I went to look a bit on the Louvre’s website to see the provenance and discovered the recency of the acquisitions. The absence of information about the material was interesting, like always. When you look into the biography of objects, there are always gaps.
Where were they before?
In family collections, some in Germany—it’s very surprising. If you look at the Louvre’s online catalogue, you’ll see that they were acquired in the eighties. Certain political parties have exploited the whole incident as a grave wound to French identity. But when you see that they’re products of the recent art market, it’s a whole different thing.
It’s clear that there was a lot of shock in France.
There were a hundred responses, a polyphony. There was, first of all, a massive political instrumentalization, which is to say, political parties accusing their government of poorly protecting France’s sacred royalist patrimony. Others attached to a republican idea of the museum were sad that public money wasn’t used to better protect the establishment. I think not a few people also felt Schadenfreude—all those jokes on Instagram about the password [for the museum’s security system] being “Louvre” and all. If we can take anything away from all these different, and sometimes dissonant, voices, it’s the fact that when a museum is attacked, it touches everyone.
In any case, the museum staff were the most shocked. It’s a true trauma. I’m in close contact with people at all levels, and everyone, in their way, is shocked, practically as though—and I exaggerate, it’s not a good comparison—but almost as though after a rape.
The main takeaway, for me, is that museums have a vulnerability—a technical, physical vulnerability—that is mirrored by the vulnerability of the public’s reaction, the idea that you can be culturally wounded in a profound collective manner.
It’s quite a coincidence that the Louvre was burgled just after appointing an expert on stolen art. Were you surprised by your appointment, given your calls for the return of stolen works?
It’s a surprise, but also a homecoming. As a researcher, I was born at the Louvre. At the end of the nineties, I contributed to an exhibition about its first director, Dominique-Vivant Denon, which, for the first time in the museum’s history, disclosed the whole story about the Napoleonic looting of art. In a way, it was the Louvre that got me started. But returning after so much time, and after reflecting on the subject in an African context, has totally changed my perspective.
What I want to emphasize is that this institution is courageous enough to allow critical voices into its very heart. Maybe you remember that after Felwine Sarr and I published our report, a museum director called it “a cry of hate” against museums. But it wasn’t hate. If you love museums, you have to be critical of them—so that they stay relevant, in tune with young people, with the questions that concern us today.
I’m glad you brought up Denon. Can you say a bit about how your work on art plunder in the many wars between France and Germany shaped your thinking?
The decisive factor was moving to Berlin. I was studying the way that France emptied out German collections, and, because of where I was living, I adopted the point of view of the victims. Of course, I was still interested in the Parisian side, in the reception of German works there, et cetera. But primarily, I was struck by what it does to a society to be culturally dispossessed. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, the Humboldt brothers—the whole intelligentsia of the time talked about the subject so, so much. There was very sophisticated writing on the violation of German museums, the experience of loss and absence, all of that, even in poems by Schiller—all the German Romantics, the greatest writers of the epoch, even painters and draughtsmen, all commented. I was young, twenty-three or twenty-four, and that’s why it was so natural to write, later on, with Felwine, about the African context. Because when you’re sensitized very young to the expression of loss, you hear them, whether they were in the Germany of 1800 or the Cameroon of 1900.
