Objects of Desire, Desire for Objects
Inaugural lecture delivered at the Collège de France on Thursday 30 March 2017
Texte intégral
1Dear Minister,
Dear Administrator,
Dear Professors of the Collège de France,
Dear Colleagues,
Dear staff of the Collège de France,
Dear friends,
2From time to time, one hears that art is a source of courage. Or strength. Or elation. When contemplating fifteenth-century Tuscan frescoes, the great art historian Henri Focillon even described experiencing a feeling of “intellectual safety”.1 I, for one, do not know what it is like to feel intellectually safe when contemplating a work of art. We would have to talk about it together, at length. But I do know that right now, in this institution, I need some – even a lot – of that “intellectual safety” to speak before you. So I thought that I would find that safety – or courage, if you will – in three works, which I usually keep on my desk in Berlin. Over there, they are part of my life, in a sense, and now they have travelled with me, like three old friends, to share this conference-desk here with me; the longest, most intimidating, one in the history of academic furniture (11 meters?). I am now coming back to Paris after 24 years in Berlin and, along with the desk, these works share with me the experience of dépaysement, of estrangement.
3This estrangement is, for instance, what it feels like to speak in public, in my mother tongue, of things that I have thought about in another language. To switch between languages is to shift from one way of thinking to another, from one measure of historical density to another, from one set of collective emotions and points of reference to another. It is to experience, with each transition, the ways in which one’s self-perception is formed, deformed and reformed when one engages with others.2 And, with every transition, it is to acquire the ever-stronger conviction that there is no such thing as a “natural” identity set in stone once and for all. To live in Berlin in the early twenty-first century is to face, on a daily basis, the traces that Germany’s Nazi past has left all over the city and which, over the past half-century, have been the subject of impressive work on memory on an individual and collective level. It is also to share the legacy of communism, with a natural historical and geographical proximity to the so-called “Eastern” European countries; to experience a city that has been open, since Reunification, to creative youths from across the world and, in the last two years, to the families that have fled the war in the Middle-East. To speak of people like myself, French has invented an ugly word, expatrié (expatriate), which, in eighteenth-century dictionaries, is a synonym of being absent.3 Being absent to some, present to others. In this respect too, expatriates and heritage have a common destiny. But that is enough about me. Here are three works that have far more extensive experience of expatriation than I do.
4What you see here (Figure 1) is the head of Akhenaton, the husband of Nefertiti and likely father of Tutankhamun. It was sculpted thirty-four centuries ago by an Egyptian artist, discovered a hundred years ago in the sands of Tell el-Amarna by a Berlin archaeologist, and, in 1913, transported to the Museum Island in Berlin, where it electrified the artistic and literary avant-gardes and the early proponents of psychoanalysis: Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud. It was then assumed that Akhenaton and Moses, the first prophet of Judaism, were the same person. In 1914, the plaster cast workshop of the Berlin State Museums started selling a hand-painted, plinth-mounted copy of this Akhenaton. I have heard that it sells very well. Mine is dated 2012.
Figure 1

Painted plaster cast of the head of Akhenaton, eighteenth dynasty, around 1340 bce (Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum, inv. no. ÄM 21351), Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gipsformerei, Cast no. 489.
Photo: Patrick Imbert © Patrick Imbert/Collège de France, 2017.
5The second one is this beaded figure from the Foumban area, in western Cameroon (Figure 2). Its core is wooden and is covered first with a cloth and then with embroidery of multi-coloured beads and a crown of precious seashells. Beaded statues are among the better-known works in the heritage of the Bamileke people, and especially in that of the Kingdom of Bamum.4 They are found in museums across the world, from the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, to Berlin, Geneva, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum. Since the sixteenth century, the glass beads of which they are made have come mainly from Murano, near Venice. As far as my copy is concerned, I have checked: the beads are plastic. I found it in a shop window on Knesebeckstrasse, near the Technische Universität, in former West Berlin. Its foot is broken. The salesman, who was German, was not able or willing to tell me its age or its origin. Its worn-out or slightly dirty appearance was obtained by adding a layer of some black matter on the beads, so as to make it “look authentic”. In all likelihood it does come from Cameroon but was made for tourists, to be exported. Never mind, I still like it, with its fiercely expressionist look.
Figure 2

Tambourinaire, beaded statue, Cameroon, twentieth century, Bénédicte Savoy collection.
Photo: Patrick Imbert © Patrick Imbert/Collège de France, 2017.
6The third artwork (Figure 3) is, so to speak, only a memory of itself. It is a plaster cast of a fifteenth-century statuette by an Italian sculptor from Bologna named Niccolò dell’Arca. The original piece went missing in 1945. Its last known address was the Friedrichshain bunker in Berlin, where museum collections had been safeguarded during World War II. It is a likeness of the Franciscan monk Bernardino of Siena, who died in L’Aquila in May 1444, and who used to read while walking. A merchant from Bologna sold it to the Museums of Berlin in 1897 for 2000 Marks, which was the equivalent of the Reichskanzler’s fortnightly salary. Until 1930, there was another version of the original sculpture in the collection of Albert Figdor, a prominent Jewish businessman from Vienna, who was one of the greatest collectors of antique art of his time.5
Figure 3

Raw plaster cast of Saint Bernardin of Sienna, the original of which disappeared from the Berlin Museum during the Second World War. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gipsformerei, Cast no. 2192.
Photo: Patrick Imbert © Patrick Imbert/Collège de France, 2017.
7Either the Berlin original was destroyed in the Flakbunker fire in 1945, or it was taken to the USSR by the Red Army and has been hidden ever since in a museum basement, as were thousands of other works; or else it was taken as a souvenir by a GI or an American officer at the end of the war. We don’t know. To speak of this kind of work, of which all trace has been lost, Germans have agreed on a word, verschollen, derived from verschallen, which means, “that has ceased to echo”, “that has ceased to resonate”; one could say, “that has ceased to sing”. All that is left of the missing original is a photograph in black and white and a negative mould made by the Gipsformerei, the workshop of Berlin’s museums. My ghost of the Renaissance comes from this mould. One can still feel the scars on the plaster.
8Akhenaton, Bernardino, the Bamileke drummer… Three works, three “semaphores”, as Krzysztof Pomian put it6; three ideas of Beauty and of Art, all linked by the many ways in which they touch me.
9Just like the thousands of objects kept in museums throughout the world, these have travelled through space, from Egypt to Prussia, from Northern Italy to Novosibirsk, Irkutsk or Oklahoma City, from a Bamileke chieftaincy to the Marguerite de Navarre amphitheatre. They have travelled, sustained damage, been restored, copied, casted, and transformed; they have been subjected to symbolic and real appropriations, and they have an emotional value (for me, for instance), as well as a cultural, historical, material, economic, political, local, and global value. And above all, they have travelled through time. Akhenaton is about 3,367 years old, 3,260 of which he spent in the sand, 83 in a museum display, and the rest in bunkers during the war. Bernardino is about five and a half centuries old, during which time he spent 45 years in a museum and went missing for 72 years. Of course, the beaded figure from Cameroon is not older than you or me, but it is evidence of a technology that takes us back to twelfth-century Africa. The Chair of Cultural History of Art Heritage in Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, which you have created for me, finds its place in this concertina of spaces and time frames.
10And I thank you, Administrator, Professors, for welcoming me today in your prestigious assembly. I am especially grateful to Marc Fumaroli, a great connoisseur of art and museums, who has granted me his unfailing trust and support. To Carlo Ossola and Antoine Compagnon, who vigorously defended the creation of this Chair and have given me precious and friendly advice. To the Administrator of this institution, Alain Prochiantz, whose institutional creativity, flexibility and charm have, in agreement with the President of Berlin’s Technische Universität, Christian Thomsen, whom I salute, made possible some kind of French-German miracle. Like all living things, this Chair has a double genetic helix: one comes from Michel Espagne, who immersed me, very early on, in the demanding and stimulating cauldron of “cultural transfers” and transnational history; the other comes from Pierre Rosenberg who, at the same time, enabled me to discover and love the world of museums, curators and collectors with their peculiar rationalities, their traditions and their odd practices. I would like to express warm thanks to them both.
11I also thank Thomas Gaehtgens, from Paris, and Étienne François, from Berlin. They were guides to this generation of young French and German historians who, like me, were under twenty when the Berlin wall came down. And, as I have mentioned only men, let me send out a very special thought for the most extraordinary woman on earth, my friend Elisabeth Beyer in Berlin.
12But the more I think of it and the more I speak,
Dear Administrator,
Dear Professors,
Dear friends,
13The more I think about it, the less these three artworks give me the feeling of safety that I was hoping for here. Actually, the opposite is true. Of course, like any distinctive feature of art, they are traces of spirituality, evidence of the creativity of human beings beyond eras and borders. In that sense, they are stable and safe values. However, in this encounter between them and you, I am seized by anxiety. Because what these objects also tell, each one for itself and all of them in their fortuitous gathering on this table, are stories of wars and divisions, memory and amnesia, blurred lines, appropriations and captures: histories which, I am sure you will agree, do more to destabilize than to comfort.
14Actually, to be perfectly honest, from where I sit, here in front of you, I am not quite sure who is watching whom. Are the multiple gazes of a gathering of mainly European women, men and children born between, say, 1932 and 2007, directed towards this Egyptian portrait, this Cameroonian drummer and this Renaissance monk? Or is it not rather the opposite: are the Egyptian, the Cameroonian and the Renaissance Italian not watching us as they have watched generations of mortals before us and as they will watch future generations? Both are true, of course. And the anxiety created by this crossing of gazes is a positive anxiety, one of those that make one want to know more and know better, by switching perspectives, scopes, and scales, by granting objects their full value as historical sources, by thinking of heritage as an ever-renewed encounter between mortals – that’s us – and immortals or almost – that’s them. Any academic research begins, I think, with this drive of positive anxiety.
***
15Dear Professors,
Dear colleagues,
Dear friends,
16Since the Middle Ages, there has been a German Russia, an Italian Germany, a Norman Italy, an English France. For a long time, historiography has participated in the common effort of all social sciences to define homogeneous collective identities, placed side by side, and distributed according to the logics of national unity. Over the last few years, it has however undertaken the work of systematically revising constructions that were inherited from the nineteenth century. I have already mentioned Michel Espagne. His “cultural transfers”7, the “histoires croisées”, that is, connected, shared or entangled histories, place hybridization and migration at the very heart of the idea of culture. They refuse to consider national entities as unified and enclosed spaces, insisting, on the contrary, on processes of cross-border fluxes and the multiple ways in which sometimes-distant cultural zones are interwoven.
17In this historiographical context, the fact that you created a Chair of Cultural History of Art Heritage in Europe testifies to your concern for making the history of objects enter the Collège de France. Not that objects have been absent from the Collège until now, far from it. Over the centuries, most of the disciplines taught here “in the making”, as goes your beautiful motto, have had objects as a subject. I have in mind, notably, the current Chairs of civilizations, be they Mesopotamian, Pharaonic or Central Asian, or yet Mediterranean archaeology, and anthropology. Over the last decade, the Chair of Artistic Creation has invited eminent artists, object-makers, to speak. And in 2002, the inaugural lecture of the art historian Roland Recht was even titled The Object of Art History, although his profound examination bore mainly on the workings of the discipline and of its methods.8
18While I am here, I will pursue two goals that I will attempt to achieve by joining chronological fields and cultural areas, by preferring risky subjects, and by adopting multiple perspectives: 1) To explore, through objects, the possibility of writing a transnational history of Europe, which would give a crucial role to dialogue between disciplines and historiographies; 2) To consider the question of museums, collections, and cultural property as a major anthropological and political fact of our times and a challenge for the future. The Chair of Cultural History of Art Heritage in Europe is thus also a Chair of prospective and experimental history. It claims its right to doubt, the right to be wrong, and be irresolute. It does not pit itself against “classical” art history. It dialogues with it, completes it, and is informed by it.
***
19Before 1789 and the French Revolution, “when Europe spoke French” (an expression I am borrowing from Marc Fumaroli9), artworks collected by European sovereigns and aristocrats were mainly used for what Charlotte Guichard calls “politics of taste”.10 Throughout Europe, from Saint Petersburg to Lisbon, Stockholm, Naples, London, Dresden, Vienna, and everywhere in between – except France, where public museums did not yet exist – a dense network of galleries and museums upheld the project for an aesthetic education of mankind. As Friedrich Schiller wrote “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom”. The scholars of the Republic of Letters, who were polyglots and were mobile, would travel to find this beauty wherever it was: in Rome, in Naples, in the public museums of Italy and Germany. In Düsseldorf, Montesquieu deemed that the Gallery of Paintings “would be very beautiful in Rome itself” and did not have “its match in Germany”.11 The painter Fragonard and his friend Bergeret found the Dresden gallery to be “an inexhaustible resource for people of the arts and amateurs, [who] are wasting much time in Italy” and should rather – and this is a quote – “throw themselves in the beautiful galleries of Dresden, Düsseldorf, Mannheim”.12 In the age of Enlightenment, Greco-Roman antiquities and Italian and Flemish painting shaped the landscape of a new European taste, of common practices and knowledge.
20In the same period, however, a small population of new, uprooted objects was already entering the European cultural landscape. From the eighteenth century, objects brought from abroad, from the Americas, China, and the Indies, exotica, as they were called, were sold on the art market in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, often in modified forms for better marketability. Scientific expeditions became more common. Those of James Cook in the Pacific, funded by the King of England, brought several hundred ethnographic objects to the Göttingen Museum, which was then under the authority of the Crown of England. Another part of the collection went to Vienna, and yet another to Oxford. Oceania occupied a place in European capitals’ cabinets and displays, amongst constellations of other objects. The slow, studious, and multiform incorporation of these non-European objects gently unsettled established aesthetic, historiographical and anthropological certainties. What is Beauty? What is Art? What is “we”, and what are “others”? Those were the questions that feathered helmets, weapons made of seashells, musical instruments, and beast hides from afar raised at the time. However, before the French Revolution, material possession of an object and intellectual appropriation of it remained two distinct categories.
21The French Revolution imposed a new idea to Europe, one of which our museums are direct heirs: the idea that the intellectual appropriation of “objects of art and science”, as they were then called, was necessarily associated with their material appropriation; that it was necessary, in a sense, to possess Rome in Paris for the study of Ancient History, or to own Egypt in Turin, London or Berlin and – later – in New York or Boston, for Egyptology to do its work. In their wildest visions, theoreticians of the Revolution claimed that the treasures of humanity should be gathered in Paris to ensure the advancement of sciences and make the whole world forget that the true “heritage” of France had, until then, essentially been one of debauchery and luxury. As the prominent protestant legislator François-Antoine Boissy d’Anglas put it in Year II, that is to say, in 1794:
Let Paris be the capital of arts: let it recover, in the invaluable advantage of being home to all human knowledge and the trust of all treasures of the mind, a new splendour, more brilliant than the one he drew from his luxury, his artificial pleasures and all the excesses that formed, in ways, his dowry and heritage; he shall be the school of the universe, the metropolis of human science, and exert this irresistible authority of instruction and knowledge over the rest of the world.13
22He could hardly have expressed more explicitly the link between the fantasies of object accumulation, knowledge production and world domination; to the extent that it is tempting to link the “objects of desire” and the “desire for objects”, which are our topics today, to the categories of libido described long ago by Saint Augustine of Hippo and taken up again in a secular sense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: libido sentiendi, the desire of the senses, broadly speaking, libido sciendi, the desire for knowledge, and libido dominandi, the desire for domination.14
***
23Upon entering the Collège de France – not in the institutional sense but physically, with one’s feet, body, eyes, all senses and preoccupations of the moment – one is greeted, in the centre of the main courtyard, by a statue by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the famous designer of the Statue of Liberty. It represents Jean-François Champollion. Everybody knows Champollion. Born during the French Revolution, he was too young to participate in Bonaparte’s expedition in Egypt, but he was a student at the Collège de France from his teenage years, was appointed curator of Egyptian collections at the Charles X Museum (the Louvre) at the age of thirty-six, and became the first person to hold a Chair of Egyptology at the Collège de France a few years later. He perfectly represents a generation of Europeans who were both actors and witnesses of the great boom in universal museums in nineteenth-century Europe.
24It is hard for me to describe the stupor, or rather the incredulous dismay that I experienced when, ten days ago, in the Collège de France’s courtyard, I looked at Champollion’s statue for the first time. I mean, really looked at it. I was early for an appointment. I had seen it a thousand times before, of course, but one tends not to look much or very closely at these monuments to national glories that the Third Republic has scattered across our cities. They were commissioned by public institutions and are outstanding examples of the alliance between ideology and aesthetics, especially when, in the late nineteenth century, the State used them to reach the ordinary man and woman on the street. Nowadays, we see them without seeing them. They are part of the “urban landscape” so aptly described in the late 1970s by Maurice Agulhon who already noticed at the time that public statuary was looked at “neither by drivers who speed by, nor by pedestrians who, for many reasons, are no longer inclined to stroll”.15
25I had a bit of time and I looked at Champollion. It is a monumental 2.40 metres tall young man, who seems to be about thirty years old. He is wearing the tight-fitting frock coat, skin-tight breeches and short riding boots that were worn in Europe around 1800. He has sideburns. He is resting on his elbow, his chin on his hand, and gazing at the floor in an indefinable manner, so altered by weather and pollution is the surface of his face. The white marble of which he is made is abraded and dirty. His left leg is very high, like that of a traveller who set his foot on a stone during a break. But his foot is not set on a stone (Figure 4). It is a decapitated statue of Ancient Egypt, the majestic and broken head of a pharaoh who could be Ramses II. The statue’s pedestal bears Champollion’s name in large letters. On the right-hand side, the work is dated and signed: Auguste Bartholdi, 1875.16
Figure 4

Champollion, marble statue of Bartholdi, drawing by Sellier published in Le Magasin pittoresque, vol. XLIV, July 1876, p. 233.
26The scholar’s boot on the pharaoh’s sacred head… Upon seeing this, I was seized by a dread that Walter Benjamin (and my German friend, scholar Karine Winkelvoss) call the “memory of the unseen”.17 The return of repressed colonialism in a fortuitous crossing of divergent timelines: mine, that of a Berlino-Parisian mortal of the year 2017 who has never really paid attention to the political iconography of great men on the street and is waiting for an appointment at the Collège de France; and his, that of a century-and-a-half-old marble statue which, for decades, freely and openly, has been telling anyone willing to listen the same story that it already told in 1875, when France and Europe dominated the world. In Western art, the iconography of the foot on the severed head is kept for representations of David vanquishing Goliath; or, when the head belongs to a ferocious beast, to images of archangels or saints slaying the demon. What was Bartholdi trying to say? I do not know.
27What I do know, however, is that Champollion’s statue says more about the history of heritage in Europe than any book, any class or any inaugural lecture on the subject. It is like an allegory of that history, in the oldest sense of the term, which meant “to speak loudly in public, in a different mode”. To me, what it lays out for all to see, with its made-to-last statuary insolence, is the alliance between the three libidos that I mentioned earlier: the one that is sensually directed towards the beauty of the pharaoh’s face; the one that is intellectually committed, together with the young scholar, to deciphering the remains of a lost civilization; and the one that is manifested, with a foot on a head, in an act of domination.
28Looking at it now, in 2017, Champollion’s statue is both an unbearable and precious document. It publicly invites us, in one of the institutions most able to do so, to think the un-thought aspects of Europe’s heritage and museums. It reminds us at all times, under open skies, that in the Western world, the shiny, golden medal of culture and knowledge almost always has a reverse side of symbolic and real violence; that there is a diurnal side to heritage in Europe as well as a nocturnal side; that these two aspects are inseparable from each other; that we must strive to think them together, as a single contradictory unit. At the museum, this means seeing the objects where they are, and simultaneously seeing them where they no longer are, that is to say, in the regions from which they were taken. It means enjoying the beauty and the knowledge that have been accumulated in our cities over centuries, but enjoying them with full awareness of the conditions in which these objects were collected, in asymmetrical economic, military and epistemological contexts. It means rendering visible, in order to master them better, the internal contradictions and the glaring tensions that have been at work in the very idea of museums since its origin. It means paying close attention, in this context, to the gazes and voices of the dispossessed, and keeping in mind what Barbara Cassin and her research team have so convincingly shown: that the words museum and heritage and the associated concepts, are among the most eminently untranslatable terms in European languages.18
***
29So Champollion was four years old when France implemented its doctrine of liberated heritage, according to which the arts – as a product of liberty – should be gathered in the country of liberty, that is to say, in France. He was six when the Directory ordered that hugely famous ancient statues discovered in Rome during the Renaissance and permanently kept in the Pope’s collections ever since, the Apollo Belvedere and Laocoön and His Sons, be confiscated from the Vatican and transported to Paris to be exhibited in the Louvre. He was seven when The Wedding at Cana, painted by Veronese for the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, was removed from its refectory wall and taken to France. He was eleven when the British army confiscated part of the discoveries made in Egypt from Bonaparte’s scholars, among them the famous Rosetta Stone, which was sent to London as a military trophy and has been exhibited ever since in the British Museum (and I’ll take this opportunity to salute the director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, who is now entrusted with it). He was twenty-six when the British government decided to buy the Parthenon frieze’s 120 tons of marble, of which the diplomat Lord Elgin organized and funded the transfer from Greece to England, and which Athens is still claiming back to this day.
30In the nineteenth century, the French triad of museums, nation, and heritage, so masterfully studied by Dominique Poulot19, extended its grip to the whole of Europe. Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna and Saint Petersburg, most notably, invested dizzying sums in developing their museums, which are now our museums. They would spy on one another. The very young disciplines of art history, archaeology and ethnology each cast their nets on Europe and the world. In unified Italy, the museums of London, Paris and Berlin scoured the art market and vied with one another in ingenuity to obtain authorizations to export major artworks. The Spanish Golden Age fascinated northern capitals. In only a few years, Berlin gathered the largest collection of Rembrandt paintings ever formed outside of the Netherlands.
31During the same period, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, an elite of private collectors from the cosmopolitan upper class of business bourgeoisie acquired ancient artworks of extraordinary worth on the art market, and gathered world-class collections in all of Europe’s large cities – including Constantinople/Istanbul, Moscow, and Athens. Decorative arts, medieval sculpture and silver and goldsmiths’ works, the arts of Islam and of the Far East, paintings from the Italian Renaissance and seventeenth-century Dutch prints and drawings, would compete on the art market for the attention of these well-informed and wealthy collectors, who were often motivated by philanthropic and patriotic sentiments. Whether one was French, British or German, investing in a collection of ancient art was then not only a sign of culture and taste, but also an act of patriotism, with governments encouraging collectors to bequeath or donate pieces from their collections to national museums, and collectors largely adhering to this system.20
32With, amongst others, Adolphe Schloss, David and Pierre David-Weill, Alphonse Kahn in Paris, Calouste Gulbenkian and the Rothschilds in Paris and London, James Simon in Berlin, the Camondos in Istanbul and later in Paris, the most prominent collectors of these days were often from Jewish families that regularly gratified public museums with spectacular donations. This part of history is overlooked all too often: these collections, built between the 1860s and the beginning of World War I, were precisely those that were systematically despoiled for racial reasons in Nazi Germany and the countries that it occupied in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
33This explains – please forgive me for this parenthesis, which is not as technical as it may seem – that what in France is called the Musées nationaux récuperation (MNR – “National Recovery Museums”), about 2,000 artworks despoiled from French Jewish families during the Occupation, returned to the French state after the war, but which the latter has not yet given back to the legal successors of the families in question, are largely composed of decorative art objects, drawings, prints, precious tapestries and paintings by former masters: Rubens, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, and so on. To read the MNR’s catalogue – and to remember that, on top of these 2,000 works, the French state recovered another 15,000 from Germany after 1945, which it sold for the benefit of the administration of state-owned real estate, the Domaines21 – is to make an impressive dive into the wealth and quality of nineteenth-century French private collections.
34So, in the nineteenth century, when the European art market was expanding at unprecedented rates, the improvements to railways and steamboats, along with an acceleration of trade and competition between European powers in the colonies, made the heritage of mankind a major political stake for national assertion policies in Europe. The history of art has never been a neutral science. Similarly, as Alain Schnapp and Ève Gran-Aymerich have shown, ethnology and archaeology have been part (as they are now) of precise political, diplomatic and military contexts, in which tourism and religion have played an increasingly important part.22 Starting in the 1850s, biblical archaeology spread to all the territories mentioned in the Bible: Egypt, Mesopotamia and current Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel.
35This was a golden era for European museums, when their collections would fill up with papyrus fragments and thousands of cuneiform tabs and rolls, which constituted such a wealth of text that archaeologists are still far from having deciphered them all to this day. In the same period, the Ottoman Empire sold spectacular remains of Greek civilization in Asia Minor to archaeologists from European capitals, starting with Berlin. The ruins of the Pergamon Altar and the market gates of Miletus, for instance, were sent in hundreds of wooden crates from modern-day Turkey to be added to the antique collections of Berlin’s Museum Island, where they were reconstructed in bold and innovative ways. Colonies in Africa, Asia and Oceania also paid a heavy tribute to Europe in terms of heritage.
36In the nineteenth century, artworks were collected not only during research expeditions, but also during wars for territory and trade. During the Second Opium War in China, the French and British army jointly pillaged treasures in the Summer Palace in Beijing. The most spectacular pieces taken then were deposited at Empress Eugénie’s “Chinese museum” in Fontainebleau. Part of them can still be seen there to this day.
37In 1897, the British army led an infamous punitive expedition in the Kingdom of Benin, in the South of current Nigeria, which marked the arrival in Europe of a body of works commonly known as the “Benin Bronzes”. Over the past few years these artworks have been the subject of claims, which European museums and governments have systematically turned down. These bronzes are a set of several hundred metal fragments produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, richly decorated with animal and human figures in full relief (Figure 5). They were taken from their original sites, transported to London in around 1900, deposited in part at the British Museum and, for the rest of them, sold on the art market, where the museums of Berlin and Hamburg acquired many. Nowadays, these bronzes are mainly owned by the museums of London, Oxford, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and New York.
38When the bronzes entered European capitals, in around 1900, the Kingdom of Benin was presented – and this is a quote – as a “cultural exception” on the African continent; with a 1932 German article going as far as to call it “close to an advanced civilization”.23 Astounded art historians saluted the virtuosity of these works, which reminded them of European Renaissance or Baroque art. They had difficulty accepting them as the production of an African people.
Figure 5

Benin Bronze.
Photograph published in Eckart von Sydow, “Bronzen aus Benin”, art. cit., p. 379.
39But they were not alone. Around 1900, the whole of Europe struggled to believe that other cultures, other existences, other desires existed independently from it. In his famous letters on “The crisis of the mind”, of 1919, a text that was initially published in English, in London, for a British audience, Paul Valéry asserted of Europe that:
Other parts of the world have had admirable civilizations, […]. But no part of the world has possessed this singular physical property: the most intense power of radiation combined with an equally intense power of assimilation.
Everything came to Europe, and everything came from it. Or almost everything.24
40Yet in terms of heritage accumulation, this “everything” did not come without resistance. Since Ancient times, dispossessed people have had their say. For a European historian, they are undoubtedly harder to grasp than the victors’ discourse. But these words exist and are the soil in which contemporary claims regarding displaced cultural goods have their roots. In the late 1880s, a young Egyptian intellectual Ḥasan Tawfīq al-ʿAdl, who had left Alexandria to live in Berlin for a few years, noted in his travel diary these few words exchanged with an employee of Berlin’s Egyptian museum:
— “So”, he asked jokingly, “how do you find your treasures in our country?”
— Very well presented, Sir, and you have made a fine effort to preserve such beauty. I am glad that they are in your country, where they can remind you of Egypt. However, it is obvious that the most legitimate right to keep them is ours.25
41Given some effort to look for these missing words, one will find early traces of them outside of Europe. But they can also be found, in great numbers, inside of Europe itself, in this Europe where “everything came”, and where the accumulation of precious objects from foreign lands has never been a subject of collective approval nor of general consensus.
42Starting in the late eighteenth century, from Paris to London and from Rome to Weimar, massive transfers of cultural goods and the violence that underpinned them triggered troubled reactions in enlightened circles. In England, Lord Byron revolted against the transfer of the Parthenon frieze from Athens to what he called England’s “Northern climes abhorred”.26 In France, Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy vigorously protested against the Directory’s policy of artistic conquests in Italy, and dedicated some admirable pages to a description of the sacred unity which, according to him, binds an art object to its original context:
Neither in the fog and fumes of London, nor in the rain and mud of Paris, the ice and snow of Saint Petersburg; neither in the midst of Europe’s large cities’ commotion nor in this chaos of distractions of a people necessitously occupied with merchant tasks can one develop this profound sensitivity for fine things.27
43Half a century later, Victor Hugo wrote a now famous letter to express his disgust at the sack of the Summer Palace in Beijing and denounce a crime of European barbarity committed against Chinese civilization.28
44In 1920, the journal L’Esprit nouveau published a memorable inquiry titled “Faut-il brûler le Louvre?” (“Should we burn the Louvre down?”).29 In 1923, Paul Valéry – him again – wrote of his disgust upon visiting the Louvre, and described an “accumulation of excessive and therefore unusable capital” in what he called a “house of incoherence”. To which he added: “our heritage is crushing us”.30 Two years later, in Berlin, art critic Carl Einstein compared the museum of ethnology to a gigantic “cold store where the trophies accumulated by the white man’s greedy curiosity lie bloodless”.31 The crisis of museums that we think we’re diagnosing today is at least a century old.
***
45And yet. There is also a diurnal face to this primitive accumulation of cultural capital in eighteenth to twentieth century Europe: individual and collective emotions, aesthetic fertilizations and unexpected crystallizations, which are at the very heart of the ideas of culture and humanity. Culture, not in the fixed sense of a “sum of knowledge”, but rather in the dynamic sense of an elaboration, a construction; a sense that the German language captures with the term Bildung. For, in museums, immortal objects (that is, them) cross, from generation to generation, the timelines and the preoccupations of mortals (that is, us), and are imbued with a germinating power; the power, through their interactions, to make things, ideas or forms, which had not yet happened, happen. To paraphrase the Collège de France’s motto, one could say that, in a museum, we “observe culture in the making”. Here are three brief examples.
46In 1901, Guillaume Apollinaire, then aged twenty, wrote one of his first literary essays in Berlin. He was touring Germany with a family that had hired him for a year to teach French to their daughter. He did not know what his future would look like. In Berlin, the Pergamon Museum had just opened (Figure 6). It presented a life-size reconstruction of the altar of Zeus that Prussian archaeologists had discovered twenty years earlier in the province of Izmir, in modern-day Turkey. The altar is adorned by a monumental frieze: “the Gigantomachy”, which represents the victory of the gods over the giants, of order over disorder. The frieze is made of 120 marble slabs 2.30 meter-high. Apollinaire, planted before them, wrote in a mixture of enthusiasm for the work’s savage beauty and caustic ferocity towards the German people:
How beautiful it is! What a magnificent poem in stone! The earthly, marine and infernal Olympian gods, the animals, the giants, the monsters furiously entangle their sometimes mutilated limbs, the torsos of goddesses rear upon the arms of heroes, faces contort and mouths bite. This work, that craftsmen carved in very large grain stone, is so imbued with the divine that the traveller forgets the crowd of handlebar-moustached visitors and ugly females, and wishes for the hour when the sacrificial bulls will bellow.32
47The text, which was published in La Revue Blanche, marked the beginning of Apollinaire’s literary career. Thus, in Berlin, the savage creativity of the second century bce Greeks met that of a slightly lost young man, born in Rome of a Polish mother and an Italian father (Apollinaire was granted French citizenship only in 1916). From this encounter in the museum – as well as from others, of course – emerged one of the most prominent voices on the early twentieth century’s French literary scene.
Figure 6

Berlin’s Pergamon Museum as it was presented from 1901 to 1907. Anonymous photograph, 49.4 × 52.3 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum des Technischen Universität, inv. no. F 2059.
© Architekturmuseum, Technischen Universität, Berlin.
48In the same period – this was March 1900 – the Munich composer Richard Strauss was in Paris to conduct the Orchestre Lamoureux for two concerts. Romain Rolland took him to the Louvre. They were both thirty-five at the time. Romain Rolland was a lecturer in art history at the École normale supérieure. Strauss had also studied art history, but had become the conductor of the Berlin Opera’s orchestra. Rolland wrote in his diary that “[Strauss] has true taste in terms of painting, and his taste is fashionable. He admires Chardin very much […]. He is amused by Fragonard […]; he is disappointed by Boucher. He is not severe enough with Greuze; he has a bit too much sympathy for Vernet’s landscapes, and he recognizes the great Watteau’s superiority; he says that this Embarkation [Figure 7] is a kind of Märchen-malerei. The happiness and ease that radiate from this eighteenth century move him pleasantly”.33 As for Strauss, after visiting the Louvre, he wrote in his diary “Ideas for a ballet called The Island of Cythera, inspired by Antoine Watteau”.34
Figure 7

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera, also called The Embarkation for Cythera, 1717, oil painting on canvas, 129 × 194 cm, Louvre Museum, Department of paintings, inv. 8525.
49In the following weeks and months, long before Watteau’s works reached Debussy and touched his heart, the young Strauss started composing the music for a vast ballet called Kythere (opus AV 230, Trenner 201), which remained fragmental but which provided some of the themes of Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Josephslegende.35 Pierre Rosenberg called the Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera “at once a pause and an action, an instant, but beyond all time”.36 This fine wording could be used to describe museums in general. They are all at once, the stopping of artworks, which are immobilized and forever imprisoned in displays and on walls, and the powerful, gripping action of these works on the generations that pass before them.
50One last example: the Egyptian art of the Amarna period in the crazy Berlin of the pre-World War I years. The Amarna period is this short break in ancient Egyptian history, when Pharaoh Akhenaton (that’s him, Figure 1) decided to desert the gods, the political capital and the aesthetics of his predecessors and impose a new capital, a new worship and a new art. During excavations conducted in 1912, an archaeologist from Berlin discovered the workshop of an Amarna sculptor. It contained tools, models, about twenty portraits among which some were of Queen Nefertiti, and some plaster casts. With the approval of the French authorities, which were then the administrators of Egypt’s antiques, the set was shipped to Berlin and almost all of it was exhibited on the Museum Island during the winter of 1913-1914. Artistic avant-gardes and popular newspapers were dumbfounded. These faces came from the dawn of time (Figure 8) and yet were so similar – as writers of the time put it – to the people of 1913 that their radical realism made a political object out of Amarna art. Newspapers insisted on the democratic aspect of this “art for all”, which would strongly move even the least cultivated visitors of the museum. Marxist journals would congratulate themselves on finding in these sculptures the categories that preoccupied them elsewhere. In December 1913, the Sozialistische Monatshefte, the monthly Socialist review, even explained that the Amarna faces resembled those of “anyone on the street”; that some were like “an ultimate aristocratic filtering” of mankind, whereas others (the plasters) seemed to have been cast, I quote, “on proletarians”.37
Figure 8

Sculptures and live plaster casts discovered in Tell el-Amarna.
Photographic montage published as “Portraits of 1370 bc from an Egyptian studio” in Illustrated London News, 19 March 1927, p. 3.
51Egyptian heads from the fourteenth century bce enrolled in the International Workers’ class struggle. An eighteenth-century French painting which, two hundred years later, spawned music. Two-thousand-year-old Hellenistic marbles gave birth to an avant-garde poem in Berlin. There are numerous combinations and examples of unexpected cultural cross-fertilization within European museums. Special mention can be made of the painter André Derain for the turmoil he experienced at the British Museum in London in 1906. He was then twenty-six and it was the first time, according to Philippe Dagen, that a western painter paid attention to non-European sculpture. Once he had regained his hotel room, Derain spent the night writing an exalted letter to his friend Henri Matisse:
I have blackened four sheets of paper that I have given up on sending you. It is such a mess of ideas, such a chaos of sensations, of reasoning, that you would really think I have gone mad. […] I have been at the British Museum for the fifth time. There lay all jumbled up, so to speak – pay attention: the Chinese, the Africans, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, Phidias, the Romans, the Indies. My ideas were so confused before all this that I had to leave. I have insinuated myself in environments, in lives other than mine. I have therefore broadened my conscience by something else than words. Sensations alone, defined with, by shapes, colours. […] It is no longer an idea, but the absolute idea, the conscience of being.38
52The awareness of being and the taste for Otherness; an incorporation of the Other into the substance of Self; de-centring and re-centring. There is no doubt that museums are among the places where the “singular physical property of Europe”, to use Paul Valery’s words again, its extraordinary absorption and assimilation power, is visible at it strongest. Museums are, or have long been, the sites of formal encounters with vast worlds, the archives of human creativity, some of the places where History fertilizes the future. And, if I were not afraid of pomposity and if so many European museums had not been excessively commodified and “touristified” over the last few years, I could almost say that they are the house of the Mind.
***
53But what then, of the places where objects no longer are? What is there to say to those who are outside the house and have been deprived from their goods by History’s violence and asymmetry? How could one justify a situation in which some have access to the heritage of a mankind from which others are physically and economically excluded? How could we tolerate the symbolic and real capital generated by these museums not being shared? And how could we not want – by museums, through museums, because they have given us so much and because we have taken so much – to engage in a fairer policy for the dispossessed?
54In 1940, while he was fleeing from Nazi persecution, Walter Benjamin diagnosed traditional historians’ inability to empathize with defeated people. It is meaningful that he did it in one of the rare passages of his oeuvre in which he mentions artistic conquests and spoils of war. With whom do historians identify when they write History, wonders Benjamin. With the victor. The following is from Olivier Mannoni’s excellent French translation with Patrick Boucheron’s foreword:
Whoever before now has walked in victory, marches in the same triumphal procession that carries today’s rulers over the prostrate. The booty, as has always been the custom, is also carried in this triumphal procession; it may be called cultural assets. […] And, just as [these assets] are not free of barbarism in and of themselves, neither is the tradition whereby they are handed down from one owner to the next.39
55We, Europeans, who have received and passed on, and are still passing on these objects, are on the side of the victors. And in a way, this too is a “heritage that is crushing us”. But it is not our fate. The good news is that, in 2017, the history of Europe having been what it has been for centuries – a history of enmity between our nations, of bloody wars and of discriminations that were overcome with great difficulty after World War II –, we have sources and resources within ourselves to understand the sadness, or the anger, or the hatred of those who are in other parts of the world, further, poorer, weaker, and have been subjected in the past to the “intense absorbing power” of our continent. Or, in a nutshell, all we have to do now to empathize with the dispossessed is to make a tiny effort of introspection and slightly adjust our perspective.
56I will take a French example which will speak to this French audience but which was formerly relevant to the whole of Europe. In the 1920s, a powerful America had just taken the leadership of the international community. In Toulouse, a young lawyer gave a speech for the start of trainee lawyers’ new year, which was immediately awarded a prize, published, and broadcast. It was titled L’Elginisme, in reference to the Count of Elgin whom I mentioned earlier, the one with the Athenian Parthenon frieze. But in this young lawyer’s Elginism, neither Greece nor England were mentioned. Instead, America and its dollars were making the young man fret – as they did jurists and public opinions of the time in other parts of Europe.
President of the Bar, Gentlemen […],
Armed with a notebook and a Kodak, a second-rate second-hand goods dealer has travelled up and down the city and the land, with worn out soles and threadbare trousers. He has written down everything that seemed antique to him and transmitted his discoveries to his correspondent [in New York]. […] Every day, universally known, visited and described marvels of our architecture are uprooted from French soil to be exported to other continents. […]. [Of course,] it is necessary that some of our finest works go to foreign lands to serve as ambassadors of our taste and our civilization. What is, however, becoming intolerable, is that foreigners methodically come here to disfigure what the great Ruskin called “the beloved face of the Fatherland”. Alas! We, Gentlemen, stand before this sorry sight.
In times past, destruction came from ignorance. […] Nowadays, it comes from appreciation for the venal value of what has above all a “soul value”. […] Go no more to Sens to see the great flamboyant windows of the refectory before which Jacques Clément, the half-mad monk, pondered the assassination of King Henry III; they were sold for 20,000 francs to an American lady who will use them to light a music room. The door of Abbeville […] recently left its Francois I courtyard and is headed for an unknown destination. The Gothic staircase which stood so picturesquely with its three floors of woodwork in a courtyard of Morlaix is now entirely in a museum in London, sitting between an electric spotlight and a central heating unit. You would not find Villeneuve-lès-Avignon’s beautiful cross anymore […]; it has been in New York for five years, and it is a miracle that the old abbey of Moissac still keeps its remarkable thirteenth-century frescoes. […] Thus, were we to cross out of guides all that can no longer be seen here, we would write all of the history of our French art, and the list of irreparable losses to our country would be long.40
57As I read these lines, I think of Benin.
58Of course, we should not mix everything up. We should not put on the same plane the dismantling of collections formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by patriotic Jewish European families, led by Nazi fanatics in a general context of racial persecution, and the transfers from Italian and German public museums to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France in the name of ideals such as freedom, public education, and the progress of arts and knowledge. We should not confuse post-1915 despoiling of the Armenian people and the “second-hand goods dealer armed with a notebook, a Kodak” and dollars, who scoured French provinces in search of good deals at around the same time. Neither, of course, should we mix up the bloody plunders of colonial wars and the nineteenth-century archaeological campaigns. In studying massive heritage displacements – and thus in raising the issue of restitution –, one must always pay meticulous attention to the historical, cultural, ideological and symbolic context in which these displacements took place, and to the specific nature of each case. The very credibility of our research is at stake.
59So we must not mix everything up. Neither, however, should we fear to tackle contentious issues. Tackling the history – be it of gold or of lead – of art heritage in Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and doing it today, from Paris, from Berlin, from London, or from the Collège de France, which is the finest, the freest, the most dignified place to do it, is first and foremost undertaking a process of introspection. It seems to me that this introspection on heritage, in Europe, is the first mark of friendship and respect that we could show to those who have enriched us. True introspection is neither a matter of self-flagellation, nor of deleting anything, nor of rushing to return things of which some people, including outside of Europe, may think that they are better kept here for now.
60Introspection is the effort consisting in collectively tying these objects in our museums back to the history that brought them to our countries, and back to the people who now live where they used to be. It is consciously embracing the burdensome part of our history as Europeans “to whom all came” and making it visible and thinkable. It is to pay extreme, constant, and critical attention to the voices of all those who, inside and outside of Europe, make heritage a political issue. In sum, it is to try to do what Achille Mbembe invites us to do, “to cross [multiple places] as responsibly as we can, as the heirs that we all are, but in a totally free and, where needed, detached relationship. In this process, which involves translation as well as conflict and misunderstandings, some questions will dissolve by themselves. Then, in relative clarity, will emerge requirements, if not of a possible universality, at least of an idea of the Earth as that which is common to all of us, as our common condition”.41
61The dividing line does not run between others and ourselves; it lies between the immortals – that is, them – and the mortals – that is, us.
Notes de bas de page
1Henri Focillon, Piero della Francesca, Paris, Armand Colin, 1952, p. 7.
2See, for example, Barbara Cassin, Éloge de la traduction. Compliquer l’universel, Paris, Fayard, 2016.
3“Expatriation”, “Expatrié”, in: Dictionnaire universel françois et latin […] contenant la signification et la définition des mots de l’une et de l’autre langue, 4th edition, 5 vols., Paris, vol. 3 [DET-F], 1752, p. 1256b.
4See Pierre Harter, Arts anciens du Cameroun, Paris, Arnouville, 1986.
5See Lothar Lambacher (ed.), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Dokumentation der Verluste. Skulpturensammlung. Band VII. Skulpturen. Möbel, Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2006, p. 148. The work was published by Wilhelm von Bode in 1897-98; it is mentioned in Frida Schottmüller’s catalogue, Die Bildwerke in Stein, Holz, Ton und Wachs, 2nd ed., Berlin/Leipzig, Walter de Gruyter, 1933, pp. 106-107; and in the Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein’s catalogue from 1997, p. 231. I am grateful to Neville Rowley for this valuable information.
6Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991.
7See Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (eds.), Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (xviiie-xixe siècles), Paris, Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988; Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands, Paris, PUF, 1999.
8Roland Recht, L’Objet de l’histoire de l’art, Paris, Collège de France/Fayard, coll. “Leçons inaugurales du Collège de France”, no. 167, 2003.
9Marc Fumaroli, When the world spoke French (French title: Quand l’Europe parlait Français), New York, NYRB Classics, 2011.
10Charlotte Guichard, “L’amateur d’art est-il un artiste ? Les usages sociaux et politiques du goût au xviiie siècle”, in a seminar-talk by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Figures de l’amateur, Beaubourg/Centre Pompidou, Institut de recherche et d’innovation, 13 May 2008.
11Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, Voyages de Montesquieu, 2 vols., Bordeaux, G. Gounouilhou, vol. 2, 1894-1896, pp. 186-187.
12Pierre-Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt, Bergeret et Fragonard : journal inédit d’un voyage en Italie, 1773-1774, Paris, Librairies-imprimeries réunies, 1895, p. 410.
13François-Antoine Boissy d’Anglas, Courtes observations sur le projet de décret présenté au nom du Comité d’instruction publique sur le dernier degré d’instruction, adressées à la Convention nationale, Paris, 28 germinal an II (17 April 1794), p. 164, quoted from Édouard Pommier, L’Art de la liberté. Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française, Paris, Gallimard, 1991, p. 161.
14Augustine’s tripartition (see Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, book X, chap. xxx, Oxford University Press, 1998), which is based on the Epistles of John (Letter I, chap. ii, v. 16) is reused by Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Lafuma edition no. 545 /Brunschvicg edition no. 460): “All that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life; libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido dominandi.”
15Maurice Agulhon, “La statuomanie et l’histoire”, Ethnologie française, t. 8, no. 2/3, 1978, pp. 142-172, p. 165.
16Pierre Vidal and Christian Kempf, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) : par l’esprit et par la main, Lyon, Les Créations du Pélican, 1994.
17See “Le souvenir du jamais vu”, a conference designed and organized by Karine Winkelvoss and Andreas Beyer at the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 16-17 May 2014 (minutes to be published in German in 2018). Benjamin talks of “images which we have never seen before we remember them” (Bilder, die wir nie sahen, ehe wir uns ihrer erinnerten): Walter Benjamin, “A short speech on Proust,” quoted in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural History, vol. II, Modernity, Routledge, 2005.
18Barbara Cassin and Danièle Wozny (eds.), Les Intraduisibles du patrimoine en Afrique subsaharienne, Paris, Demopolis, 2014.
19Dominique Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine, Paris, Gallimard, 1995.
20Véronique Long, “Les collectionneurs d’œuvres d’art et la donation au musée à la fin du xixe siècle : l’exemple du musée du Louvre”, Romantisme, vol. 31, no. 112, 2001, pp. 45-54 ; Véronique Long, “Les collectionneurs juifs parisiens sous la IIIe République (1870-1940)”, Archives juives, vol. 42, no. 1, 2009, pp. 84-104.
21See the MNR’s online catalogue : http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/mnr/MnR-pres.htm.
22Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, New York, Abrams, 1997; Ève Gran-Aymerich, Les Chercheurs de passé. 1798-1945. Aux sources de l’archéologie, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2007.
23“In diesem Umkreis bildet Benin die Enklave einer relativen Hochkultur, deren Geschichte noch ein Rätsel ist, das nach einer Lösung verlangt.” Eckart von Sydow, “Bronzen aus Benin”, in: Die Kunst für Alle, vol. 47, no. 12, 1932, pp. 378-380, p. 380. On the history of “Benin Bronzes”, see Janette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures, 3rd ed., New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 124-128.
24“Other parts of the world have had admirable civilizations, poets of the first order, builders, and even scientists. But no part of the world has possessed this singular physical property: the most intense power of radiation combined with an equally intense power of assimilation. Everything came to Europe, and everything came from it. Or almost everything.” Paul Valéry, “The crisis of the mind”, The Athenaeum (London), 11 April 1911 and 2 May 1919, 2nd Letter, reproduced in “The crisis of the mind”, J. Matthews (ed.), The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Princeton, Princeton University Press, vol. 10, pp. 23-26. See Achille Mbembe’s reading of this excerpt in Achille Mbembe, Politiques de l’inimitié, Paris, La Découverte, 2016, pp. 98 sq.
25Ḥasan Tawfīq al-ʻAdl, Riḥlat Ḥasan Afandī Tawfīq al-ʻAdl, 1887-1892, Cairo, 2008; on the museums of Berlin in particular, see pp. 279-288.
26“And snatched thy shrinking Gods to Northern climes abhorred!” George Gordon Byron, “Childe Harold’s pilgrimage” (1812), chant II, xv, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980-1993, vol. 2 (1980), pp. 3-186.
27Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres sur le préjudice qu’occasionnerait aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monuments de l’art de l’Italie, also called Lettres à Miranda, Édouard Pommier (ed.), Paris, Macula, 1989, Letter IV, pp. 109-116, p. 116.
28Victor Hugo, “L’expédition de Chine – au capitaine Butler”, Hauteville House, 25 November 1861, in Victor Hugo, Actes et Paroles II : Pendant l’exil (1852-1870), found in Émile Testard (ed.), Édition nationale. Victor Hugo, t. 40, Paris, Librairie de l’Édition nationale, 1894, pp. 253-256.
29“Faut-il brûler le Louvre ?”, a two-part inquiry by the journal L’Esprit nouveau, no. 6, 1920, pp. 1-8 ; no. 8, 1921, pp. 960-962.
30Paul Valéry, “Le problème des musées”, published in Le Gaulois on 4 April 1923, reproduced in Œuvres, t. II, Pièces sur l’art, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 1960, pp. 1290-1293.
31Carl Einstein, “Das Berliner Völkerkunde-Museum, Anläßlich der Neuordnung”, Der Querschnitt, 1926/8, pp. 588-592, p. 590.
32Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Pergamon à Berlin”, La Revue blanche, vol. 28, May 15 1902, pp. 146-147.
33Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland, Correspondance / fragments de journal, Paris, Albin Michel, coll. “Cahiers Romain Rolland”, vol. 3, 1950, p. 136 sq., quoted from Willi Schuh, “Das Szenarium und die musikalischen Skizzen zum Ballett Kythere”, in Willi Schuh (ed.), Richard Strauss Jahrbuch 1959/60, Bonn, Boosey and Hawkes, 1960, pp. 59-98, pp. 84-85. I am very grateful to Wolf Lepenies for drawing my attention to this event.
34Richard Strauss, note from 17 May 1900, quoted from Willi Schuh, art. cit., p. 85.
35Willi Schuh, art. cit.
36Pierre Rosenberg, Dictionnaire amoureux du Louvre, Paris, Plon, 2007, p. 901.
37Lisbeth Stern, “Ägyptische Funde”, Sozialistische Monatshefte, no. 26, 23 December 1913, pp. 1720-1721, quoted from Bénédicte Savoy, ‘“Futuristes, inclinez-vous !’, Fièvre amarnienne à Berlin en 1913-1914”, translated by Daniel Barric, Revue germanique internationale, no. 16, 2012, https://doi.org/10.4000/rgi.1353.
38André Derain to Henri Matisse, 6 March 1906, quoted by Rémi Labrusse, Matisse. La condition de l’image, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 52. See also Philippe Dagen, André Derain. Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, pp. 173-174; and by the same author, Le Peintre, le poète, le sauvage. Les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français, Paris, Flammarion, 2010.
39Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, in Anna Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
40Pierre de Gorsse, L’Elginisme, Toulouse, Vidaillon, 1927, pp. 8-12.
41Achille Mbembe, Politiques de l’inimitié, Paris, La Découverte, 2016, p. 178.
Auteurs
- Liz Libbrecht (trad.)
-
Bénédicte Savoy
Visiting Professor, International Chair of Cultural History of Art Heritage in Europe, 18th-20th century
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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