, includes stupendous things brought back from his voyages - that is, by the first Europeans to make contact with the peoples of these islands. Among them is a wooden bowl supported by the arms of two figures with big round eyes. It's probably the artefact Cook describes with his brand of cool approval in his journal: "A large cava bowl ... neither ill designed nor executed."
Article continues
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Ever since Europeans started to visit - then with brutal rapidity conquer - places across the oceans in the 15th century, they have been struck by the carved, painted, cast, woven and embroidered objects travellers brought home. But here is a terrible irony. The very contact with Europeans that destroyed so many cultures, through violence, disease and, most lethally of all, the assault on traditional beliefs by Christian missionaries, also created the collections of premodern non-western art that today are the best resources for appreciating and trying to understand them.
This creates endless controversies, as the British Museum itself can attest. This year, though, it has been able to relax. The flak has been drawn across the channel. No recent event in the world of museums has been as bitterly contested as the creation of the Musée du Quai Branly, the new French museum of "the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas", which opened in Paris this summer. Such has been the criticism of this museum that a comment piece in the Guardian compared it to the Millennium Dome.
It was Jacques Chirac's personal plan to rehouse the French national collection of ethnographic art. In the eyes of radical critics, however, the project has been clumsy at best, racist at worst, reinforcing antiquated colonial prejudices. The museum's planners made a mistake when they described its contents as "arts premiers" - first arts, a phrase critics denounced as scarcely better than the defunct "primitive art". At exactly the moment when African curators like Simon Njami - founder of the magazine Revue Noir and curator of last year's exhibition Africa Remix in London and Paris - insist on the contemporaneity and urbanity of African art, here is a museum, basically, of masks and drums.
Now it has opened an exhibition that is a riposte, or sop, to its critics. D'un Regard l'Autre is about exactly what critics accuse the museum of crudely celebrating: the western gaze. I went to see it with some trepidation, wondering if I'd be the only person in the museum. At least I'd have plenty of space to be angry in.
I realised that news of this place has been distorted in traversing the immense cultural distance between Paris and London, as soon as I entered the jungly park over which the museum floats on bulbous legs. You queue underneath to get inside. That's right, queue. I had to compete with la toute Paris for a ticket. The excitement and eagerness can only be compared to Tate Modern - Jean Nouvel's spectacular organic building is Paris's answer to London's modern art museum - except it exhibits the antithesis of modern industrial life.
You go up a circular ramp around a transparent tower loaded with drums, to emerge into a flowing space that lets you wander from one world culture to another. The display is completely open and connected: a single stroll leads from Oceania to Africa to the Americas. Alcoves contain treasures: Ethiopian wall paintings are presented in a chapel of meditative quietness; another refuge has literary fragments from Timbuktu. It's not hard to criticise. Why imply that a small selection of works from village cultures in Asia reflects the whole of Asian art history? Why assume, in publications, a western visitor? Should we even call these objects art? Yet none of this carping seems relevant to the stunning fact of this exhilarating museum.
No other European government - least of all ours - has spent money on this scale to display what this museum rightly calls "masterpieces" of premodern global art. And what is so great about the British Museum's approach anyway? I find the Wellcome Trust Gallery, where artefacts from all over the world illustrate topics such as "respecting animals" and "coping with death", truly annoying: objects are not treated as works of art, but as part of social life. Which they are of course, but the elusive relationship of art to society is patronisingly simplified. Some of us go to the doctor, some to the shaman - it's all supposed to be perfectly logical. This rationalist social worker's anthropology is woefully inadequate in looking at works of art from any culture.
The Musée du Quai Branly takes the opposite approach. It doesn't explain much at all, but shows art - which it simply and rightly declares to be art - in dramatic, spectacular vistas, intimate close-ups, poetic juxtapositions. It's one of the most seductive museum displays I've ever seen. Its aim is to excite people about this art, to free it from dusty cases in neglected corners of museums, and make you want to see more. It is a triumph, all the braver for defying cliches of post colonial cultural studies.
The funniest thing is critics' belief that a French museum would be intellectually naive. This from the French, the inventors of structuralism? Quai Branly has American masks that come from the collection of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology; far from being unthinking, its flowing display surely reflects his writing on art. In a famous essay, Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America, Lévi-Strauss identifies formal similarities between art unconnected in time or space; it is one of the steps on the road to his theory of a universal structure of human thought. The way this museum invites comparison between cultures - why are masks universal? - resembles the big questions asked by Lévi-Strauss, yet its belief in the mystery of art goes back further.
In the exhibition D'un Regard l'Autre you can see how the Parisian avant-garde fell in love with "the primitive" 100 years ago. Here is a mask made by the Fang people in west-central Africa that was owned by the artist André Derain, who showed it to Matisse and Picasso; according to Derain it was the first time either of them "got" African art. The similarity between the great almond-shaped mask and the masked women in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is unmissable. Also here is a New Hebridean figure that Matisse gave to Picasso.
The exhibition takes us back further still. It shows how Europeans collected artefacts from Africa and the Americas, even in the Renaissance. Cabinets of curiosities - those Renaissance ancestors of museums - were full of exotic objects to wonder at; you could argue the Musée du Branly returns to this spirit of amazement.
Back in London, I am looking at A'a, a wooden image of the creator from the island Rurutu. There's a photograph nearby of Picasso next to his bronze cast of this work in the British Museum collection, yet here it's hard to recapture the excitement Europeans once felt for such art. There seems to be a choice, in displaying global art, between cautious introspection and full-throttle spectacle. The British Museum is too diplomatic and, as a result, Power and Taboo is scarcely one of the hot exhibitions in London. A reasonable number of people stroll about. In Paris, they're going mad for the art of elsewhere. And if they're not using the correct language, who cares? · D'un Regard l'Autre is at Musée du Quai Branly, Paris until January 21 2007. Details: 0033 1 56 61 70 00. Power and Taboo: Sacred Objects From the Pacific is at the British Museum, London, until January 7. Details: 020-7323 8181.

in http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,,1936537,00.html#article_continue

Reviews roundup: Musee du Quai Branly

Louise Radnofsky
Monday June 26, 2006
Guardian Unlimited


The politics of the Musee de Quai Branly seeped through its halls. They even swayed the choice of its name, as the New York Times noted: neither "primitive art" nor "Jacques Chirac" would quite do. And most critics couldn't escape them either. The (London) Times blamed Chirac for styling himself as the defender of global culture by showcasing France's collection of ethnographic artefacts and then attempting to imply "that the collections are in Paris purely by serendipity, rather than by the efforts of some of the most voracious colonial collectors in European history. It is an attempt to rewrite history in concrete."


Reviews roundup: Musee du Quai Branly

Louise Radnofsky
Monday June 26, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

The politics of the Musee de Quai Branly seeped through its halls. They even swayed the choice of its name, as the New York Times noted: neither "primitive art" nor "Jacques Chirac" would quite do. And most critics couldn't escape them either.
The (London) Times blamed Chirac for styling himself as the defender of global culture by showcasing France's collection of ethnographic artefacts and then attempting to imply "that the collections are in Paris purely by serendipity, rather than by the efforts of some of the most voracious colonial collectors in European history. It is an attempt to rewrite history in concrete."
Article continues


In New York, the reviewer offered some pointed questions, including, "Do pre-Columbian Mayan figures and 19th-century African masks, for example, have anything in common beyond needing a fine display window in Paris?"
Everyone concluded that the architecture was pretty magnificent, not least the Washington Post reviewer, who called it "visually stunning, inside and out." Well, perhaps not everyone. Newsweek grumbled "the jungle metaphor is so overdone that it starts to seem silly, or condescending." But the Financial Times that managed to embrace it. Admiring "jewel boxes" of rooms, an "organic leather wall [that] wends its way around" and the galleries' layering that provides "an animated, occasionally jarring dreamscape" it conceded, "for Chirac it may be his one substantial achievement, and for Paris it is a real gift."

in http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1806442,00.html#article_continue


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[asimplemind]

eu estive lá em julho e fiquei literalmente desiludido. Não é que as obras do Nouvel me fascinem normalmente, mas com tanta polémica em torno do museu, e com os meus amigos franceses a dizer que isto era a maior obra de arquitectura contemporanea da França (já sabem como os franceses sao ).

Bem de facto a única coisa que eu achei de alto interesse e que era um toque de génio foi a fachada vegetal (que eu até inclui na imagem do meu blog http://palavras-arquitectura.pt.vu), mas não fosse ela uma coisa já imensamente estudada e experimentada por dezenas de outros arquitectos. O que o Nouvel fez foi pegar em meia duzia de estagiarios e pô-los a estudar como se poderia fazer uma criação de plantas numa fachada, sem terra e, acabou por aplicar isso à sua fachada da rua o que a meu ver é o ponto mais subtil e belo deste museu, porque tudo o resto é absolutamente banal e quase que me atrevo a dizer aleatório..

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Esta foto para mim mostra como ele conseguiu fazer uma fachada absolutamente bela em total comunicaçáo com a fachada anterior, num expressionismo bastante contemporaneo mas ainda assim cheio de desenho (neste caso natural). Mas se olharmos mais para o fundo vêmos aquela estrutura de pilares com uns suportes obliquos que é o contraste completo com a subtileza desta fachada e que demonstra que há uma tremenda falta de caracter e de coerencia neste projecto. Então não é que ele começa com este volume a fazer fachada para a rua e depois faz aquela estrutura enormissima com vidros de cima abaixo só para reduzir o impacto sonoro no espaço do museu?! Isto para mim é realmente uma grande falta de coerencia. Aquela estrutura com vidros mais parece os protectores sonoros das autoestradas e por trás disso tudo aparecem uns volumes meios abstractos cheios de cores e que nada têm que ver entre eles e muito menos entre as traseiras dos edificios parisienses daquele quarteirao.

Enfim... começou tão bem e depois deu-lhe para o virtuosismo..

[JVS]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GyCkSHj2jc

[Cinaminaminamina]

have i missed something here ? Não sei se sim ou se não, mas alguem que me faça entender a ligação entre a fachada verdejante e a fachada "paralepidica. Em termos exteriores, já que o interior, por enquanto desconheço, a presença de O2 naquele espaço inspira em mim um espaço agradavel ! ;)

[asimplemind]

cina: o problema é mesmo esse! eu quando ia pela rua e me deparo com a magnifica fachada vegetal fiquei emocionado, mas quando continuei e vejo aquela estrutura enorme com o vidro e depois aqueles volumes aleatórios lá dentro perdi o interesse e voltei atras para admirar a tal fachada. Enfim..

[hkzimmer]

Em relação à fachada vegetal, é importante corregir a informação de que ela não é projeto de Jean Nouvel, mas sim do botânico Patrick Blanc, que também é responsável por fachadas similares em outros edificios, inclusive do Nouvel, como a Fundação Cartier.

Escrevi sobre o assunto no meu blog: http://baukunst.blogspot.com/2007/08/patrick-blanc-e-os-jardins-verticais.html

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