Primitive art, early art or no art at all?

Abstract

On 20 June 2006 a new museum in Paris opened its doors for the first time, the Musee du Quai Branly. President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the museum in front of an audience that included, among others, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and France's most famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. The museum is another enrichment of that fabulous city, already so well endowed with museums and monuments. The Fifth Republic, founded by General de Gaulle in 1958, has been extraordinarily successful in the creation of new museums. De Gaulle himself did not feel the need to have a special museum built in order to commemorate him. He may have thought that he would be remembered anyway, and he was right. But he certainly stimulated French culture and had Paris embellished in many respects. His famous Minister of Culture Andre Malraux not only ordered the cleaning up of the blackened facades of many Paris monuments and other buildings, but also actively stimulated cultural activities outside Paris or, as the French say, in the provinces. Malraux also took a great interest in non-Western art and in this way helped the founding of the Quai Branly museum. De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou, was of course the source of inspiration for the Museum of Modern Art, also known as the Centre Pompidou and particularly famous for its revolutionary architecture. Another less extravagant but also rightly famous building is the Institut du Monde Arabe which dates from the late 1980s and was built by Jean Nouvel, the architect who also built the Quai Branly Museum.