Spoils of the colonies

FRANCE - The newest addition to the Paris skyline is a dazzling statement on the universality of art. Or it's a hotchpotch of colonial artefacts, tossed into a pretentious and eye-wateringly expensive building.

It thrusts Paris back at the galactic centre of the arts. Or it confirms the city's decline against such rivals as Bilbao, Barcelona, London and Venice.

Put four Paris intellectuals in a room, give them sustenance (a glass of chardonnay and a plate of hors d'oeuvres usually do nicely), casually mention the Musee du Quai Branly and then stand back to watch them squabble.

The museum, which opened to the public yesterday, is President Jacques Chirac's pharaonic legacy to the city - and like the buildings bequeathed by the kings of ancient Egypt, it has left its public bemused and divided over the beauty, cost and point of it all.

Eleven years in the making and, at €235.2 million ($477 million), 38 per cent over budget, and with likely running costs of €40 million a year, the museum unites 290,000 indigenous artworks and objects from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas that previously lay forgotten among a clutch of poorly visited museums.

At an inauguration attended by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and others, Chirac said the museum was "a refusal of ethnocentricity, of this unreasonable and unacceptable claim of the West to be the sole bearer of the fate of humanity".

"There is no pecking order in arts and cultures any more than there is a pecking order among peoples," he declared.

It is the first new museum building in Paris since the Pompidou Centre in 1977 - and just as controversial.

Located on a bend on the Left Bank in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the museum, designed by Frenchman Jean Nouvel, has nothing comparable anywhere in the world.

Its main building, 21m high and 220m long, comprises a long, curved building facing on to the Seine, with a glass facade decorated with aboriginal motives.

The building's other side is clad by black horizontal shutters redolent of Japanese swords, admitting a gentle background light while keeping out brightness.

Four other buildings are studded with 30 earth-toned "boxes" that jut out 15m to create intimate exhibition space. One edifice is swathed by a "vegetal wall" of 800 sq m, designed by botanist Patrick Blanc, comprising some 15,000 plants - ivy, mosses and ferns.

Inside, the sensation is of spirituality, with random shimmerings of light dappling the floor like sunbeams that pierce a rainforest canopy. The floor gently slopes, and the pillars are daubed in ochre coatings to make it look as if they have strangely taken root there.

Some 3500 objects have been put on permanent display, most transferred from the Museum of Man and the Museum of African and Oceania Arts in Paris. They will be supported by seasonal exhibitions dealing with common themes, such as the portrayal of the body, and invited shows.

Two photographic collections from New Zealand are displayed in the garden. There are 12 photos by Michael Parekowhai, using flowers as a metaphor for World War I battles in which Maori soldiers of the New Zealand Pioneer Battalion lost their lives, and 17 portraits by Fiona Pardington of "hei tiki" jade pendants which are handed down from generation to generation.

Magali Melandri, head of Oceania collections, said Maori were a major source of interest. "They are people who claim their identity through the traditional and the contemporary."

Despite the museum's good intentions, critics say a sense of do-goodery and, ironically, eurocentricity hangs over the collection.

Items arranged by continent and tribal artefacts come with an anthropological explanation to recount what they did and how they were made - rather like a 1960s issue of National Geographic but in multimedia. Another way of describing a collection that is from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas is to call it the Museum of Non-European Art.

Patrick Lozes, president of an umbrella group of several hundred black associations called Cran, said he feared the new museum's "archaic way of showing the past" would accentuate divisions rather than heal them.

"It's an extension of a certain colonialist vision," said Lozes. "Today we should emphasis migration and the mixing of people and not try to artificially separate the various strands of French society."

Nouvel is hurt by such criticism, saying his aim is to create a sanctuary for indigenous art once scorned by Europe's art snobs.

He is defensive about predictable criticism that some works, hauled back to France during its colonial era, should be returned to their countries of origin.

Among such prizes are a 19th-century Maori woman's cloak, brought back to Europe by French explorer Dumont d'Urville; the prows of a Maori war canoe, from a collection assembled by the Marquis de Serent; and a carving - one of several, originally from a marae entrance, that surfaced in a Paris market and were bought by actor Sarah Bernhardt and turned into a sideboard.

But none of the museum's pieces are on a "red list" of pillaged art and all serve a purpose in this showcase, said Nouvel.

"Should all Italian paintings be sent back to Italy, or all Spanish paintings go back to Spain? I think there would be cultural impoverishment for everyone," he said, adding, though, that museums "have another responsibility to give back dignity to the people who have been despoiled of these things".