Orientalist museums in Paris during the Second World War

Conference by Ambre Genevois, contractual PhD student Paris Sorbonne.

In 1939, four establishments thus constituted the heart of Parisian museum activity devoted to the arts of the Far East: the department of Asian arts of the Louvre museum, the Guimet museum, the Cernuschi museum and the Ennery museum. The representation of these works in public, national and municipal collections then results mainly from private initiatives and is as much a result of a universalist ambition, a search for exoticism, as an aesthetic consideration and a scientific interest. .

On the eve of the war, a large-scale reorganization of the Parisian orientalist collections took shape, towards an emancipation of Far Eastern art through a regrouping of dedicated institutions. This project takes shape in a paradoxical context of dispersion of collections in the face of conflict which reveals more than ever the individuality of the establishments in question, through different strategies for protecting works, new acquisitions and managing events.

The department of Asian arts at the Louvre Museum, despite only thirteen years of existence, appears to be a crucial step in the process of legitimizing Far Eastern art in France, as a heritage in its own right. The department's collection remains eclectic since it is based as much on objects of so-called Muslim art as on works linked to the Far East, but its scale and artistic importance establish it de facto as an issue in its own right for the museum confronted with the Second World War.

Historically represented in the collections of the Louvre Museum by the prestigious set of around a hundred Japanese lacquerware that belonged to Marie-Antoinette, Asian art took an increasingly important place within the Naval Museum from 1827 and of its Ethnography gallery from 1850, until being dedicated to a Chinese room then a Chinese Museum in the Imperial Museum of the Louvre under the Second Empire. In 1894, the Ernest Grandidier gift, a collection of porcelain from China and Japan, gave birth to the “Grandidier Museum” installed on the mezzanine floor of the Grande Galerie. In 1912, under the leadership of Gaston Migeon (1861-1930), the Louvre had an authentic “Museum of the Far East”, still on the mezzanine floor of the Waterfront Gallery. The enrichment of the Louvre's Far Eastern collections is in fact continuous thanks to the generosity of collectors and dealers. As a result of this development, the plan of the establishment drawn up in 1926 combined the “Museum of the Far East” and the “Museum of Muslim Arts” under the single name “Asian Arts”. Following this dynamic and given the artistic, historical, scientific and ethnographic importance of such a collection, the Department of Asian Arts at the Louvre Museum was created in 1932. It brings together Far Eastern and Muslim arts under the umbrella of direction of Georges Salles (1889-1966), appointed curator of the department, and of Jean David-Weill (1878-1972), deputy curator before he was dismissed from his position by the laws of the Vichy regime. On the eve of the Second World War, the Asian Arts department of the Louvre museum had nearly 10.000 pieces, while the collections from the Far East were themselves mainly made up of objects from Japan and China. , a collection synthesizing the ambitions of scientists, merchants and amateurs into a true heritage.

Louvre Ethnographic Museum. ©Gallica.fr.

Journey of the MNG crates 23,27, 31 and XNUMX. ©Ambre Genevois.

From the beginning of the 1930s, with the rise in international tensions, the need appeared to develop a plan for the protection of national collections: it was decided to choose castles located far from cities and major roads as places of deposit to the works safe from bombing, to establish priority lists and to prepare all the necessary equipment. At the Louvre, lists of precious objects were drawn up in 1933 with a view to possible evacuation. The DAA thus details, in a list A, “particularly precious objects”, and in a list B “fragile and large objects”. The museum closed its doors on the evening of August 25, 1939. The inventory then carried out sounded like a sentence: Delort de Gléon room “empty”, Grandidier collection “empty”, Pelliot and Foucher rooms “empty”. The works that are subject to evacuation are packed in wooden crates marked LA (Louvre Asiatique), numbered and listed: 240 crates are evacuated, a figure which includes 144 crates dedicated to the Grandidier collection. From August 28, they take the road by truck to the Château de Chambord, a central depot which constitutes a first step before the distribution of the national collections in the different depots of Sarthe. In mid-October 1939, the LA funds reached the Château de Valençay. The treasures of the Asian Arts department benefit from increased surveillance and coexist with other masterpieces from the Louvre such as the Venus de Milo or the Victory of Samothrace. No major incident seemed to affect the works until 1945, the date on which a major reorganization of national museums took place: the Guimet museum absorbed works of art from the Far East from the DAA to become the new Department of Asian Arts. After the war, when he assumed the newly created position of director of the Museums of France, Georges Salle initiated the decree of August 31, 1945 which ratified the merger of the Far Eastern art collections from the Louvre to the Guimet museum , a project discussed as early as 1927, which therefore grants these works full heritage consideration within French national collections.

This merger is a step in the constant evolution of the institution that the Lyon industrialist Émile Guimet (1836-1918) shaped according to the ideal of “A Museum that thinks, a Museum that speaks, a Museum that lives ". Inaugurated on September 30, 1879 in Lyon, then 10 years later in Paris, the Guimet museum firstly showcases Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Indian, Chinese and Japanese collections brought back to serve the project of a museum of religions. from Egypt, classical antiquity and Asian countries. Even during the founder's lifetime, the numerous contributions which enriched the establishment nevertheless shaped a museum increasingly focused on Asian arts. Attached to the Directorate of National Museums in 1927, the Guimet Museum, now dedicated to the history of Far Eastern religions and Oriental arts, benefits, in the same way as the Louvre Museum, from the plan for safeguarding the works of National museums to face the Second World War. The establishment, however, adopts a very different strategy for preserving its objects while continuing to enrich its collection. It is this approach which determines the central role of the institution in the museum reorganization implemented after the war and in the change in the condition of Far Eastern art.

File concerning the “Camondo elephant”. Louvre Museum.

Sheet for a Bodhisattva of Yu-Kang. Guimet.

The museum closed its doors on September 1, 1939, 48 hours before the declaration of war. The elements on display join their boxes: that of Screen of the Portuguese (MG18653), made of fir, costs for example 32.000 francs and measures 1,85 x 0,75 x 0,50 cm. The vast majority of objects, remaining on site, are distributed in the conference room in the basement and within the new reserves and shelters, the result of the implementation of numerous passive defense measures from September 1939. Sandbags still protect the works that remain in the rooms. The curator Philippe Stern (1895-1979) indeed expresses reluctance regarding the fact that Chambord serves as a repository for the evacuation of works: he highlights a unique place, known and visible, therefore vulnerable, and underlines the lack of maneuverability works in the castle. Faced with the insistence of the Commission of National Museums, the Guimet museum finally evacuated despite the renewed doubts of Stern who wanted the works to be deposited "as far away as possible", in two different places and reaffirmed his fear of humidity. Faced with the already overcrowded deposits of museum coffers having followed the procedure regularly, two choices were available to him: Chambord, of which he wrote: “I admit to you that I have a fairly strong objection against Chambord”; or Valençay: “I would still have preferred, I admit, another castle, smaller, less known and with less prestigious neighbors […] I am not a snob, I believe so at least, I do not expressly want that my pieces are delivered with Madame de Samothrace (Victory) or Madame de Milo (Venus).” If the curator wishes to distribute the funds between the two castles offered to him, the snow prevents the implementation of this strategy and the works remain in Chambord. In all, 32 crates and 5 packages of inventories were evacuated and received the greatest care: the room dedicated to Guimet's sculptures is even air-conditioned to avoid sudden changes in atmosphere.

Sheet concerning the “Tigress”. Cernuschi Museum.

Sales catalog. Liquidation of the Bing Gallery, May 10 and 11, 1943, Hôtel Drouot, Paris: Villain et Bar, 12p.

But the apparent sleep of the Guimet museum actually hides a bustling activity. Between 1942 and May 1945, the MA inventory lists 64 new entries in the establishment's collections: 15 relating to bequests, 5 corresponding to donations, 36 purchases from merchants and individuals and 8 sold at public auction and this even though the art market of the period appears as opaque as it is dynamic. As a result, our museums still house objects with sometimes obscure provenance, acquired on an art market that can be considered dubious in many respects: 972 inventory numbers are purchased by the Museums nationals between 1939 and 1945. The return of works from the Guimet museum took place in December 1945 while a new arrangement was put in place within the establishment to present the new collections entirely dedicated to Asian art , Mediterranean and Egyptian objects having joined the Louvre Museum.

In parallel with this project, as part of the reorganization of collections on a national scale, was born, in 1941, the project to complete the regrouping of Parisian orientalist museums by bringing together the Guimet and Cernuschi museums under a common scientific direction, that of the chief curator of Guimet, to avoid overlap and duplication in the collections. If this initiative appears today to have been aborted, the Cernuschi and Guimet museums operating independently of each other, René Grousset (1885-1952) in fact jointly directed the two establishments from 1944 to 1952. “During the invasion , Grousset was equal to himself. Others, who remained at his side, will say how he knew how to stand his ground, track research, save the treasures entrusted to his care and usefully defend those around him who were threatened or imprisoned” writes the orientalist Robert Fazy. Museum of Asian Arts of the City of Paris, the reaction of the establishment to the conflict is completely dissociated from the measures adopted for the national collections, despite the planned meeting with the Guimet museum. However, the memory of the museum's activity during the Second World War remains fragmentary due to bibliographic and archival gaps.

The museum remained closed to visitors between 1939 and 1940. It nevertheless endeavored to remain a center of orientalist studies before opening its doors again in September 1940 at the request of the City of Paris, exhibiting second-rate or borrowed from collectors. Measures to protect works were applied from August 1939 and were based on lists established in 1937 based on color codes: red-red sticker (exceptional value); red (very important work); red-blue (exceptional but untransportable object); blue (2nd value)… The vaulted cellars which extend under the museum house some of the works, notably ceramics and porcelain, and also hide private collections threatened by racial and anti-Semitic laws. The Department of Fine Arts ensures the transport of at least thirteen packages stamped with various indications linked to their content and their origin, and an indefinite number of other boxes without inscription, to the castle of the Gidonnière in Sarthe. A report established in 1942 by the curators of municipal museums, however, highlights the contrast between the conditions of deposit of the museums of the City of Paris and those of the collections of national museums. We can thus imagine, without however being certain that the object was indeed evacuated during the period, the Tigress (MC6155) from the Cernuschi Museum, an object classified as exceptional, in its 31x31x40 cm box, exposed to the risks of theft, fire and damage mentioned here.

Reopening of the Guimet museum in “The Love of Art”. 1946. No. 12.

Between 1942 and 1943, 32 numbers also entered the inventory register following donations from 8 different benefactors. In 1997, the Cernuschi Museum carried out initial research into the origin of the works entered into its collections between 1940 and 1950, rejoicing that they were only donations and legacies from prestigious collectors, somewhat hasty conclusions that Ambre Genevois strives to delve deeper into his research. Furthermore, Paris-Musées is now looking into the question of the provenance of its works: the institution is raising awareness among its curators about the goods entered into the collections between 1933 and 1945 and is considering having a provenance researcher to secure its future acquisitions in particular.

The period 1939-1945 therefore highlights an evolution in the consideration of the arts of the Far East and confirms its heritage in French museum collections. This institutionalization of Asian arts is also supported by the acquisitions made by museums during the war, an enrichment which today must be studied and questioned under the specter of spoliations. If the conditions of protection of museum collections then differ, in particular according to the status of the establishment which houses them, these collections remain in fact quite privileged, in comparison with the fate of art objects owned by dealers and individuals, left at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the period.