2002 Articles

Les surréalistes et le musée d’ethnographie

Debaene, Vincent

The Institute of Ethnology was founded in 1925 ; in 1928, Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Rivière were put in charge of reorganizing the old Museum of Ethnography in the Trocadéro where the Fauves and the Cubists had discovered the Negro art at the begining of the century. In 1934, the building was finally destroyed and replaced by the Palais de Chaillot where the Musée de l’Homme would be inaugurated in 1938. These years are marked by an artistic and cultural dynamism where ethnologist's and avant-garde surrealists'interests intersected. But this proximity would not last because the avant-garde's demands were incompatible with the institutionalization of the discipline of ethnology around the Musée de l’Homme. During this period oppositions between ethnologists and "esthetes" also appeared as we may still see it today in the controversies concerning the transfer of the Musée de l’Homme’s collections and the Musée des Arts Premiers’s project at the quai Branly.