With Pride Intact

To many Europeans the U.S. is an artistic wasteland whose museums are1 deserted. Not so, says Georges A. (for Adolphe) Salles, director of the Louvre in Paris, who has just returned to France from a U.S. visit. Writes Salles in Paris' Figaro Litteraire:

"In France the word 'museum' has an unpleasant ring. In America it has a pleasant ring. Why? Is the museum in America different from the museum in France? I don't think so. What is different is not the museum but the country. In America the museum plays another role, fills other needs, than in Europe. It is a place set apart, a magical place, the only one where the past is encountered. When I returned to Paris, I ... was appalled by the dirt of ages that overlaid everything . . . We cannot escape the dead hand of the past. We inhabit a collection of open-air museums which are the antechambers to the museums themselves, and we enter without changing our climate.

"When I arrive in New York, on the contrary, only the present welcomes me and shows me its bare fare. Here it is, unlined, resplendent with life, rising straight out of the Manhattan rock . . . We are far from the confined world of museums. [Yet] nowhere else in the world do museums attract such crowds. Each day at the Metropolitan I watched the milling crowd, a young and athletic crowd that took pleasure in being there . . . What did they seek? . . . Simply the past of the whole universe. [But] in America the museum is not an opium one inhales to rediscover lost paradises . . . Confronted by admired works of art, [Americans] do not have that humble reaction that, too often in Europe, leaves one with the conviction that one was born too late and can never equal them. In America, when one goes to a museum, one's pride remains intact . . . The collections we admire, the civilizations, stay firmly in their epoch ... allowing the present to remain supreme. They activate us, like mechanical hares, in the great race toward the future . . ."

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