Art: Museum of Man

• Share

One of the good things left in Paris by the pretty Exposition of 1937 is a new and handsome Trocadéro, on the Seine not far from a new and handsomer Museum of Modern Art. The proximity is fitting, for the Trocadero is to house the choicest examples in France of primitive and folk art, twin toys of modernism. Last week the "Museum of Man" in the west half of the Trocadéro was completed with the gala opening of an American Room.*

On the whole less rich than the British Museum or the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, this outgrowth of the French Ethnographical Institute is rich in Zapotecan sculpture, Ooxocan ware and feather-mosaics from Mexico, particularly rejoices in several treasures: 1) the tallest (55-foot) British Columbian totem pole in captivity; 2) the world's finest bison-hide North American Indian paintings; 3) a fine, puma-headed statue from Bolivia, recently rescued from the Government Geology Laboratory, where it had reposed for 80 years as an interesting "sample of stone (undetermined)."

Directed by spidery, snapping-eyed, sagacious Curator Paul Rivet, this exhibition is a worthy successor to the old Trocadéro's exhibit of comparative sculpture. Best idea: arranging showcases like text and footnotes in a book, one line of cases along left walls giving a bird's-eye impression of each period of each civilization, while other cases standing out from distant right walls contain complete museum collections. Smartest mechanical innovation: a show case which displays any one of nine related objects at the touch of a button, a great improvement on the usual system of showing one each month.