The first plaster casts of Angkor for the French métropole: From the Mekong Mission 1866-1868, and the Universal Exhibition of 1867, to the Musée khmer of 1874

Abstract

The 12th-century Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat was staged during the Exposition coloniale internationale of 1931 in Paris as probably the largest architectural reconstitution of a non-European structure ever built on the European continent, and has counted, since then, as an architectural masterpiece in the (Occidental) canon of art historiography. The beginnings of the temple's French 'career' in the 1860s and early 1870s have however remained quite unknown until today. To shed light on these earliest circumstances of the physical transfer of Angkor's gigantic temple architecture in the medium of plaster casts for the European public is the general aim of this paper. In order to conceptualize more specifically what was also a symbolic transfer of a declared patrimoine culturel from the colonial Orient into the centre of French colonial power, we employ the term 'translation'. Yet, given the prevalent focus on texts and images, techniques of direct material translation -such as plaster casts- are rarely discussed in scientific literature, and the analysis of the casts' importance in colonial politics as such remains a desideratum. To sum up, this paper explores the hypothesis that plaster casts were a powerful translation tool used to appropriate the famous Khmer temples of Angkor for a colonial heritage representation in the French métropole. Our study focuses on the earliest five stages of what was to lead to an art historical canonization of Angkor in Europe : 1) the first French casts from Angkor Wat as executed in the context of the French Mekong Expedition of 1866-1868 ; 2) the casts' embedding in the classification générale of the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1867 ; 3) the picturesque display modes of Oriental plaster casts in the Exposition permanente des colonies, 4) the first explicit plaster cast mission to Angkor under Louis Delaporte in 1873, which finally led 5) to the foundation of the Musée khmer in Compiègne in 1874 as the first of its kind in Europe.