Lyon. This is an important direction in research in history, social sciences, and now in art history: instead of stories compartmentalized in regions (or centers) and Eurocentric, it is a question of writing a connected history, where objects are considered as the product of exchanges between different cultures. In Marseille, two exhibitions have already given substance to this renewal of research: “Migratory objects, treasures under influence”, proposed by academic Barbara Cassin at the Vieille-Charité in 2022, and, this winter at the Mucem, “Another history of the world”, curated by historian of globalization Pierre Singaravélou. The Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon is also embarking on this path with the exhibition “Connecting the worlds”, which is based almost exclusively on the museum’s collections, revisited through this new prism.
Sylvie Ramond, director of the Lyon museum center, entrusted this task to Léa Saint-Raymond, an art historian with a strong economic tropism, specialist in the art market and director of the Observatory of Digital Humanities at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon. As is often the case at the Palais Saint-Pierre, it is a book that serves as a trigger for an exhibition project: here, by the same Léa Saint-Raymond, Fragments of a Global History of Artpublished by Éditions Rue d’Ulm in 2021. This fragmentary approach governs the entire journey, delivering a microhistory that advances object by object, to respond to the challenge of a macrohistory of which we do not control the ins and outs.
“Seeing elsewhere in here”
As a manifesto of this approach, and of the humility it implies, the exhibition opens with a large canvas by the collective of Aboriginal artists Warlukurlangu, evoking the “Dreamtime” of the cosmogony of Australian peoples (2000). The visitor is thus invited from the outset to become aware of the limited tools that a strictly European perception offers to apprehend this work, which one would be tempted to conveniently consider as an abstract canvas. In the same room, a famous sculpted fragment from the 12th century, in which a dancing figure appears too cramped, and from which the art historian Henri Focillon formulated in the early 1930s his “framework law”. A definition which brilliantly essentializes certain characteristics of Romanesque art, but Léa Saint-Raymond invites us to also see in this bas-relief a desire for “see elsewhere here”Around the dancer squeezed into his frame, there is a pseudo-Arabic writing which inscribes the presence of a distance in this Berry sculpture.
At the heart of the exhibition, the largest room displays a perfect example of globalized artistic creation with the large Trojan War tapestry commissioned by the Portuguese governor of Macao and made in a Chinese workshop at the beginning of the 17th century. The two embroideries preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon are complemented by a third from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and are much better showcased than in the museum’s permanent exhibition. Restored for the occasion, these genuine needlepoint paintings show how a theme from ancient Greece was adapted by Lyon engravers, whose engraving was enlarged by Chinese artists to obtain this masterpiece. Next to the three embroideries, a large trompe-l’oeil display case appears to contain, from a distance, classic liturgical material. But the workmanship and materials used tell the story of objects created in Japan or Goa for Portuguese missionaries.
Looking at the other
If the economic question underlies the part presented on the first floor, that of the gaze occupies the second with the inserts of contemporary works from the MAC Lyon, such as the large photographs of the Dutchman Hans Neleman. The latter managed to establish a bond of trust with the Maori community in order to be able to photograph the sacred Moko tattoos. A counterpoint to the stereotypical and racist representations presented upstream: in both cases, the image results from a gaze directed at the other.
What is missing from this collection of eloquent fragments is a cartographic incarnation, or a chronological account of the objects’ journey, mediation strategies that make the multiplicity and diversity of the actors behind a piece immediately understandable. The journey, which focuses on a few specific points, makes the subject very accessible, and shows how the museum’s universalist and encyclopedic collections can tell a global story. For Sylvie Ramond, it is in any case a “laboratory exhibition, preparatory to a redefinition of the route”.
