Mission Dakar-Djibouti

Hyeres, Camargue. At the Villa Noailles, a building designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, the exhibition Mission Dakar-Dijbouti illustrates how arts, science and museography relate to each other and reveals the role played by the Noailles couple in the foundation of Paris' ethnographic Musée de l'Homme which, after Jean Nouvel's Quai Branly refurbishment, will exhibit its permanent collection at the Trocadero, with a new design by Brochet-Lajus-Pueyo, in 2015.

Complementing the Villa Noailles records and on display are craft artefacts, photographs, writings and magazines from the Musée de l'Homme and Quai Branly, alongside material from university collections, archives, libraries and private collections. Together, they paint a mosaic picture of the intellectual relationships developed by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, which gave rise to an African expedition in the melting pot of the age d'or that radically changed the concept of the ethnographic museum. Between Dogon masks and zoomorphic figures from Benin, sculpted heads from Mali, seats and musical instruments of native African peoples from the early 20th century, the story of the museum and the multifaceted Noailles patronage is narrated.

The exhibition begins with the words of Marie-Laure: "The city of Amsterdam craves urbanism with identical houses stretching for kilometres around Baudelaire's old canal city. Here, we met Georges-Henri Rivière and I am most enthusiastic about his architecture and the northern European spirit. He was a guest of Baron Van der Heyd, the collector of Negro objects [...] a sort of return to nature and humanity for which we feel a need and that you seem to resolve magnificently with your expedition." It was 6 September 1932 and the construction of the Hyères villa had just been completed when Marie-Laure sent this letter to writer Michel Leiris, who was, at the time, on a yearlong mission between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. Along with artist Gaston-Louix Roux, musicologist André Schaeffner, linguists Jean Mouchet and Deborah Lifchitz, geographer Abel Faivre, ethnologist Jean Moufle and technical operator Eric Lutten, Leiris covered 800 kilometres with the purpose of documenting the cultures of the peoples in Senegal and Eritrea. This expedition became known as the Mission Dakar-Djibouti and was led by young explorer Marcel Griaule. Although the political context was still dominated by colonial interests when the mission departed, its travel accounts were critical of colonialism's devastating effects and focused, for the first time, on the need to safeguard a vast and as yet still unexplored cultural heritage that was at risk of being eliminated by Western expansionist aims.

The field research lasted 22 months, putting into practice theories developed by Marcel Mauss — the father of modern ethnography — based on sociological investigation, that prompted experimentation with new study methods and narrations. It removed the African culture from the "intriguingly exotic" status to which it was still relegated and instead sought to understand it through an account of its linguistic variety, history, legends and the values and rules underpinning life in autochthonous communities. For the first time, they also studied the rituals, dances and music to place artefacts and images in the symbolic and cultural contexts of their peoples and linked the implements, furnishings and vernacular constructions to local crafts and orography. One innovation in their research was the integration of human science and the arts, promoted by the Noailles. Leiris' travel journals, published with the emblematic title L'Afrique fantôme ["Phantom Africa"], served as a detonator to fire up the controversy on colonial enterprise. Griaule's photo-reportages and his documentaries preceded the evolution of an independent profession. Schaeffner's studies (1936's Les Origines des Instruments de Musique ["The Origins of Musical Instruments"]) led to a new branch of musicology. This was a chance missed by Luis Buñuel, who declined Charles de Noailles' invitation to participate in the expedition.

The input of art in its various expressions, from literature to photography, music and the cinema, is a reflection of the couple's patronage and commitment to supporting and promoting artists and intellectuals.

It is no coincidence that Leiris, Roux and Schaeffner contributed to the Noailles-backed periodical Documents, or that the Surrealist magazine Minotaure served as a catalogue for the opening exhibition at the Musée Ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET) — the present-day Musée de l'Homme — where the mission artefacts and studies were concentrated. 3,600 objects, 300 manuscripts, 6,000 photographs and 200 sound recordings revolutionised not only the way people looked at overseas countries, but also the very concept of the ethnographic museum. This was not, as so often occurs, an expedition commissioned by a collector who would bequeath his collection to a museum nor, as occurred with the previous colonial expeditions that lay the bases for the MET, an eclectic ensemble arranged like bric-à-brac, as if in a "flea market", as Picasso commented when he visited the old arrangement in 1907, fascinated by the sculpted African masks. The importance and significance of the Mission Dakar-Dijbouti lay in the fact that it broke away from the folklore approach in favour of a culture of the arts and folk traditions that had to be implemented, on the one hand, in the field with fresh approaches to learning about communities and their ways of living and, on the other, in the museum with an exhibition design conceived as an intermediary and pedagogical interface between scientific studies and the public's different knowledge levels. The main person pulling the strings of this modernisation, which became the cornerstone of anthropological museum disciplines, was George-Henri Rivière. Charles de Noailles appreciated the way Rivière has organised an exhibition on pre-Colombian arts at the Pavillon de Marsan, and was also behind an encounter between Paul Rivet, then director of the MET, and Rivière, then a critic for the Cahiers d'Art magazine and one-time manager of Josephine Baker — who opened the music events at the inauguration of the Dakar-Djibouti exhibition in 1933.

The criteria adopted for the expedition material collection, developed by Rivet and Rivière in April 1931, were published and distributed thanks to the proceeds from a boxing gala held to cover the costs of equipping the mission. As well as the Noailles, the main financial backers of the enterprise were Picasso and the playwright Raymond Roussel. During the mission, which was followed by others led, again, by Griaule, Rivière lay the foundations of a radical renewal in museological arrangement and in the museographic design of the ethnographic museum. This first took concrete form with the foundation of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, arranged in the basement of the Trocadero and, on 20 July 1938, with that of the Musée de l'Homme in the building refurbished by Carlu, Boileau and Azéma, who expanded its capacity from 17,000 to 40,000 square metres.

The aesthetic of the void, a spectacular void free from reconstructions and dressed mannequins, was behind Rivière's exhibition designs, in which the spatial arrangement's hierarchy was dictated by each of the items displayed, and a fitting presentation studied ad hoc. Fan-like arrangements were abolished and the objects isolated, hanging on fine threads — perhaps with then recently invented nylon —, so that they could be clearly observed all over. Ample space was given to pedagogy renouncing a paternalistic approach and instead entrusted to texts, maps and photographs, the tools employed by scientists and artists in their field research.

Objects were grouped in families for overall and comparative reading, supported by scientific reasoning. The impact of these arrangement principles was felt all over Europe and also in the United States. The experiences of the Musée de l'Homme and the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires sanctioned museology and museography as scientific disciplines and, at the same time, a new museum concept started to develop: a more complex place complete with photographic archives, a research library and means and spaces for pedagogical communication. As an interpretation of what is on display, exhibition design is never neutral; but the museum's identity as a place of culture was also the expression of political thought. Along with Rivet, Rivière and Noailles, the Trocadero museum became the mouthpiece for a political and cultural position, that clearly contrasted with colonial exhibitions of the time, which continued to offer a demonising and frivolous vision of the African civilisation. Indeed, Rivière believed that the underlying mission of the Musée de l'Homme was to build the archives of humanity.

This summer exhibition at Villa Noailles is filled with Rivière's teaching — a collage of objects, places and people, in which the house-museum concept gains added meaning. The links between art and science that pass through the lives of the Villa Noailles inhabitants and the history of the ethnographic museum, were all made possible by an encounter between knowledge and a passion for learning. Cristina Fiordimela

Through 30 September 2012
Mission Dakar-Djibouti: The Story of a House and a Museum. Ethnography Patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles
Villa Noailles
Hyères, France