I looked at the Louvre website to see the provenance and discovered the recent acquisitions. The lack of information about the material, as always, interested me. When you look into the biography of items, there are always gaps.
Where were they before?
In family collections, some in Germany – this is very surprising. If you look at the Louvre's online catalogue, you will see that they were acquired in the eighties. Some political parties took advantage of the incident as a serious wound to French identity. But when you see that these are products of the modern art market, it is a completely different matter.
It is clear that there was a lot of turmoil in France..
There were a hundred answers, polyphony. First of all, there was massive political instrumentalization, that is, political parties accused their government of poorly protecting France's sacred royalist heritage. Other supporters of the Republican museum idea were saddened that public money was not used to better protect the institution. I think a lot of people also felt schadenfreude – all these jokes on Instagram about the password. [for the museum’s security system] being the Louvre and all that. If we can take anything away from all these different and sometimes conflicting voices, it is the fact that the attack on the museum affects everyone.
In any case, it was the museum staff who were most shocked. This is real trauma. I interact closely with people at all levels, and everyone is in shock in their own way, almost as if – and I'm exaggerating, this is not a good comparison – but almost like after a rape.
For me, the main takeaway is that museums have a vulnerability—a technical, physical vulnerability—that is reflected in the vulnerability of the audience's response, the idea that you can be culturally wounded in a deep, collective way.
It is a complete coincidence that the Louvre was robbed immediately after the appointment of an expert on stolen works of 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 in the Louvre. In the late nineties, I participated in an exhibition about its first director, Dominique-Vivant Denon, which for the first time in the history of the museum revealed the entire history of the Napoleonic looting of art. In a way, it was the Louvre that gave me my start. But coming back after all this time and thinking about this topic in an African context completely changed my perspective.
I want to emphasize that this organization is brave enough to allow critical voices to penetrate into its very heart. You may recall that after Felvin Sarr and I published our report, the museum director called it a “hate cry” against museums. But it wasn't hatred. If you love museums, you need to think critically about them to ensure they remain relevant and relevant to young people and the issues that concern us today.
I'm glad you mentioned Denon. Can you talk a little about how your work on art thefts during the many wars between France and Germany shaped your thinking?
The decisive factor was the move to Berlin. I studied how France emptied German collections, and because of where I lived, I adopted the victims' point of view. Of course, I was also interested in the Parisian side, the reception of German works there, and so on. But what struck me most was what makes a society deprived of cultural property. Goethe, the Grimm brothers, the Humboldt brothers – all the intelligentsia of that time spoke so much on this topic. There was very sophisticated writing about the encroachment on German museums, about the experience of loss and absence, about all this, even in Schiller's poems – all the German romantics, the greatest writers of the era, even painters and draftsmen, commented on everything. I was young, twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and that is why it was so natural to write later with Felwein about the African context. Because when you are very young to the expressions of loss, you hear them, whether in Germany in 1800 or in Cameroon in 1900.
