And Did Those Feet

Across the River From Quai Branly Museum, near the Eiffel Tower are yet another 2 wonderful Museums in Paris.  The Palais de Tokyo is a modern White Cube gallery full of the most interesting installations.  Varied in quality, yes but there are so many of them each with their own big space - either white, bright, or dark, filmic, and some with chaotic art pieces.  But the shere quantity truly gives the measure of the French love of culture. The suspended crawl-way made out of clear parcel tape was a mere bit of claustrophobic fun, but the marvelous tree growing out of the white  columns was a true deconstruction of the White Cube ideal..  Next door is a 'traditional' collection of modern art with paintings from Cubism to the present day, with just enough paintings to give a tolerable narrative, and enough star names to satisfy anyone.  But the glory of the collection is the Salon de Dufy with a huge work of art made for an international exhibiti...

The  Quai Branly is an amazing museum dedicated to art from cultures all around the world.   This, would once have been called an Ethnographic Museum. It was set up as Jacques Chirac's Grand Project and is designed by Jean Nouvel.  It has been heavily critised for the way it deals with the source material, and has a very heavily and rigorously controlled editorship of all aspects of the Museum.  What is interesting is how the many decisions that have been taken - probably with good intentions, somehow open the Museum up to all sorts of post-colonial criticism. And yet, one has to admire the single-minded focus, the stance that has been taken and stuck to.  Forget context, we don't have room to discuss context properly, so we are just going to present these items as gorgeous works of Art. The building is screened from the road by a large glass wall,  designed to make the garden visible from the road and to shelter those in the garden from the  ...