National and colonial: the Musee des Colonies at the Colonial Exposition, Paris, 1931

Patricia A. Morton

A city has just been born, attached to Paris. In the groves of the Ile-de-France, the sun germinates surprising flowerings of stone, wood temples, beaten earth, strange sculptures, roofs like curved prows, bellturrets with bulbs and creepers. . . . A curious population inhabits it: whites of an olive tint and yellows of a pale visage, blacks with skin of shining ebony, lemon Orientals. . . . all the races, all the languages, all the costumes, all the vocations. And over this crowd from Babel, swarming and guttural, over the palaces and the huts in the billowing Vincennes greenery, the tricolor flag snaps in the pale sky, the symbol of the unity of the French Colonial Empire.

We are here at "Lyauteyville," the magisterial, picturesque and coherent ensemble realized by [Lyautey] our great African, a magnificent resume of all that which old Europe has made in the universe, rallying center for all the peoples who love the French genius and its manifestations across the World.(1)

L'Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris feted the accomplishments of colonialism from May 6 to November 15, 1931 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Nicknamed Lyauteyville after the exposition's commissioner general, Marechal Hubert Lyautey,(2) this was the last international world's fair exclusively devoted to the celebration of international colonialism. France hosted the Colonial Exposition - joined by Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, and the United States - to demonstrate its colonial puissance and to stimulate the French public's interest in its colonial empire. The only colonial power absent from Paris was Britain, which, although invited to the Colonial Exposition, had staged its own imperial extravaganza in 1924-25 and lacked both the resources and interest in participating in a celebration of French colonialism. Germany no longer possessed a colonial empire, having been stripped of its colonies after World War I, and Japan was not yet recognized as a colonial power. The Colonial Exposition attracted a huge audience (there were 33 million entries into the exposition) from France and abroad and generated an overwhelmingly positive critical response.(3)

The Musee des Colonies (Museum of the Colonies) was unique at the 1931 Colonial Exposition as the only permanent structure and the only pavilion that represented both France and its colonies. The majority of the exposition's pavilions was modeled after native architectural styles, from the Sudanese mud tata to the Polynesian straw hut. Marcel Olivier,(4) the delegate general of the exposition, saw the pavilions as the literal embodiment of the exposition's mission: "Colonization is legitimate. It is beneficial. These are the truths that are inscribed on the walls of the pavilions at the Bois de Vincennes."(5)

The original impetus for the 1931 Colonial Exposition grew out of the popularity of the colonial section at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle:

The initial idea [for the exposition] goes back to 1910. In 1910, we naturally turned toward exoticism, then in full novelty. We dreamed of renewing, with more brilliance and more sincerity, the picturesque ambience - although quite false and sometimes excessive - of the successful colonial sections at the 1878, 1889, and 1900 expositions. Why not transport once again, in a larger setting in the middle of Paris, this vision of the Near and the Far East? . . .

The initial conception of an Exposition of Exoticism was later enriched, amplified, and led toward more elevated goals. It was no longer a matter of artificially reconstituting an exotic ambience, with architectural pastiches and parades of actors, but of placing before the eyes of its visitors an impressive summary of the results of colonization, its present realities, its future.(6)

The 1931 Colonial Exposition, in contrast to the colonial displays at previous expositions, was planned to convey the potential future as well as the current reality of international colonization through pedagogical and accurate displays. As envisaged by Marshal Lyautey, the exposition had two educational goals: first, to stimulate French business to invest in the colonies, and second, to overcome the apathy and even hostility that the French public felt toward its colonial empire. National pride was at stake, and the exposition was meant to counter the image of the casanier (stay-at-home), lethargic French who cared nothing for their colonial holdings.(7) The directors of the Colonial Exposition linked French colonialism with the long history of conquest beginning with the Crusades, but they distinguished their own, enlightened colonialism from the brutality of former colonization. According to their vision of colonization, a stable, pacific world had resulted from the spread of French civilization on a global scale. Lyautey and his colleagues sought to make the Colonial Exposition reflect the beneficial progress of the French "civilizing mission," the responsibility to bring civilization to the natives by means of scientific, authentic exhibitions, rather than vulgar, exotic entertainments.

La plus grande France, or Greater France - the France of 100 million inhabitants, of France and its colonies - required an architectural and artistic expression different from that of previous expositions. The colonial sections in the 1878, 1889, and 1900 expositions established exotic conventions for pavilions, decorative programs, entertainment sections, landscaping, exhibits, and native displays.(8) The eclecticism and the carnival atmosphere of earlier colonial sections were rejected by Lyautey's group, which sought instead to promote authenticity of form and detail in the pavilions and a serious, if entertaining, spirit in the exhibits. This goal reflected the shift in French colonial policy between the wars from the assimilation of the colonies into the French nation to the association of the colonies to France.

The mid-nineteenth-century colonial policy of assimilation was derived from the Enlightenment and republican ideology of equality, as well as from the French conviction that their culture was inherently superior to any other. Assimilation was also based on the supposition that the colonized peoples would only benefit by adopting French civilization and jettisoning their own. As Raymond Betts notes, assimilation policy aimed at the union of France and its colonies, such that each possession was to "become an integral if noncontiguous, part of the mother country, with its society and population made over - to whatever extent possible - in her image."(9) Under assimilation, a single legislative body was, in theory, to be promulgated for both the metropole, or mother country, and the colonies, with the Parlement the chief governmental entity for the whole. France and its colonies were conceived as a united country, ruled under the same flag, with one language, despite the different origins of its disparate peoples.(10) As Gwendolyn Wright has noted, the military government in Algeria controlled architecture and urban planning in the colony, where military engineers laid out "monotonous gridiron city plans for colons . . . lined with heavy-handed pastiches of nineteenth-century French architecture" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].(11) Early French administrators employed a similar urbanism in Indochina, parts of which were colonized in the 1850s and 1860s.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the new French colonial policy of association emerged from the experiences of previous colonial administrations, from social Darwinist theories of evolution, and from emulation of British and Dutch native policies.(12) The British, for example, had long used a form of "indirect rule" by which native elites administered British colonial policy. This type of efficient administration was greatly admired by French colonial advocates such as Jules Harmand and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu at the turn of the century.(13) Association allowed for a more flexible policy which, according to Betts, "would emphasize retention of local institutions and which would make the native an associate in the colonial enterprise."(14) The Moroccan Protectorate of Marechal Lyautey, established in 1912, enacted the fullest application of association policy, which dictated the strict physical, political, and cultural segregation of natives from the French.(15) In Morocco, Marechal Lyautey promulgated an architectural policy based more directly on native precedents, of which Albert Laprade's New Medina in Casablanca is an excellent example [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].

The practice of assimilation was not, however, abandoned entirely in the French colonies but was pursued most vigorously in those colonies where its techniques were already established, such as Algeria. In practice, the old policy of assimilation continued as the implicit agenda of French colonization due to the persistence of belief in the "civilizing mission" and the advocacy of republican ideology in certain segments of the colonial bureaucracy. Governmental and cultural structures established under the assimilationist regime endured in Algeria, Senegal, and other old colonies. Well into the twentieth century, assimilationist and associationist factions coexisted within French colonial circles.(16)

Association policy was informed by racial theories of evolution, which dictated fixed relations between the metropole and the colonies, especially in the realm of culture, where indigenous civilization was held inferior.(17) Segregation was advantageous for the natives, by this logic, in that it allowed them to progress at their own level, without detrimental pressure to advance too fast. The world of colonial association was, therefore, predicated on the precise and subtle differentiation of peoples, societies, and cultures into racially based hierarchies.

Following this logic, the pavilions at the Colonial Exposition maintained a strict architectural hierarchy: a variant of Art Deco for the metropolitan pavilions, such as the Section Metropolitaine [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED], and "native" styles for the pavilions of the colonies, such as the Tunisian souks [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED]. The distinction between the colonial and French pavilions mirrored association policy as practiced by Marechal Lyautey during his service as governor of Morocco. The Colonial Exposition physically embodied this principle through separate vocabularies for the colonial and the metropolitan pavilions. The only exceptions to this rule, among the official pavilions, were the free inventions for those colonies that the French considered to have no monumental architecture of their own (such as Madagascar), the older colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Reunion (which France considered assimilated to the metropole), and the Musee des Colonies.

The Musee des Colonies

The separation of the metropolitan architectural vocabulary from the colonial made designing the museum a particularly thorny problem within the context of association policy. The Musee des Colonies, as described in the exposition's General Report, was to "symbolize, in its structure, its decoration and its installations, the entire work realized in the colonies by the French genius, in the past and the present."(18) It was conceived, on the model of the Tervueren Museum in Brussels, the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, and the Imperial Institute in London, as a clearinghouse for information on the "positive results" and the techniques of French colonization. During the exposition, the museum housed historical and synthetic exhibits of France's colonial empire, and from 1935 to 1960, it served as the Parisian museum of colonialism.(19) Its exhibits contained a microcosm of the ethnographic artifacts, historical objects, statistical displays, and recreated native environments found in the exposition as a whole. The museum now exists as the Musee des Arts Africains et Oceaniens, serving as a pedagogic institution with limited collections.

The first laws concerning the Colonial Exposition included provisions for a permanent museum of the colonies. The law of March 17, 1920, authorized the organization of an interallied colonial exhibition with a permanent museum that, during the exposition, would house exhibitions for the minister of the colonies, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.(20) The 1920 law envisaged an ambitious complex of natural and manufactured exhibits for the museum, along with a park containing colonial fauna and flora.(21) The site for the museum was a rectangle of land belonging to the Ecole d'Arboriculture et d'Horticulture adjacent to Porte d'Honneur.(22) The museum became part of an ensemble of metropolitan buildings around the exposition's main entrance at Porte Doree [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. The offices for the North African colonies were removed from its program and located in separate pavilions for Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The museum's exhibits contained a Section de Synthese (a summary of the achievements of French colonization) and a Section Retrospective (the history of French colonial activities from the Crusades to the Second Empire), which fulfilled the mandate established by the 1920 legislation.

The Vincennes site on the east side of Paris was not Marechal Lyautey's first choice for the exposition and the museum.(23) He preferred a location in the center of the city, where the exposition would gain more visibility with the public. Lyautey and his associate Bourdaire believed that there was only one reason for putting the museum at Porte Doree: the hope of stimulating the public to support colonialism.(24) They presumed that since the museum was being located outside the intellectual, industrial, and commercial center of the city, the number of visitors to the museum would thereby diminish. "Little by little, we will forget even its existence and it will take enormous blows on the tam-tam to render it alive and efficacious."(25)

By contrast, Leandre Vaillat, an architectural critic and columnist for the daily newspaper Le Temps, strongly championed the Vincennes site in an article written in March 1928.(26) For Vaillat, it was logical to avoid the center of Paris since it would be difficult to reconcile its classical monuments with the exotic palaces of the exposition. He maintained that Angkor Wat next to the Invalides would be inharmonious. The center was like a work of art, not to be touched, but the east needed new monuments. The Colonial Exposition could give eastern Paris transportation and other infrastructural improvements, but the most important legacies would be the museum, "the Louvre of the people," and Porte Doree, as magnificent as Porte Dauphine in the west.(27)

Lyautey took up Vaillat's optimistic line of reasoning in his public pronouncements on the exposition's site.(28) The exposition would have a happy influence from a social point of view - it would even make the Bois de Vincennes fashionable. Better yet, the museum would be implanted in the downtrodden quarters of eastern Paris, thereby aiding the fight against Communism. Lyautey saw the exposition as a step toward the creation of other colonial institutions, such as a maison des colonies of information on the colonies, and toward the application of his colonial experiences with urbanism to the Parisian context.(29) The educational mission of the museum, then, was to demonstrate the beneficial results of colonialism to the visitors and residents of Paris, but also to provide a way of reforming the "red" quarters of eastern Paris through an urbanism based on colonial models.

The first scheme for the museum was designed by Leon Jaussely, who was a winner of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Grand Prix de Rome in 1903 and was best known for his urban plans.(30) Jaussely was the director of architecture for the Colonial Exposition from 1921 to 1927 and, in this capacity, produced various schemes for the site plan and for other architectural aspects of the exposition.(31) Jaussely's scheme for the museum, then intended to house the North African exhibits and more general displays, was designed in a pastiche of exotic styles variously described as "mixed North African" or "Algero-Tunisian" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED]. In May 1927, Jaussely presented his design to the Comite Technique, the administrative body charged with overseeing architectural and engineering matters at the exposition. The committee members did not favorably receive Jaussely's project. The "colonial style" of the proposal was sharply attacked by members of the committee, who declared that there was no reason to adopt a "North-African" style rather than an "Indo-chinese" or "Sudanese" style and even less reason to mix them.(32) The pastiche of exotic styles that Jaussely proposed was considered inappropriate for an edifice meant to represent France as well as its colonial empire.

Leandre Vaillat succinctly summarized the problem in a 1928 review of the Colonial Exposition and its architecture. Vaillat stated that the evocation of Andalusian gardens and Moorish cafes in a particular style might be suitable for the Moroccan pavilion, but that the museum had to endure in the Parisian light and ambience. A little tact, therefore, was essential. In Vaillat's view, "it was necessary to proceed by equivalence, to transpose, in some way, the taste for exoticism without localizing its evocation."(33) Vaillat made the problem clear: the museum had to be a national and a colonial monument, a task complicated by the debates over the aesthetic definitions of "national" and "colonial" architecture at the time.

Nationalism in this case meant the nationalism of la plus grande France, consisting of France and its colonial empire. Questions of French national identity, including the integration of the French provinces and the colonies into a nation, the collective cultural expressions of the Republic, and the basis of national unity, were vexed issues throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the 1789 Revolution, efforts to define the French nation evolved as a reaction to the loss of collective identity that accompanied the monarchy's fall. The diverse cultures and peoples of republican France had few common political or cultural points of reference once the king, who had personified France, was toppled.(34) A new definition of the nation was constructed by the Republic's leaders through the invention of a new national image, traditions, and institutions founded on the nation, rather than the king, as the source of political legitimacy.(35) A matrix of unifying organizations was founded on the monarchical institutions that in the seventeenth century had begun to forge a relative community out of language and culture.(36) The Republic and subsequent governments extended the homogenization of France that had begun under the monarchy through uniform administration, territorial division, and scholastic and cultural systems.

In the absence of a more "fundamental" cohesiveness, the leaders of the Republic and subsequent governments constructed a conceptual unity based on the claim that France was the "Queen of Civilization," the most civilized nation in the world, and that it was the "civilizing instinct," or la mission civilisatrice, that united all Frenchmen.(37) This unity was fictitious, an invention that attempted to counter the lack of geographic and cultural homogeneity in France. As Eugen Weber has pointed out, the Breton, Provencal, and Alsatian had no common language, traditions, or "race," and their traditional government had been eliminated by the Revolution.(38) The arts were a primary carrier of "Frenchness" since they were one of the bases for France's claim to be the seat of civilization, not to mention one of the chief means of nationalist propaganda. Museums formed one of the principal means for promulgating national ideologies in France and other nation-states. According to Carol Duncan:

Art museums . . . appeared just at the moment when notions of the public and public space were first being defined throughout Western Europe. . . . If the various capitals of Europe and, later, America, ended up with similarly conceived art museums, it was because, from the start, those nation-states and cities had similar ideological needs, and public art museums afforded them similar ideological benefits.(39)

French culture, especially its language and arts, was the unifying factor that provided a common national identity for the disparate French peoples, although this identity was conceived and promulgated from Paris and the central government without reference to local traditions.

The problem of integrating the diverse cultures of metropolitan France into a republican nation was given additional scope when the Republic acquired a new colonial empire in the late nineteenth century. If French culture was the universal glue that held the nation together, how could the divergent cultures found in the colonies be integrated into the nation? La plus grande France (Greater France) required a new definition of, in Herman Lebovics's terms, "True France," a definition that articulated the new form of associative French imperialism.(40) The premise of "France as civilizer" demanded that the colonies be folded into metropolitan French culture, since the concept that Africans or other natives could not be integrated into France threatened the theoretical structure on which republican national unity had been built.

This conundrum had its correlative in the Musee des Colonies, a structure that was to embody both the French colonial empire and metropolitan France itself. The Comite Technique rejected Jaussely's mixture of North African styles because the design referred too strongly to the colonial side of the French nation. The museum's design had to represent la plus grande France while staying within the representational hierarchies established at the Colonial Exposition.

"A Discreet Exotic Savor": The Museum's Design

Albert Laprade, another Beaux-Arts-trained architect, provided the answer to the problem of designing a nonspecifically "colonial" museum appropriate to the capital of France.(41) At the same Comite Technique meeting in which Jaussely's scheme was rejected, Laprade presented several perspective sketches for an alternative museum design. According to Laprade's notes, the committee responded with approbation to one sketch that showed "a great tapestry of stone in warm tonalities . . . a tapestry sheltered by a sort of light canopy, evoking the countries of the sun in a neutral and modern note" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED].(42) He claimed that he had avoided an archaeological "colonial" style - "the elephants with hanging trunks, the whole warehouse of Khmer, Negro or Arab accessories"(43) - in favor of what he called a "simple, noble, very calm, very neutral" architecture that "left to the sculpture the concern for evoking the Empire dispersed over the globe."(44) Laprade stated that this approach was "the only solution possible because it would have been illogical to adopt an architecture more Asiatic than African, or the inverse."(45) His desire was "to evoke far-off countries while remaining in harmony with the atmosphere of Paris."(46) Laprade was adept at designing adaptations of indigenous styles to modern planning, having built the New Medina in Casablanca under Lyautey, but he shunned this approach for the museum.

Although the attenuated columns and abstract Ionic capitals of Laprade's scheme belong to the classical vocabulary, he denied any explicit connection between his design and the "neo-Greek tradition" or the "Greco-Latin canons."(47) Instead, he saw this composition as classical only in its "great simplicity" and described it as "a synthesis of the spirit of the primitive civilizations."(48) Further, he claimed a place for his design in contemporary architectural debates, saying it proceeded a little from the "Esprit nouveau" (a clear reference to Le Corbusier's work), but with moderation, so that it was both "of its time" and for eternity.(49) He felt that his project balanced the exigencies of monumental building in Paris - with its obligatory references to the classical language - and the new modern aesthetics of thinner proportions and abstract ornamentation.

In these terms, Laprade's design belonged to the general movement toward classicism prevalent in French architecture between the wars, a parallel to the rappel a l'ordre (return to order) in post-World War I art.(50) During this period, what Franco Borsi designates the "monumental order" was the dominant trend in French art and architecture, such as the classicizing formalism of Art Deco and the traditionalism of Andre Mare and Louis Sue's interior decoration.(51) The explicit turn toward classicism is most marked in the 1930s, when such monuments as the Palais Chaillot (Carlu, Boileau, and Azema, 1937), Auguste Perret's Musee des Travaux Publics (1937-39), and Tony Garnier's Boulogne-Billancourt Town Hall (1934) were built. The Musee des Colonies was the first of these overtly classical buildings.(52)

Marcel Zahar, a prominent architectural critic, noted that Parisian monuments seemed to require the classical language in order to achieve the correct degree of dignity:

The Permanent Museum is a curious example of the survival of traditions. Most monuments of past centuries appear with a decoration of colonnades; one concludes from this that no monument can decently appear in public without its colonnade, even if its presence proves to be perfectly useless. The Permanent Museum thus appears like stone architecture. It seems that this makes it more noble, more dignified. . . . Without Mr. Laprade, from what picturesque and humorous vision would we have perhaps benefited, what aesthetic genre "trompe d'elephant," or "pagoda"? . . . We estimate ourselves fortunate.(53)

While the classical character of the front facade placed the museum within the monumental French tradition, its colonnade is not its primary expressive element. The columns are too high and slender to dominate the architectural expression and, instead, form a permeable screen in front of the bas-relief.

Jean Gallotti provided a nonclassical interpretation of the museum's antecedents, one that gave it a more explicitly "colonial" heritage.(54) In a review of Laprade's design for the museum, Gallotti praised its "eternal qualities of beauty in architecture" - simplicity, order, equilibrium, harmony of proportions - as the ingredients of the style 1930.(55) He also pointed to specific details that give it "a discreet exotic savor": "The delicacy of the facade columns, is it a souvenir of the wood porches of equatorial huts? The capitals, have they been borrowed from certain Moroccan houses? The geometrical ornaments, are they from Negro or Berber art?"(56) For Gallotti, Laprade's scheme evoked the colonial world through these elements while being far from a reconstitution or even an adaptation of any colonial style, in contrast to Jaussely's proposal.

The problem of evoking the colonial world in a metropolitan building was original to the 1931 exposition. At previous fairs, pavilions equivalent to the Musee des Colonies in function were designed in eclectic, exotic, but distinctly European styles. Gabriel Davioud designed the Trocadero, for example, for the 1878 Exposition Universelle in an Orientalizing, "Moorish" style. As the backdrop for the colonial section and the future home of the Musee d'Ethnographie, the Trocadero's function was analogous to that of the Musee des Colonies. Although it contained the retrospective exhibits for the exposition and served as the permanent monument of the exposition after its closure, Davioud made no attempt in the Trocadero to characterize it as either a uniquely "colonial" or "metropolitan" building. The Palais des Colonies at the 1889 fair [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED] was identifiably metropolitan, designed in an eclectic style native to no particular country. Similarly, the musee colonial proposed for Marseilles in 1900 had no "colonial" details or motifs and was a strictly Beaux-Arts classical structure [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED]. The Grand Palais de l'Exportation for the 1906 Marseilles Exposition Coloniale consisted of a classicizing colonnade with a central monumental arch. At the 1922 Marseilles Exposition, the Grand Palais was an eclectic confection, similar to that of the 1906 exposition in its lack of definite stylistic references to "colonial" architecture.

In Paris, few buildings carried explicitly "colonial" motifs unless they housed functions linked with colonial finance, business, or administration - such as the Ecole Coloniale - or were entertainment buildings, such as theaters, cinemas, zoos, casinos, or park kiosks. Many of these edifices were constructed during the nineteenth-century fashions for "Japanese" and "Egyptian" styles.(57) The rue du Caire, for example, was decorated with "Egyptian" motifs in reference to its function as an arcade for rug dealers. Although specific functions were associated with certain exotic styles, such as cemeteries with the Egyptian mode, they were rarely applied to other Parisian building types.

Colonial styles: however, had considerable impact on French decorative arts. Emile Bayard's book L'art de reconnaitre les styles coloniaux de la France contains a diatribe against the influence of "primitive" styles on French design, but his objections are largely confined to interior decoration. Bayard wrote a series of books popularizing French and foreign styles of art, including Louis XIV and Japanese art. In the introduction to his book on colonial styles, Bayard denounced what he saw as an excessive admiration for colonial styles, applied to contemporary design in a "frenzy of exoticism" and with a lack of knowledge. He stated that although the French had a taste for the "captivating naivete" of primitive art, it should not prevail over the "solid foundation, the manifest genius that the great classical aesthetic currents have propagated across the world."(58) The "savage hut and Arab hovel, the rough idol" could offer only an originality "often without any character other than barbarity."(59) Europeans might, according to Bayard, admire the "definitive" beauty of primitive art, but they did so without connecting it with the cultures of indigenous peoples. That is, they viewed this beauty simply in aesthetic terms without considering its propriety for French art. Exotic art might have the capacity to "revitalize" French culture, but it should do so without fundamentally altering its classical basis and reference to European traditions.

This attitude was typical of the conservative official architecture establishment in France between the wars and conformed to the policy of association. Architectural design education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was largely untouched by the vogue for the "primitive," as can be seen in a survey of the programs assigned for the design prizes and of the winning entries for the years 1900 to 1939. Of the Grand Prix programs for these years, only three had programs explicitly relating to the French colonial empire or susceptible of being designed in a "colonial" style: "Un Palais colonial" (a colonial palace) in 1909, "Une Residence du representant de la France au Maroc" (a residence for the French representative in Morocco) in 1923, and "Le Palais de l'empire coloniale" (the palace for the colonial empire) in 1939.(60) By contrast, painters and sculptors in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts were encouraged to work in "colonial" styles and were offered various prizes and scholarships to travel to the colonies and to foundations such as the Villa Abd El Tif in Algeria.(61) The "reproductive strength," in Paul Leroy-Beaulieu's words, of French art might be reinforced by colonization, but its architecture remained pure.(62)

A few buildings in colonial styles were erected for the immigrant native populations of European cities. The mosques of Paris, Frejus, and Berlin, for example, were Muslim cultural centers as well as religious edifices for the Arab residents of those cities [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED].(63) As the Institut Musulman, the Mosque of Paris served as a symbol of the North African presence in France and as a point of contact between the immigrant Arab communities, which numbered about twenty-five thousand in the mid-1920s, according to a contemporary source,(64) and the "natives" of Paris. Its architect was Maurice Mantout, of the Parisian firm Eustache, Mantout, and Fournez.

The Mosque was born out of a desire to acknowledge and commemorate the contributions that Muslim members of Greater France had made to the French side in World War I. It was to be "the durable sign of France's friendship for Islam which, in the pressing hours of the Great War, gave her the life of its children."(65) The complex was finished in 1926 and was inaugurated by Sultan Youssef, Marechal Lyautey, President Gaston Doumergne, and Sidi Mohammed El Habib Pacha, the bey of Tunis. The titular governments of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and French West Africa provided funds, along with the French government and the city of Paris, which donated the site.(66) The Societe des Habous des Lieux Saints de l'Islam, founded in 1917 to aid Muslims in their pilgrimages to Medina and Mecca, administered the Mosque and the Muslim Institute.(67)

The Muslim Institute comprised the mosque itself, a minaret 32 meters in height, a hammam (bath), a tearoom, a library, a gnest house, housing for the director and the Imam, and gardens and courtyards. Moroccan craftsmen constructed the institute, fashioned the intricate carved plaster and wood ornament, installed the faience tiles, and furnished the rooms. Mantout modeled the institute after the North African mosques and madrasas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as the renowned madrasa Bu-Inaniyya of 1345 and the Qurawiyyan Mosque, both in Fez.(68) The larger ensemble of the institute generally resembles the form of the madrasa, or religious university, with its combination of community, prayer, and learning spaces. The institute's exact program was, however, an invention of the French authorities, who combined disparate functions in a way not seen in the Maghrib.

The Mosque is a rare Parisian example of the North African architectural style that developed under association policy. The French architectural historian Francois Beguin terms the adaptation of indigenous architectural forms to French colonial buildings "arabisance."(69) In the Petit Robert dictionary, arabiser is defined as "to give an Arab consonance to a word, to render Arab, to give an Arab (social, cultural) character, e.g., 'The Moors arabized Spain.'" Arabisation is defined as "the fact of Arabizing, (to give Arab national, cultural, linguistic character, in the countries formerly colonized), e.g., 'The arabization of the administration of the Maghrib.'"(70) Beguin has identified two stages in the arabisance of French colonial architecture, which roughly correspond to the periods in which assimilation and association were the dominant native policies.

The first phase of arabisance, the Style of the Conqueror, began with the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and involved the destruction of indigenous buildings and cities, which were replaced by the architecture and the urbanism of the Second Empire. This arabisance of the Conqueror recreated an image of France on the other shore of the Mediterranean.(71) The second phase of arabisance, the Style of the Protector, overlapped with the first and began in 1865, when Napoleon III stopped the destruction of the Medina in Algiers. From that moment, according to Beguin, French policy shifted toward the appreciation and preservation of Arab monuments.(72) Along with this preservationist trend, the world expositions stimulated the creation of Arabized or Orientalized buildings and styles in France. In the North African colonies, an official neo-Moorish style appeared around the turn of the century, an Arabized, monumental architecture that still represented the Conqueror more than the Protector.(73) Lyautey's architectural programs in Morocco, such as the New Medina in Casablanca, employed Maghribian details allied with modern plans and hygienic facilities.(74) Mantout's design for the Mosque, given its function of embodying the North African presence in Paris, originated in the arabisance of the Protector, the Arabized style of associationist segregation. And yet it, too, was a hybrid of multiple Muslim monuments and of an invented program that corresponded to no particular Islamic institution.

A hybrid arabisance might be acceptable for the Mosque, within the conventions of what the French could read as "Arab," but hybridization between French and native cultures and peoples was generally anathema to colonial authority. The mixture of European populations with nonwhites, which produced progeny neither European nor native, was the nightmare of colonialist fantasies.(75) In colonial contexts in which the separation of colonized from colonizer is required to maintain a system of power relations, the hybrid posed a threat. Hybridization could, potentially, erase the codes of difference established by colonialism. "The hybrid products of cross-breeding . . . possess a value intermediate to those who engender them. Cross-breeding results in elevating a less evolved population and lowering a very evolved population," according to Dr. Georges Papillault, an anthropologist and consultant to the Colonial Exposition.(76) The hybrid, creole cultures of the colonies were perfidious to colonialism because they dwelt within its systems, mimicking and mocking the colonizer's authority.

The hybrid has been adopted by postcolonial theorists, such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Salmon Rushdie, as a powerful subversion of colonialism's binary oppositions: the opposition of colonizer to colonized, of civilization to savagery, of white to colored.(77) The phenomena of syncretism, creolization, and other forms of cultural mixing have a central place in postcolonial theory as a counter to the rigid lines of identity and culture drawn by colonialist discourse. The hybrid "terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery," according to Bhabha.(78) This recuperation of the hybrid by postcolonial theory is a paradoxical, even perverse, appropriation of a term imbued with pejorative value. In the context of the Colonial Exposition, however, the hybrid retained its negative significance for Lyautey and his colleagues, as indicated by the reception of Jaussely's scheme for the museum.

Jaussely's project represented the type of hybrid produced by Parisian world's fairs and Orientalist fantasies, a hybrid dominated by the exotic and the spectacular, or what Edward Said calls "latent Orientalism."(79) This form of hybrid was disavowed under association policy, which attempted to enforce the separation of French and indigenous representational forms. Laprade's design for the museum, on the other hand, muted its "colonial" traits and deferred the representation of the colonies to the sculptural program, thereby sufficiently distancing the museum from the taint of hybridity to satisfy the Comite Technique.

"Concretizing the Sentiment" in the Museum's Decorative Programs

As opposed to the colonial pavilions, in which the architecture itself exemplified the indigenous culture of each colony, the design of the Musee des Colonies relied on sculpture and other decorative arts to represent the colonial empire [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED]. As Laprade himself stated, the sculpture carried the entire responsibility, for evoking the specificities of life in the colonies.(80) In Jean Gallotti's words, the bas-relief by the sculptor Alfred Janniot "concretized the sentiment" expressed in the museum while evoking the colonial world.(81) Given the pressure on the architecture of the Musee des Colonies to provide a suitably monumental and civilized presentation of France itself, the decorative programs proved the best medium for representing the colonies.

The decorative programs are, therefore, supplemental to the architecture. Within traditional architectural theory, as codified by theorists from Alberti to Kant, ornament is always added to the inherent beauty of a building.(82) In The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida uses this notion of a supplement to the work (the parergon to the ergon, in Kant's terms) in order to question this classical opposition between ornament and inherent beauty.(83) For Derrida, the supplement is that which appears extraneous and additional but which is actually required to define the work or entity to which it is added. One of his examples is the architectural frame. The frame cannot be detached from what it frames, as is typical of the supplement, according to Derrida. There is a mutually dependent relationship between frame and framed, between center and margin, between the work and its supplement. The ostensibly weaker, less "central" term reveals the lack in the dominant term, but also provides the definition of its edges.

The ornamentation of the Musee des Colonies left intact the primacy of architecture as the true metropolitan expression, the true "civilized" art. It also preserved the opposition of the colonized to the colonizer. That Laprade abdicated the burden of representing the colonies in architectural terms reveals the degree to which the museum's architecture was incapable of representing the colonies without compromising its status as metropolitan, dominant, and primary. The taint carried by the colonial was relegated to the supplement of ornament in order to contain its threat to that primacy. This status of margin or supplement corresponds to the relative place given the colonies within French colonialism: as the margins of French civilization, the site of the most threatening and alluring things, the source of supplementary labor, materials, and sexuality.

The exterior decorative programs, by the foremost classicizing Art Deco practitioners of the day, supplemented the museum's architectural expression with abstract "colonial" motifs. Jean Prouve, who later became an outspoken advocate of prefabricated construction, designed and built the "African" cast-iron entrance gate at the foot of the monumental front staircase. Four "primitive" lion figures carved in granite by the sculptor Henri Navarre flank the gate. During the exposition, a statue of France Bringing Peace and Prosperity to the Colonies by Ernest Drivier was placed in the middle of the ceremonial staircase [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 24 OMITTED].(84) The ornamental grilles on the windows at the gallery level and in the base were fabricated by Edgar Brandt and Edouard and Marcel Schenck, respectively. These elements belonged to the subtly "colonial" but primarily classical vocabulary of Laprade's building.

The bas-relief is conventionally Beaux-Arts in its techniques and forms. It portrays the contributions made by the colonies to the metropole: the goods, materials, and images given to France. Albert Janniot, its creator, was a Prix de Rome winner in 1919 and a prominent Art Deco sculptor of the classicizing school.(85) His previous commissions included a sculptural group and a bas-relief for the Pavillon du Collectionneur (Pierre Patout, architect, and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, decorator) at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, a monument in Nice, and bas-reliefs for the Ile-de-France ocean liner. The design and sculpting process for the museum took three years, which was considered a prodigious feat, given the scope of the bas-relief: 100 meters by 13 meters. Janniot devoted the first year to drawing the composition at various scales, another year to making a clay model of the whole at half scale, and the third year to sculpting the stone with his assistants. Two hundred and fifty "personages and animals" are depicted in the relief.(86)

This "stone tapestry" was separated into sections by continents, with France at the center of the front facade [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED], Africa to the left, Asia to the right, Oceania on the return side toward Paris, and the American colonies on the other return. A contemporary account described the figures assembling around the pivotal image of France: "The products of all these countries converge with the sailing ships, the freighters, the transatlantic ships toward the central door, surrounded by Marseilles, Bordeaux, Saint-Nazaire, Le Havre, Bourget and surmounted by the figures of abundance and of peace."(87) This "vivid swarming mass" evoked the "potent, but still confused, activity of the less evolved countries" of the French colonial domain, particularly its people at work.(88)

Janniot portrayed the natives busy in their traditional occupations, primarily agricultural and artisanal work. In this rendition, the contribution of the colonies to France consisted of the materials and goods produced by the French exploitation of the colony's "natural" bounty, including the labor of its population. Frozen into a productive relationship with France, the indigene was characterized as the "good savage" who labors for the good of the metropole in his or her organic relation to the earth and labor. Nowhere were the modern factories, the railroads, and the textile mills, or their workers - "the results of colonization" - that the didactic exhibits flaunted elsewhere in the exposition. These natives were fixed in their "timeless" societies, in their "unchanging" ancestral employments, as if colonization had never occurred.

The primitive state of the native was signified by his or her relative nudity, with the female nude given more prominence, and associated with racial facial and body characteristics and particular body language and postures [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED].(89) The natives of West Africa and Dahomey are virtually naked, the women's breasts are prominently displayed, and the men's bodies uncovered except for loincloths. The women of the Maghrib, the traditional site for European male erotic/exotic fantasies, are more modestly attired, but their breasts are still visible through their artfully draped costumes [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED]. This mode of representing the North African woman is related to the long tradition of posed photographs of "Arab types" and erotic pictures produced for the Euro-American market.(90) The indigenes of Polynesia and the Malgaches of Madagascar are "decently" clad, by way of their contact with European missionaries who insisted they wear "modesty dresses."

Nature in the bas-relief corresponds to the human representations with analogous savagery. In Foret vierge, representing Africa's virgin forest, a lion roars as it brings down an antelope [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED], leaping over peaceful scenes of harvest and husbandry. By contrast, the Indochinese tableau includes a domesticated water buffalo and peaceable egrets. The snarling tiger beneath views of rice gathering ("L'Annam laborieux et sauvage," as one magazine's caption reads(91)) incarnates the terrifying potential of the Indochinese jungle, like the revolutionary who lurked beneath the guise of the mild-mannered coolie [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED].

These scenes of colonial life contrast with the allegorical figures of France, its great ports, and its virtues that circumscribe the entrance doors [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED]. Terra Mater or Abundance appears in the center, raising her hand in a gesture of blessing, with figures from mythology - Ceres, Pomona, and the Sun - below her. Peace and Liberty flank her, above figures symbolizing work and leisure. Below them, the great French port cities are illustrated by seminude women and the architectural monuments of each metropolis. In the figures depicting French ports, the racial characteristics of the natives are spurned in favor of the features and poses of Beaux-Arts classical beauty. The colonized female figures [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 13, 14 OMITTED] display secondary sexual features and body postures - such as splayed legs and breast-revealing arched backs - signifying the "looser" sexuality and morals of the "primitive" woman, as opposed to the more upright, "noble," and civilized poses of the European women.(92) Although both groups of female figures were allegorized in the bas-relief, they stood for opposing ideals of sexuality and beauty.

The interior decoration of the museum strengthened this lesson on the hierarchies of civilization and evolution in the French colonial domain. For the interiors, Laprade assembled a group of designers who exemplified the conservative strain of French modernism, the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs rather than the more radical Union des Artistes Moderne.(93) The designers for the museum had worked together on pavilions for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs where their variant of classicizing modernism enjoyed great success.(94) Laprade himself was firmly ensconced in the S.A.D. and, by 1931, had made his reputation as a talented architect working in the stile moderne. Many of these designers, such as Jean Dunand and Jean Dupas, collaborated on the decoration of the ocean liners Ile-de-France (1927), Atlantique (1931), and Normandie (1935).(95) The French ocean liners were part of what Romy Golan calls a "propaganda machine" launched between the wars to spur interest in the colonies.(96) Many of the museum's designers, therefore, had considerable experience designing in colonial modes as a result of their work on the liners.

Laprade divided the museum into four floors: the basement, entrance level [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED], a mezzanine, and the second floor. The entrance level contained a heterogeneous group of rooms and exhibits, including the Salle des Fetes and rooms devoted to exhibits of the influence of the colonies on French arts and letters. Along the front of this floor, the Grand Galerie d'Honneur stretched the length of the facade [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED]. The decoration of the Galerie d'Honneur incorporated a decorative railing and fanlight in wrought iron and lamps by Raymond Subes, wrought-iron banisters on the stairs leading to the upper floors by the firm of Bagues, and fabric wall coverings by Jacques Rodier.

The Salle des Fetes, an auditorium where lectures, meetings, and performances took place, was the most important space in the museum [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 18 OMITTED]. Rising the entire height of the building, it is a square room, 29 by 29 meters, with a peripheral gallery around a sunken, central area. Laprade placed a small stage at the back of the Salle des Fetes for performances and speeches. Above the main floor, at the mezzanine level, there are balconies on each side overlooking the central space. Except for the stepped cupola with scalloped edges, the architecture is sober, even plain. The frescoes are the primary decorative ingredient in the room.

Pierre Ducos de la Haille, a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and master fresco painter, painted these murals. A Prix de Rome winner in 1922, Ducos de la Haille had executed frescoes at a Parisian school, at the Hotel de Ville at Reims, and at the Mairie of Roubaix, among other commissions.(97) The program of frescoes for the Salle des Fetes illustrates the overall theme of "The Contribution of France to the Colonies." At the back of the stage, the most important panel depicts France Offering the Dove of Peace to the Five Continents [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 19 OMITTED].(98) The figure of France is represented by a fully clothed white woman, who holds the hand of a monumental Europe at her side. She dispenses the benefits of civilization to Asia to the left and Africa to the right, which are portrayed by seminude women of the appropriate colors lounging on white and black elephants, respectively. A cupid sits at her feet, perched on the grapevine that gives wine to France. A cortege of natives swarms around the figures of Asia and Africa, bearing goods as offerings to the metropole. Below, Oceania lies on a hippocampus to the left and America sits on another seahorse to the right, pointing to the skyscrapers of dynamic Manhattan.(99) The sexual economy of body language on the museum's exterior applies equally to the female figures in Ducos's mural.

Allegorical figures of Justice, Liberty, Peace, Work, Art, Science, Commerce, and Industry, mixed with symbols of the colonizers (such as the figure of Albert Laprade to the right of the stage), line the side walls. The rest of the walls are covered with paintings by Ducos de la Haille's students on related themes.(100) The "laboring populations" of the colonies are included here, juxtaposed with the fruits of their labor: the mines, construction sites, and railroads of the modern colonies. These frescoes represent what was omitted from the bas-relief - the results of colonial development - but the results are portrayed only as the product of France's contribution to the colonies, not as the effect of the natives' own effort and work. In this image of the empire, France, the tutor of the colonies, has taught the natives how to reap the bounty of their countries, but for the benefit of France.

Two oval rooms, the Salon du Ministere and the Salon du Marechal, occupy the corners of this floor [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED]. These two rooms received the most intensive decoration of any space in the museum. As Laprade explained, in a report to the Comite Technique, no painted or sculpted decoration was planned for the areas designated for the Synthesis and Retrospective Sections, since the exhibitions would have more impact in sober surroundings.(101) The salons, on the other hand (and the Salle des Fetes), were highly ornamented with the recently revived art of fresco and with Art Deco decorative pieces.

The Salon du Ministere, also called the Salon Paul Reynaud (named after the minister of the colonies) or the Salon de l'Afrique, was decorated to celebrate Africa's "contributions of an intellectual, literary, philosophical, and artistic order" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 20 OMITTED].(102) The frescoes were awarded to Louis Bouquet, an academy-trained artist from Lyons. Gaston Varenne described these murals as"a marvelous tale" of the intellectual contributions of the Muslim world.(103) In the largest panel, Apollo plays his lyre in "a forest full of strange mysteries, of troubling seductions, where palaces of red ocher raise their crenellated silhouettes to the sky, bristling with denticulation, studded with stakes of wood."(104) Behind him, an allegorical figure of Africa stands among frolicking animals, while naked Africans dance below them. The other murals evoke the arts and sciences of the Islamic world, including mathematics, philosophy, poetry, architecture, and music. As Catherine Bouche has pointed out, the panel portraying Africa bears the clearest colonial imprint of all the museum's decorative programs: the white Apollo's call to the black people of the forest expresses the mission civilisatrice of the West and the responsibility to guide the "good savages" toward civilization.(105) These images hark back to the Orientalism of Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Leon Gerome, and J.-A.-D. Ingres, which was briefly revived during the interwar period and exhibited at the Colonial Exposition.(106)

The interior decoration of this space was allotted to Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, one of the best-known Art Deco decorators of the time [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 21 OMITTED]. Ruhlmann decorated the Hotel du Collectionneur at the 1925 exposition and had an extensive furniture and design practice. In the Salon du Ministere, he abandoned the rather overelaborate and busy interiors of the Pavilion du Collectionneur in favor of restrained embellishment and simple lines. The furniture and woodwork, including the doors, the window surrounds, and the parquet floor, was fabricated from Madagascar ebony. The furniture consisted of models that Ruhlmann had previously developed, such as the Bloch desk in ebony with sharkskin top, constructed in 1928-29, and the "Elephant" chairs and sofa, first exhibited at the 1926 Salon des Artistes Decorateurs.(107) Two monumental metal urns with "primitive" chiseled ornamentation by Edgar Brandt, another Ruhlmann collaborator in 1925, served as indirect lighting fixtures.

The Salon du Marechal, also called the Salon Lyautey or Salon de l'Asie [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 22 OMITTED], was dedicated to the Orient's contributions to the Occident. Eugene Printz, another prominent conservative practitioner, conceived the decoration. Printz did not achieve Ruhlmann's fame, but his work was well received, especially after his success at the 1926 Salon d'Automne, where he gained a reputation as a talented cabinetmaker.(108) He was closely associated with Pierre Chareau, for whom he executed the office and library that Chareau displayed at the 1925 exposition.(109) For the Salon du Marechal, Printz designed a striking geometric parquet floor pattern in wood from Gabon, accented with ebony and rosewood. The doors and furniture were made of patawa (palmwood), a vividly patterned wood for which he was renowned.

Andre-Hubert and Ivanna Lemaitre, who specialized in the decoration of churches and were themselves interested in Eastern religion, painted the frescoes. The figures in the fresco were drawn from Asian myths and religious teachings, articulated around the three figures of Buddha, Confucius, and Krishna. In the largest panel, these characters appear in scenes from their lives, while the other walls bear frescoes depicting the music and theater of the Far East and celebrations of the primordial elements of earth, water, and fire. The paintings refer to the "inscrutable Orient" of mysterious religions and complicated mythologies. The fact that the Lemaitres were knowledgeable about Asian beliefs perhaps accounts for the relatively accurate and comprehensive pantheon depicted on the walls of this room. The Lemaitres gave the spiritual contributions of the Far East a full description, with neither the Orientalist conventions found in Delacroix, Ingres, or Auguste Renoit's paintings nor the excessive stylization of the Art Deco exoticism of Georges Barbier or Erte.

The distinction between the cool sophistication of the decorative elements (furniture, flooring, lighting, and so on) and the writhing, sinuous forms in the frescoes is another instance of the segregation of the colonial from the metropolitan by aesthetic means. In the Salon d'Afrique, the natives are illustrated in their "natural" state, with only the Apollo figure present to express the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. The contrast between the refinement of the modern furnishings (however much they were influenced by l'art negre, or African art) and the "primitive" and enigmatic riot of colonial life in the frescoes evoked the difference between France and its colonies and the distance between them. As a contemporary account noted, "the strict order of metropolitan civilization has arrived at a stage where the predominance of simplicity and of practical sense feels repugnance for superfluous ornaments and uselessly complicated forms."(110) This formula indicates that although Asian and African civilization might be "celebrated" in these frescoes, they were still characterized in such a way as to reinforce their evolutionary retardation.

The exhibits displayed during the Colonial Exposition were classified into the Retrospective Section on the entry floor - the colonial history of France from the Crusades until 1870 - and the Synthetic Section on the second floor - a summary of contemporary colonization efforts. The Retrospective Section collected the "souvenirs and documents" of "colonial France of past centuries" by means of historical objects, dioramas, models, artworks, and documents that were organized in a roughly chronological order.(111) It also incorporated exhibits on the colonies' influence on the genius of France, primarily French arts and letters. The Ministry of the Colonies organized the Synthetic Section to illustrate French activity broadly in its colonies, in order to give the French public a "living, palpable image" of la plus grande France, through ethnographic, archaeological, historical, artistic, and technical exhibits.(112) Victor Beauregard, the commissioner of this section, classified the exhibits by two sweeping categories: (1) the work France accomplished in the colonies, and (2) the repercussions of the French empire on France.(113) These categories were further subdivided into anthropology, archaeology, native arts, the formation of the Third Republic's colonial empire, social action, public works and economic tools, colonial products, the army and navy, tourism, the Merchant Marine, the colonial influence on the French genius, transport and missions, a luminous planisphere, and the aquarium.(114)

This eclectic collection of categories and objects recalls Michel Foucault's evocation of the "certain Chinese encyclopedia" described by Jorge Luis Borges, which Foucault employed to elucidate a heteroclite ordering of things.(115) Rather than the neat distinction between artworks and artifacts, as in the Western art museum, or between historical and contemporary objects, as in the natural history museum,(116) the Musee des Colonies mingled things of native and French, historical and modern, utilitarian and artistic provenance. As Carol Breckenridge notes, the emotive, nonverbal forms of experiencing objects in the cabinet of curiosities were replaced, at the world's fair and in the museum, by more disciplinary languages concerned with authenticity, connoisseurship, provenance, and patronage.(117) These forms of knowledge were equally forms of control, methods with which a usable past could be constructed out of the colonies' messy history and present. The Musee des Colonies failed to fulfill this aspect of the modern museum's mission since it did not provide a lucid, determined ordering of history and the present.

The indistinct, overlapping mandates of the museum's two sections and the split authority for their organization produced a disordered, confusing "potpourri," according to Albert Laprade. In a memo on the interior organization of the museum, Laprade lamented the "bizarre" division of the sections and the lack of logic in the exhibits' layout. The "fabrics pasted on all the walls, great decorative motives in sculpture, arcades, pilasters in plasters, etc." destroyed the simplicity and harmony of the museum's interiors and contributed to the visitor's confusion, in his estimation.(118) The disordered exhibits represented a collapse of the calibrated harmony and hierarchy that Laprade achieved on the exterior of the museum, thereby compromising the legibility of its order.

The Incommensurable

The Musee des Colonies provides a case study of the discourses contesting the representation of France as a nation between the wars. The conflict between France as an integrated unity of metropole and colonies versus France as a loose association of provinces and colonies percolated through the debates over nationalism in the Third Republic. The contradictions within the museum's program reveal disparities within French national identity and its colonial policies and practices, which could not be neatly resolved in a single building.

This contradictory program can be read in the painting Souvenir du Musee des Colonies by Louis Bouquet [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 23 OMITTED]. The painting depicts Albert Laprade, the museum's architect, surrounded by his representational partners: from left to right, Alfred Janniot, the sculptor of the bas-relief on the facade, Bouquet, who painted frescoes in one of the museum's salons, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, who designed the interior decoration of that salon, and Leon Bazin, Laprade's assistant. There is one more person in the painting, but she is not identified, nor does she belong to any of the "noble" professions represented by the men around her.(119) She is a bare-breasted black woman who resembles Josephine Baker, the patron saint of negrophilie, the fascination with black culture, between the wars. She embodies the primitive presence of the colonies in Paris at the Colonial Exposition.

This painting demonstrates the status of French art and architecture relative to that of the indigenous peoples of the colonies. The French artists have names and the civilized trappings of their professions - including appropriate clothing, paintbrushes, and portfolios - whereas the black woman has no name and wears only a skirt and decorative ornaments for her hair and neck. She is anonymous and representative rather than identified and personal. The French arts are here epitomized by white men and the indigenous arts of the colonies by a black woman; the equation of power and knowledge represented is clear in political, gender, and sexual terms. Native arts are rarely attributed to a particular artist or a precise moment of creation when they are displayed in museums, at expositions, or in galleries.(120) Indigenous arts are feminine, sexual, intuitive, and traditional, according to this economy of power, whereas French art is virile, personal, upright, and the product of individual genius.

This painting might have been made without reference to the native arts of the colonies, that is, without the figure of the black woman, except that this is the "souvenir" of a building that was not just another monument in Paris. These men designed and decorated the Musee des Colonies, the emblem of France's colonial empire, and this task required reference to the colonial side of the nation.

How well did Laprade's design for the Musee des Colonies respond to the task of providing a national and colonial monument for the French empire [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 24 OMITTED]? As a symbol of association, in which the colonies are culturally autonomous but integral parts of la plus grande France, it failed to adequately articulate the individuality of the colonies and, instead, subsumed them to the homogeneity of the sculptural representation. The museum's architecture represented the metropolitan side of the empire in the museum, while the sculptural and decorative programs portrayed the colonies, thereby reinforcing both colonial and Beaux-Arts representational hierarchies. This split was intended to further the exposition's program of fixing people and things in their "proper" places within colonial power hierarchies, which made the museum a success within the logic of the exposition.

The desire to unify the colonies and France in the museum was countered by a correlative fear of mixing their separate representational norms. Yet the museum does contain "colonial" elements: the "African" motifs in the stone base, the "primitive" sculptures and ironwork of the window grilles, and at the entrance gate, the attenuated columns that recall a tropical porch, the hybridized furniture. Like the black woman in Bouquet's painting, the presence of the colonized could not quite be relegated to her "proper" place. While the seamless colonial word fantasized by Laprade and Lyautey could be largely realized in the museum's stately architecture and decorative programs - imaged with docile, productive natives reaping the bounty of nature - it could not entirely resist the hybrid contamination feared by Papillault and Bayard. The Musee des Colonies embodied the national-colonial architecture sought by Laprade, within an uneasy commingling of conflicting images and conceptions of the metropole, the colonies, and la plus grande France.

Notes

I would like to thank Zeynep Celik, Jean-Louis Cohen, Marco DeMichelis, Taisto Makela, Anthony Vidler, and Stanislaus Von Moos for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank the anonymous readers for the Art Bulletin, who provided me with extremely constructive criticism. Portions of this paper have been presented at the Society, of Architectural Historians annual meeting, April 1993, and at the College Art Association annual meeting, February 1996. Unless otherwise noted translations are mine.

1. Jean Camp and Andre Corbier, A Lyauteyville: Promenades sentimentales et humoresques a l'Exposition Colontale (Paris: Societe Nationale d'Editions Artistiques, 1931), 9-10.

2. Marechal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey participated in the conquest of several of France's most important colonies, including Indochina, Madagascar, and Morocco, where he was the first resident general of the French Protectorate from 1912 to 1925. See Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, Lyautey l'Africain - Textes et lettres du Marechal Lyautey, ed. Pierre Lyautey, 4 vols. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1962); Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l'institution du Protectorat francais au Maroc, 1912-1925 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1988); and Alan Scham, Lyautey of Morocco: Protectorate Administration, 1912-1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).

3. The Rapport general for the Colonial Exposition gives a figure of 33,489,902 entries, about 15 percent of which received free entry, which translates to approximately 8 million individual visitors. By comparison, the 1889 Exposition Universelle and that of 1900 had 32 million and 48 million entries, respectively; Olivier, vol. 3, 571-77.

4. General Marcel Olivier had a long career as a colonial military officer, in French West Africa and as governor-general in Madagascar from 1924 to 1930. He was appointed delegate general to the Colonial Exposition in 1930 to act as Lyautey's deputy and to take on some of the aging marshal's work. See his Six ans de politique sociale a Madagascar (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1931).

5. Marcel Olivier, "Avant-Propos," Le Livre d'Or de l'Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris, 1931 (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honore Champion, 1931), 11.

6. Olivier, vol. 1, xi-xiii.

7. William Cohen records that a large number of French colonial officers were influenced in their choice of a career by the Colonial Exposition, and Erik Orsenna's Prix Goncourt-winning novel L'Exposition Coloniale describes how the exposition exemplified a strain of devotion to the empire within certain French circles; Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 105-106 and Orsenna, L'Exposition Coloniale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988).

8. See Zeynep Celik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: World Exhibitions, 1851-1939 (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1988).

9. Betts, 8.

10. Arthur Girault, Principes de colonisation et de legislation coloniale, 5th ed. (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1927), 106; Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

11. Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 92.

12. Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 51-67; Betts, 24.

13. Betts, 35. See Jules Harmand, Domination et colonisation (Paris: Flammarion, 1910); Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris: Guillaumin, 1874).

14. Betts, vii.

15. On the segregation of the indigenous and French cities in Morocco, see Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

16. Jacques Thobie, et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, 1914-1990 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 25-37.

17. J.-L. Lanessan, L 'expansion coloniale de la France (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1886), x.

18. Olivier, vol. 5, pt. 1, 10.

19. On the museum's history after the Colonial Exposition, see Sylvie Cornilliet-Watelet, "Le Musee des Colonies et le Musee de la France d'Outre-Mer (1931-1960)," in Breon and Lefrancois, 83-94.

20. Olivier, vol. 5, pt. 1, 23.

21. Ibid., vol. 1, 14 and vol. 2, 65.

22. Ibid., vol. 2, 65.

23. Achives Nationales, Paris (ANP), Fonds Laprade, 475AP/26.

24. Bourdaire, to Lyautey, letter of Oct. 31, 1927, ANP, Fonds Lyautey, 475AP/208.

25. Ibid.

26. Leandre Vaillat, "Le decor de la vie: L'Exposition Coloniale de 1931," Le Temps, Mar. 13, 1928, n.p.

27. Ibid.

28. "Allocution de M. le Marechal Lyautey," Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris, 1931: Son but, son organisation (Paris, 1928).

29. On the working-class districts of "red" Paris, see Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

30. Jaussely won the competition for a city plan for Barcelona in 1903, and in 1919 he, Roger-Henri Expert, Gaston Redon, and Louis Sellier won the competition for a plan for Greater Paris, the Plan d'extension de Paris. Jean-Louis Cohen, "De la ville a la region: L'extension de Paris au XXe siecle," in Paris: La ville et ses projets/A City in the Making, ed. Jean-Louis Cohen and Bruno Fortier (Paris: Editions Babylone and Pavilion de l'Arsenal, 1988), 214.

31. He created schemes for the site on the Champs-de-Mars (in 1921), the alternative sites at the Ecole Militaire, the Bois de Boulogne (in 1926), and for the Bols de Vincennes site (in 1924). In 1927, Jaussely became too ill to fulfill his duties as director of architecture for the exposition, and Albert Tournaire was appointed to that post; Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (AOMA), Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931, carton 63.

32. [Albert Laprade], "Note pour Monsieur le Marechal Lyautey Relative au Musee Permanent - Vincennes," ca. 1929, ANP, Fonds Lyautey, 403AP/12.

33. Vaillat (as in n. 26), n.p.

34. In Michel Foucault's terms, this was the shift from the classical episteme, which relied on representation and the corporal actuality of the king's body, to that established on nonrepresentational, "human" institutions. "In a society like that of the seventeenth century, the King's body wasn't a metaphor, but a political reality. Its physical presence was necessary for the functioning of the monarchy"; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 55. See also Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 303-18.

35. Robert Tombs, introduction to Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War, 1889-1918 (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991), xi.

36. Yves Lequin, ed., Histoire des Francais XIXe-XXe siecles, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1984), vol. 1, 91.

37. Greenhalgh (as in n. 8), 118.

38. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University, Press, 1976), 112.

39. Carol Duncan, "The Art Museum as Ritual," Art Bulletin 77, no. 1 (1995): 12.

40. Lebovics (as in n. 10), 6.

41. Laprade was appointed Jaussely's assistant after Jaussely became too ill to continue as director of architecture for the exposition.

42. Laprade.

43. Albert Laprade, "Notes for M. Yvanoe Rambosson of the Revue de l'Art ancien et moderne," Jan. 15, 1931, ANP, Fonds Laprade, 403AP/26.

44. Albert Laprade, "Description du Musee," n.d., ANP, Fonds Laprade, 403AP/26.

45. Ibid.

46. Albert Laprade, "Mementos," ANP, Fonds Laprade, 403AP/26.

47. Laprade.

48. Laprade (as in n. 46).

49. Laprade. Romy Golan, 100-101, 110-14, elucidates Le Corbusier's own shift from the machine aesthetic of his Esprit Nouveau period to the organicism and primitivism of his work in the 1930s.

50. On the rappel a l'ordre, see Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

51. Franco Borsi, The Monumental Era: European Architecture and Design, 1929-1939, trans. Pamela Marwood (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 52-93.

52. See Bertrand Lemoine and Philippe Rivoirard, L'architecture des annees 30 (Lyons: La Manufacture, 1987).

53. Marcel Zahar, "L'architecture [de l'Exposition colontale]," La Renaissance de l'Art, no. 8 (1931): 226-27.

54. Jean Gallotti wrote Le jardin et la maison arabes au Maroc, a survey of Moroccan houses and gardens illustrated with drawings by Laprade and photographs by Lucien Vogel, 2 vols. (Paris: Albert Levy, 1924).

55.Jean Gallotti, "Le Palais Permanent des Colonies," L'Illustration 89, no. 4603 (1931): n.p.

56. Ibid.

57. For the most comprehensive accounts of these fashions in architecture, see Nadine Beautheac and Francois-Xavier Bouchart, L'Europe exotique (Paris: Chine, 1986); and Patrick Connor, Oriental Architecture in the West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979).

58. Emile Bayard, L'art de reconnaitre les style coloniaux de la France (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1931), 2.

59. Ibid., 3.

60. Donald Drew Egbert, The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 192-96.

61. Numerous commissions for decorative programs in public buildings in the colonies were given to French artists. For lists of artists, scholarships, and commissions, see Emmanuel Breon, "Les peintres de la plus grande France," 13-27, and Gustave Vuillemot, "La Villa Abd El Tif," 45-51, in Breon and Lefrancois.

62. According to Leroy-Beaulieu, colonization "is the expansive force of a people, its reproductive strength, its dilation and multiplication across space; it is the submission of the universe, or a vast part [of it], to its customs, its ideas, and its laws"; Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, quoted in Raoul Girardet, Le nationalisme francais, 1871-1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 86.

63. The Mosque of Frejus was constructed after World War I for Senegalese troops stationed in the region. Beautheac and Bouchart (as in n. 57), 193.

64. Nancy George, "La Mosquee de Paris," L'Illustration, no. 4315 (1925): 520.

65. Ibid.

66. Henri Rimbault, "L'Institut Musulman et la Grande Mosquee de Paris," Le Monde Colonial Illustre, no. 36 (1926): 170.

67. Alain Boyer, L'Institut Musulman de la Mosquee de Paris (Paris: C.H.E.A.M., 1992), 23-24.

68. Rimbault (as in n. 66), 170.

69. Francois Beguin, Arabisances: Decor architectural et trace urbain en Afrique du Nord 1830-1950 (Paris: Dunod, 1983).

70. Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1990), 93.

71. Beguin (as in n. 69), 11-13.

72. Ibid., 14-16.

73. Ibid., 20.

74. See Jean-Louis Cohen, "Casablanca, laboratoire de l'urbanisme et de l'habitation modernes," in Architectures Francaises Outre-Mer, ed. Maurice Culot (Liege: Mardaga, [1992]), 105-45.

75. See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

76. Dr. Georges Papillault, in Olivier, vol. 5, pt. 1, 52-53.

77. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Salmon Rushdie, In Good Faith (New York: Granta, 1990); Gayatri Spivak, "Who Claims Alterity?" in Remaking History, ed. B. Kruger and P. Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 269-92. For critiques of the postcolonial hybrid, see Annie Coombs, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 217-25; and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 37-46.

78. Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 176.

79. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 206-8.

80. Laprade.

81. Gallotti (as in n. 55).

82. See Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); and Jennifer Bloomer, "Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbies of Bower," Assemblage 17 (1992): 6-29, for recent investigations of the relation between structure and ornament, architecture and the "minor" arts.

83. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 37-82.

84. One critic found this statue regrettably placed, since it hampered circulation into the museum, especially during ceremonies and parties, and was sculpted in a "pompier" or old-fashioned manner; Antony Goissaud, "Le Musee permanent des Colonies," La Construction Moderne 47 (Jan. 31, 1931): 284. After the exposition closed, the statue was moved to the head of avenue Daumesnil at Porte Doree.

85. The original choices for sculptor of the bas-relief were either Antoine Bourdelle (who sculpted the bas-reliefs for the Theatre des Champs-Elysees) or Paul Landowski, established artists who worked in "colonial" styles. Both were too busy to take on the commission, so Janniot and Henri Bouchard were proposed to the committee charged with selecting the sculptor; "Note of 4 Decembre 1928," AOMA, Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931, carton 129. See also Michele Lefrancois, "La sculpture coloniale: Une lecon des choses?" in Breon and Lefrancois, 29-43, on the careers of these sculptors. Laprade and Jaussely were entrusted with the negotiations with these artists, since the bas-relief was critical to the success of their design (although Jaussely was probably no longer involved with the museum at this point). After discussions with the artists, Laprade chose Janniot. J. Hermant, "Rapport sur le projet de decoration sculpturale de la Loggia du Palais Permanent des Colonies," Feb. 20, 1929, AOMA, Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931, carton 17.

86. Gabriel Forestier, Charles Barberis, and thirty unnamed assistants worked with Janniot on the museum's vast bas-relief. The museum cost 22.5 million francs to build. Armand Dayot, "Voyage a travers nos colonies," L'Art et les Artistes 25, no. 117 (1931): 269, 274; and Goissaud (as in n. 84), 279.

87. "Le Musee permanent des Colonies, a Paris," L'Architecte 9, no. 10 (1931): 87.

88. "Promenade a travers l'Exposition: Le Musee permanent des Colonies," Le Miroir du Monde 2, no. 63 (May 16, 1931): 587.

89. See Kelly Dennis, "Ethnopornography: Veiling the Dark Continent," History of Photograph 18 (Spring 1984): 22-28, on the erotic function of clothing in pornographic/ethnographic photographs.

90. See Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) for analyses of these photographs. On the connection between organicism and images of North African women in Le Corbusier's work, see Romy Golan, "Plan Obus, Algiers/Femmes fantastiques," in Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987), 216-19.

91. Dayot (as in n. 36), 275.

92. I am grateful to Susan Foster for pointing out the difference in body language among the colonial and French female figures in the museum's decorative programs.

93. The Union des Artistes Moderne was founded by Francis Jourdain, Rob Mallet-Stevens, and Pierre Chareau in 1929. Jean-Paul Bouillon, Art Deco 1903-1940 (Geneva: Skira; New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 215.

94. See Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) for an account of the 1925 exposition.

95. Bruno Foucart, "Art on Board Normandie," in Normandie: Queen of the Seas (New York: Vendome Press, 1985), 54-56.96. Colan, 106.

97. Antony Goissaud, "Les fresques de la Salle des Fetes du Musee permanent des Colonies," La Construction Moderne 46 (June 7, 1931): 572.

98. Colan, 116.

99. The style of Ducos de la Haille's frescoes recalls that of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes as well as the republican imagery of the nineteenth-century pompier painters. Ducts de la Haille also belongs to the school of classicizing modern painters of which Jean Dupas was one of the most prominent. (Dupas's decorative panel Les Perruches was the focal point of Ruhlmann's interior for the Pavilion du Collectionneur at the 1925 exposition.) Bouillon (as in n. 93), 168-69; and Victor Arwas, Art Deco (New York: Abrams, 1992), 185-218.

100. Goissaud (as in n. 97), 575, gives the following subjects for these eight supplementary allegories, a catalogue of this "hymn to progress": Justice: justice rendered to the natives, idea of order (police), sentiment of pity (aid to the wounded), sentiment of charity (rescue of the abandoned infant); Liberty: idea of individual propriety, abolition of slavery, individual liberty; Peace: familial scene, prosperity; Work: lumbering, agriculture, modern methods; Art: ancient history, archaeological trenches, construction, modern architecture; Science: hygienic treatment, transport of a sick native to the hospital, obligatory vaccination, railroad, telephone, bridges, and roadways; Commerce: native market and shipment of merchandise from an Indochinese port; Industry: various industries of North Africa, pottery, oils, wines.

101. "Rapport des architectes pour les commandes necessaires a la decoration exterieure et interieure du Musee des Colonies," n.d., AOMA, Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931, carton 94.

102. Ibid.

103. Gaston Varenne, quoted in Catherine Bouche, "Histoire et Decor du Musee," in Guide: Musee National des Arts Africains et Oceaniens (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1987), 26.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid.

106. Golan, 108.

107. Florence Camard, Ruhlmann: Master of Art Deco, trans. David Macey, 2d ed. (New York: Abrams, 1984), 123, 263.

108. Derek Ostergard, Art Deco Masterpieces (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin, 1991), 96.

109. Bouillon (as in n. 93), 230.

110. "Le Musee permanent des Colonies," Le Miroir du Monde 2, no. 63 (May 16, 1931): 587.

111. Olivier, vol. 5, pt. 1, 132, 145.

112. Ibid., 5/1, 9, 36.

113. Ibid., 5/1, 37.

114. Ibid., 5/1, 50.

115. Foucault, 1970 (as in n. 34), xv.

116. Duncan (as in n. 39), 12-13.

117. Carol A. Breckenridge, "The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs," Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (1989): 212.

118. Albert Laprade, "Note memento au sujet de l'amenagement interieur," ANP, Fonds Laprade, 403AP/26.

119. This painting is reproduced in the Guide to the Musee des Arts Africains et Oceaniens (as in n. 103), 14. The caption identifies the men but not the woman in the image.

120. Sally Price, "Anonymity and Timelessness," in Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 56-67.

Frequently Cited Sources

Betts, Raymond, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

Breon, Emmanuel, and Michele Lefrancois, eds., Coloniales 1920-1940 (Boulogne-Billancourt: Music Municipal de Boulogne-Billancourt, 1989).

Golan, Romy, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

[Laprade, Albert], "Note pour Monsieur le Marechal Lyautey Relative au Musee Permanent - Vincennes," ca. 1929, ANP, Fonds Lyautey, 403AP/12.

Olivier, Marcel, ed., Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris, Rapport general, 7 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1932-34).

Patricia Morton has a doctorate from Princeton University and teaches architectural history and theory at the University of California, Riverside. Her research and attiring focus on issues of race, gender, and marginality in architecture and urbanism. She is working on a book about the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris [Department of the History of Art, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0319].

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