Zwischen Kunst, Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte

Eine deutsch-französische Geschichte des Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro

Abstract

This article deals with the connections of French ethnologists with their German counterparts in the early 1930s, in particular at the Frankfurt Institut für Kulturmorphologie. These connections are discernable in their policies of acquisition and exhibition, as well as conceptually. Adopting an ‘histoire croisée approach’, these effects, both in the realm of museum work and of evolution of the academic discipline, are studied using Paul Rivet and Georges Henri Rivière, director and deputy director of the Trocadéro, as examples. The exchange with neighbouring disciplines such as prehistory and art history opened up new interpretative spaces in both countries. Placed between documentary and artistic interests, ethnographic collections were thus reappraised, perceived in a new light and presented innovatively. They shaped a European epoch in which art was ‘ethnologized’ by recognizing non-European artefacts as works of art and by establishing a global art history, while ethnology was ‘aestheticized’ by constituting new exhibitions.