Angkor: Birth of a myth - Louis Delaporte and Cambodia

From 16 October 2013 to 13 January 2014

The museum Guimet goes back to the origins of the myth of Angkor, as Europe, and especially France, built it in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. This exhibition will show how Khmer heritage has been rediscovered and how the Angkor monuments were presented to the public during the spectacular Universal and Colonial Exhibitions.

From a rich corpus, some 250 pieces will be presented in the exhibition: stone Khmer sculptures from the Xth-XIIIth centuries, plaster casts, photographs, paintings and graphic documents from the 19th and early 20th century. century (watercolors and ink on paper, printed matter, etc.), reflecting the first contacts of France with the art of ancient Cambodia, around the emblematic personality of Louis Delaporte (1842-1925), a great French explorer whose aim was to "bring Khmer art to museums".

Installed in the temporary exhibition rooms of the Guimet Museum as well as in the Khmer rooms of the permanent collection, this course will allow to admire, for the first time since 1927, impressive casts made between the 1870 years and the end of the years 1920.

These pieces, originally displayed in the galleries of the Indochinese Trocadero Museum of 1878 at 1925, some of which are now original, have joined the collections of the Guimet Museum and benefited from a complete restoration. This exhibition will allow these historical pieces to regain a new notoriety and will reveal an important part of a heritage complex too long unknown or neglected.

This exhibition will also be an opportunity to reconstruct important structures in the Khmer Hall, such as the temple's Bayon temple tower.

Several major loans from national and international museums will complete the presentation of the museum's works. In France it is worth mentioning the Rodin museum, the Georges Pompidou Center, the museum of the Thirties of Boulogne-Billancourt. In Cambodia, major original sculptures of Khmer cultural heritage will be generously lent by the Kingdom's main institutions: the National Museum of Phnom Penh and the National Museum of Angkor.