Jacques Chirac's museum on the quai Branly, opened last summer, continues to pull large crowds at weekends. Chirac, a long-time admirer of what used to be called 'primitive' art, made a great deal of noise at the start of his first presidential term about the need to show the various public collections to better advantage. He suggested, not entirely in passing, that some of the artefacts in the Musée de l'homme should be housed at the Louvre. The idea, which he'd borrowed from the eccentric collector Jacques Kerchache, left the Louvre in turmoil. It also put the social scientists at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the keepers of the Musée de l'homme into a state of battle-readiness: the museum's wonderful collection of artefacts was a storehouse of meanings that could not be divulged by aesthetics alone.

LRB 4 January 2007 | PDF Download