A Bas-Relief Explained
Nothing explains France. Not the geography, not the history, not the language, not the mixture of people. The country, the nation, the sensation is as irrational as any social agreement on earth. To live in it is to understand this lack of coherence, this act of being France.
France is thousands of monuments. Each monument represents a thread in the continuous tapestry of France, from prehistory to the present. The explanation of the origin and use of each monument is a combination of hypothesis, scientific methods and written records. These monuments are rich with exterior relief sculptures. The doorways and walls of its cathedrals, basilicas and churches are covered with Christ in Majesty, Mary, Peter and Paul. Narrative fragments from New and Old Testament stories, the lives of saints and local traditions are written in stone. Representations of the two foundational kings, Charlemagne and Saint Louis, are everywhere.
During the 19th centuries, stone relief sculptures were carried from the Islamic Mediterranean, India, Southeast Asia, China, the Americas and the Pacific Islands to the capitals of Western Europe. The displacement of these stones to London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid demonstrated the European dominance of human civilization. By the early 20th century, a French artist had images and examples of much of human history at his disposal in the form of complete sculptures on display at the Louvre, and plaster casts at the École des Beaux-Arts. He could review work from Mesopotamia to Mexico, Cambodia to the Aegean, Egypt to India as three-dimensional objects as well as prints and photographs.
MURALS AND RELIEFS GLORIFYING LABOR
The Palais de Porte Dorée was built in 1931 and became an historical monument in 1987. This status preserves it, to some degree. As long as the French state that declared it a monument continues to exist, it will be preserved as a part of French history. The façade of the Palais de Porte Dorée is a beautiful mnemonic. Alfred Janniot’s stone bas-relief presents the viewer with a vision of La Plus Grande France (greater France), a concept almost forgotten today. It is a world represented in meticulously realistic details — native species — human, animal, vegetable and mineral — arranged in a grand ballet of harvesting and transporting materials. The rational French spirit, a sense of métier — the indivisible unity of craft and art — shapes the composition. It is a vision of life through labor in service to a greater good and achievement through attainment of quality. At its center, above the Golden Door (Porte Dorée), in the place where Christ in Majesty or the Sun King or the Emperor reigns in other monuments, we find Janniot’s symbol of an ideal French civilization.
The entire building, including the bas-relief, was created for the Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931. This was one of many late 19th- and early 20th century international exhibitions that temporarily transformed parts of Paris into information amusement parks. The Palais de Porte Dorée was one of several exhibition buildings meant to embody the contemporary style — the streamlined 1930 art of speed, smoothness, and power. From its inception, the building was to be a permanent monument in an otherwise artificial and temporary world (Morton 2000). There is no small irony in the fact that because it was meant to be permanent, we are blessed today with its colonial message. The 1931 exhibition unintentionally marked the high point of an overseas French Empire it promoted and celebrated. That political and economic empire was transformed through warfare and diplomacy by the 1960s into French Departments, French Territories and independent sovereign states that make up the Francophone world. The people of these former colonies became French citizens and significant parts of the immigrant population of Metropolitan France. This unforeseen reality is an important bond between any 21st century viewer and Janniot’s composition. It also presents an unexpected and underappreciated opportunity: to see a view of the world preserved in stone that contemporary French, and more broadly European, culture wants to forget.
WHAT JANNIOT CREATED
Alfred Janniot created a relief sculpture that can be appreciated as visual catalog of unprecedented proportion. But like the tympanum above a cathedral entrance, it was not intended to be experienced in isolation. It was part of a larger didactic program of decorative arts that included sculpture by Léon Drivier, interior murals by Henri Pierre Ducos de la Haille, and interior décor by several major French designers, under the direction of the architects Albert Laprade and Léon Jaussely. The work of each artist played a part in the building’s overall message. Janniot’s contribution dwarfs the others, covering the entire front of the building and a portion of its side, extending from the floor to the ceiling of the raised porch. In round numbers it covers a surface of 1,130 square meters — that is more than 40 feet high and over 300 feet long.
This is the conventional assessment of the composition:
« La grande fresque de pierre qui recouvre la façade, exécutée magistralement par Alfred Auguste Janniot, délivre également un message à la fois pédagogique et propagandiste. A l’instar d’un grand livre imagé représentant les colonies, le décor illustre les apports de l’Empire à la métropole. Les ethnies colonisées y sont minutieusement détaillées, et des inscriptions permettent d’identifier plus clairement les produits et les régions représentées. »
The large fresco covering the stone facade, masterfully executed by Alfred Augustus Janniot, delivers a message that is simultaneously educational and propagandist. Like a great book pictorially representing the colonies, it shows the Empire’s contributions to Metropolitan France. The colonized peoples are meticulously detailed, and inscriptions clearly identify the products and regions represented.
(Maingon, L’Histoire par L’Image, n.d.)
Despite this intention to be educational and propagandist, the sculpture is monumentally obscure. Everything about its relationship to the building it covers makes it hard to see. The viewer cannot see how France’s colonial territories stretch from the Caribbean across Africa and Asia to the South Pacific without walking all around the building. The combination of scale and position assures that the sculpture can be viewed only small sections. Wrapping it around the exterior breaks the composition into three parts. Twenty-two windows break the composition further, each window rising four meters from the porch floor. Any view from a distance is obstructed by stone pillars connecting the porch to the overhanging ceiling, as well as railings rising from the outside of the porch.
The view most people get of the composition is what we see when entering the building. Passing through an ornamental iron gate, we approach the entrance door by climbing the stone steps. From this location the viewer can recognize a monument from the late Third Republic (1870–1940). The visual language is Art Moderne, a streamlined adaptation of Greco-Roman symbols representing the genius of European civilization as a continuation of pre-Christian classicism. The symbols would be familiar to the viewing audience in the 1930s. These are the same figures that adorned the walls of casinos and the dining rooms of ocean liners of the period. It was a visual language used to illustrate the triumph of industrial progress and European civilization.
The entrance doorway is surrounding by a dense mixture of large female figures and sailing ships. Architecture quotations, the symbols of civilization visible to the sailors approaching French ports, appear among the female figures: Madonnas and saints, fortifications and towers. As the visitor raises his eyes, he can follow the gaze of all the women converging on two figures surrounded by an abundance of vegetation. The figure in the foreground is a muscular woman with powerful arms. Her naked body is draped with a cloth that covers only part of one arm and the lower portion of her crossed legs. She is seated, one hand resting firmly on the rock-like seat, the other hand raised in a gesture reminiscent of a Buddhist mudra toward the vegetation above her head. Her seated body is framed by the massive chest and muscular flank of a bull, his horned head turned forward, one visible leg placed firmly in the ocean.
The visitor can read words carved in the stone among the figures. They are the names of Bordeaux, the river Garonne, and Le Havre to the west and Marseille and the Mediterranean below the Paris airport to the east. LA PAIX and LA LIBERTE appear above the door, as well as the names of Roman goddesses: CERES, the goddess of agriculture, and POMONE, the goddess of fruits. These are the largest females gazing at the massive woman and the bull. There are no carved letters to inform us that the combination of this female symbol of fecundity and a male symbol of virility must represent La France.
A carved stone to the west of the door states:
CE BAS-RELIEF A ETÉ
COMPOSE DESSINÉ
ET SCULPTUÉ
PAR
ALFRED JANNIOT
DE 1928 À 1931
GABRIEL FORESTIER
ET
CHARLES BARBERIS
ONT COLLABORÉ A L’EXÉCUTION(This bas-relief had been composed, drawn and sculpted by Alfred Janniot from 1928 to 1931. Gabriel Forestier and Charles Barberis had collaborated on the execution.)
There are now additional panels of text attached to the inside of the pillars and beside the door, titled Hier (Yesterday), Aujourd’hui (Today) and Bas-relief de Alfred Janniot. Hier tells us we are standing on the porch of the Palais de Porte Dorée, created for the Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, a building designed to be the Musée permanent des colonies. Aujourd’hui informs us that the building now contains the Cité nationale de l’historie de l’immigration and the tropical aquarium. Bas-relief de Alfred Janniot describes the way in which the façade was created.
None of these panels provide an explanation of Janniot’s composition. Recent books about the history of the building and the colonial exhibition it was created for mention Janniot’s work and reproduce photographs of parts of the composition. But like the view from the street or the porch, these accounts are fragments. They speak about the ideas the architect and the exhibition directors wanted to express, and the general direction Janniot chose for his assignment. But none of these commentators seem to notice the details of what Janniot actually represents.
The subject is difficult to contemplate in a world that defines itself as post-colonial. The ideology of French colonialism is as world view deeply disproven by the political events that separate us today from the 1930s. We cannot imagine how a work of art from this time, representing this world view, could be instructive today, except to remind us of what we want to forget. If I were French I might cringe at this vision of an Asia, Africa and South Pacific serving the needs of invisible Colonial masters who were my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. If I or my family had suffered in the former colonies depicted in the façade, I might find the mere existence of this national monument insulting.
However, I am an American without benefit of a French education. When I look at Janniot’s composition, I see something both astonishing and intriguing. I see an enormous information graphic, executed with monumental style, capturing the human grace of a very recognizable world. It is a world not so far away in space or in time from the world in which I live. It is a depiction of the world all around me in Paris, the population of the French world today.
A WALK ALONG THE PORCH
If we stroll along the porch to the east or the west, gazing up at the walls to see the details, and step back onto the grounds or the street or the driveway to understand the vertical and horizontal tapestry, we can begin to see Janniot’s vision.
Walking to the west, towards the busy intersection of Port Dorée, we see North Africa above us and Equatorial followed by West Africa along the lower portion. Above LA HAVRE, a woman in Arab dress holding a gazelle in her lap sits on the fore-deck of a sailing ship. Behind her are the towers and domes of an unnamed North African city. Below her the shallow relief technique overlays several kinds of sailing and steam ships moving towards and away from the port. We are beneath the sea looking at angel fish and sea ferns at the bottom of the panel below her. A flock of sea birds rise above the waves towards a coffee plant. At the first window two men with bales balanced on their heads are the first figures of sub-Saharan Africa we see. One man’s muscular legs are rising from palm leaves and coffee plants, as if he is standing on the window sill. The plants continue between the windows. We see monkeys in the coffee bushes and a parrot perched on banana trees. A woman is picking coffee beans while another below her is standing in shallow water and gathering fish in a basket. This panel is labeled GABON. We have moved from the French Atlantic port to the southern coast of French Equatorial Africa.
The banana trees and coconut palms extend upward into the boundaries of North Africa. The monkey on the coconut palm looks to the right, away from the left-facing Arab farmer driving his plow beneath the rising foliage of the equatorial forest. As we raise our eyes, we see TUNISIE written on domed North African buildings against the waves of the Mediterranean Sea. The farmer’s plow is being drawn by a camel. Three women behind the camel move toward the farmer bear large jugs on their arms. Above the jugs, another group of two women and a man work a hand loom above the word TAPIS.
Moving our eyes downward from the plowing farmer, we are in the jungle of French Equatorial Africa. We see the head of a two-horned rhinoceros, the word TCHAD on the palm fronds. The vegetation separates the rhino from a group of men raising and shouldering ivory tusks. The composition of six ivory gathers continues downward. CONGO is inscribed between the arm and leg of the central male figure framed between the windows. Below him two more men raise tusks from the jungle floor. A woman raises the largest tusk from the jungle floor, an infant on her hip clutching her breast and another child at her feet. Below the woman and children are cactus and gum plants along with the word GOMME.
As we move along the porch, we travel simultaneously westward across North Africa, from Tunisia toward Algeria along the top of the façade, and northwest from the Congo to the Niger River basin. Between and above the windows is a dramatic depiction of a hippopotamus being harpooned by a group of hunters on the Niger River. The lowest of the hunters stands on the river just above the gaping mouth of a crocodile. A flock of cranes fly upward from the hunters and the word OUBANGHI. Seven men with ritual-scarred faces are plunging their spears into the animal, depicted in relief against river plants. Above the plants, two Arab women push against a press, and a shepherd facing the word ALGERIE leans on his crook facing his sheep. Above the shepherd is a vineyard where three men work gathering grapes, the highest of the group pressing his covered head against the roof. As we drop our gaze below the hippo hunters, we see a group of three women and a man with the word DAHOMEY between them. The words HUILE DE PALME is inscribed between the legs of the woman holding a large container on her head, dressed only in a beaded string and leaves covering her vulva. We are in the part of French West Africa now known as Benin. Reading this composition from the bottom, a man gathers palm nuts from a low bush, while one woman press them and the other two carry containers of the oil on their heads.
Above the next window is a marabou and crane beneath two enormous African elephants. The raised head and trunk of one elephant extends the Sub-Saharan jungle foliage into North Africa and separates the figures representing Algeria and Morocco. Beneath the elephants, French West Africa continues. A group of four men use hand saws, ropes and axes to fell wood. Between two men is the word BOIS and between the legs of the central worker the words COTE D’IVOIRE. The two men at the bottom of the group stand on ferns and roots of the tree. Beside their legs are kola plants and the word KOLA.
Above us now is the rear of the last elephant, followed by her baby, who seems to be walking along the tops of jungle trees filled with fruit being gathered by a monkey. Above the elephants’ back, Arab women are gathering fruit from the orchards of Morocco extending to the roof. Below the baby elephant’s feet, a lion leaps across the window frame to bring down a gazelle in its claws. Above the lion’s gaping mouth is the word SOUDAN, the name for the region that is now Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. In the panel beneath the lion’s rear legs, undisturbed gazelles exchange glances with two women carrying baskets of cotton flowers, while a third woman knees on the ground gathering plants. COTON is beside the long skirt of one bearer, while CACAO is over the shoulder of the kneeling gatherer. A cacao plant is above her head and a monkey reaching out to touch a pod.
Looking up, we see we have reached the western end of the porch. Along the top, the products of Morocco are displayed. Women carry jars, camels face east and west and men stare at cereal plants. A horned sheep stares at a shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders. MAROC PHOSPHATE CEREALES LAINE are carved between the legs of a standing camel. Below the outstretched claws of the lion is the corner panel depicting the last group of workers in French West Africa. Two women crush cereal with wooden pestles, SENEGAL inscribed behind one woman’s back. Strapped to the back of the woman facing her, a child holds his hand out to a flying bird. Below the child a man raises a bag of peanuts above a network of roots exposed in the soil. ARACHIDES is written across the bag. At the bottom of the corner, a kneeling woman milks a goat into a pail.
Turning the corner, we travel to the Indian Ocean islands, the Caribbean and the Americas. At the lower edge of the wall, two workers whose features and dress identify them as Malagasy pick coffee and cut sugar cane while a third with East African features gathers vanilla beans. The inscription reads ILE DE LA REUNION. Above them cactus plants extend into the large composition depicting Madagascar. Two women bear baskets towards the word FRUIT beneath a group of three zebu and a crane. Above the zebu, two men push an ore cart inscribed GRAPHITE from the corner towards coconut and banana palms. A man cuts a bunch of bananas with a knife above a group of three farmers gathering rice while a fourth man stands over them in a supervising posture. The top of the next window is framed by a fan palm inscribed with MADAGASCAR. From the palm, a lemur looks down on a group of five men pulling a crocodile from the river plants.
Two goddesses, one standing on a dolphin, seem to float on a cloud between the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. Above their shoulders is a compass symbol marking points of longitude and latitude. To their right is inscribed CANAL DE MOZAMBIQUE, to their left OCEAN ATLANTIQUE. Hidden in the sails of a ship touching the ceiling are the names of ST PIERRE ET MIQUELON, the tiny French islands off the coast of Canada.
The French Caribbean extends from the ceiling to the floor around the last window. The men and women of Guadeloupe at the top and Martinique below seem to be standing on floating platforms. The cane, vanilla and banana they cut and carry rise from a thin layer of ground surrounded by waves, coral and fish. A woman gathers bananas from a tree beside the word GUADELOUPE while a man stands amid the sugar cane, his back to the goddesses on the ocean. A similarly dressed man and woman carry great bundles of cane above the word MARTINIQUE atop the last window. A woman to their left picks vanilla beans while the woman at their feet cutting cane is stands above a coral reef teaming with fish. Between the laborers, a woman dressed only in a skirt reclines on a small floating platform of vegetation inscribed MARIE GALANTE, a small island now a part of Guadeloupe. GUYANE is represented as a marsh in the bottom of the last panel populated only by porpoises
We now walk back across the porch, passing the doorway to examine the relief to the east. At the top of the first panel, a woman sits astride the foredeck of a sailing ship. Her head, draped loosely in a scarf, is turned in profile towards France. Her dress and the palaces rising behind her are from the French trading ports of India. Directly below her ship is the profile of an airplane emerging from a cloud. The panel between the first two windows begins with a flock of sea gulls and continues down into the ocean filled with plants and sea creatures. Palm fronds rise behind the next window, and above this the sails of a three-masted schooner, which is foreground for a more contemporary steam freighter.
The palm fronds extend into the next panel where we see the bottom of a large fishing net filling with its catch. Looking up we see the net is controlled and drawn by a group of three fishermen. The net continues through the window where we see three more hauling fisherman. Below them two fisherman seem to be conversing while pulling up a smaller net. Above the fishermen, four porters carry baskets of produce on their shoulders. CAFÉ appears between the men, and there is a coffee bush behind the fishermen’s back. Above the porters, three farmers are planting rice in a flooded field while a fourth man supervises. Above them all, a woman kneels before a grove of bamboo. In the foreground another farmer pushes a plow drawn by two buffalo. The space of the field is inscribed COCHINCHINE, the region at the mouth of the Mekong River in present Vietnam. Below the buffalo, men and a woman spread grain in flat baskets inscribed with MAÏS. A layer of jungle plants separates them from a python wrapping itself around a tiger straddling the next window. Below this struggle, we find a man, woman and child standing calmly before trellises of vines inscribed POIVRE, gathering seeds into baskets. Looking up above the tiger’s snarling head, we see three men carrying bundles of dried rice plants balanced on poles, the field they walk across inscribed PADDY. Behind them a flock of herons rise above the river where a woman sails on a bamboo raft. We are moving north up the Mekong River. Behind her sail we see the temples of Angkor Vat. Looking down again between the next two windows, we see a woman kneeling beside a tree gathering sap in a cup. Above her a man is cutting a tree inscribed with CAOUTCHOUC with a knife.
At the tops of the trees above the next window we see CAMBODGE. The composition is following the geography of French Indochina from south to north. Two Asian elephants with a mounted driver march towards the doorway, mirroring the movement of the African elephants we have seen. The temple complex extends behind them. Beneath the elephants a group of men empty pails of liquid into a vat. Below them a man and woman gather cotton. Standing on the bottom of the panel, a woman surrounded by mulberry bushes gentle pulls silk fibers from a basket beside a silk worm on a leaf inscribed SOIE.
Looking up above the backs of the elephants, we see another flock of cranes rising over the river. Another group of farmers are planting another field inscribed RIZ being flooded by an irrigation wheel. This noria wheel is inscribed LAOS. Below them a man is casting a net over a flock of small birds. He is separated from a pheasant by a coffee bush. Below the pheasant, two women and a man spread leaves in woven baskets and place them on drying racks. One basket is inscribed THE. Looking up again, we see a herd of deer are running from the fowler’s cast net. Above the deer a man is pouring liquid into a vat with a spoon while a woman gathers coconuts from the palm before the vat. HUILE is inscribed beside the tree. A monkey is hanging by its hands in the coffee bush below them. Under the coffee bush at the corner of the relief we find the only representation of craft, a workshop with carved elephants, Buddhas and urns resting on shelves. A woman places a finished Buddha on a shelf. Below her arm is inscribed ARTS. A second woman kneels while carving the statue of a Confucian saint.
As we turn the corner, we see that the coconut palm and coffee bush vegetation continues into the next panel. At the bottom of the panel, three men pull woven fish traps from the sea. In the coffee bush above them is inscribed ANNAM, the colony of central Vietnam. We are on the central coast where a fishing fleet is moving out to sea. Above the fishermen steering the boats and controlling the nets, the shoreline supports more coffee bushes, palms and betel vines. We now see that the male figure at the top of the corner supporting a basket on his head is facing a female figure with another basket around the corner. CAFÉ is inscribed beside one leg, CHARBON above his raised knee. To his right a miner digs a spade into the ground. Bananas grow on a tree behind the digging miner. TONKIN, the name for the colony of northern Vietnam, is inscribed above his spade. A woman bends to gather plants along the shoreline. Cormorants fly before the fishing boats sailing into water inscribed MER DE CHINE. Complex nets extend down the next panel between two windows, where another group of three fishermen haul a weighted net filled with fish and eels.
The eastward movement of the Annam fishing fleet is crossing below a sailing ship heading in the opposite direction. Another compass symbol marking 70° LAT SUD is in the foreground before the ship, representing the distance of the South Pacific. From the window frame, a coconut palm extends over the sea. Two bare-chested Australasian miners dig with pick and shovel into rock formations below the words PLOMB, CUIVRE and CHARBON. NOUVELLE CALEDONIE is inscribed in the palm fronds above their pit. A fully clothed man picks coffee beans from a bush beside the palm.
Looking upward, we see that the sailing ship is emerging from an island inscribed ISLES DE LA SOCIETE. Between the palm and coffee bushes of Nouvelle Caledonie and the island shoreline the sea is inscribed OCEAN PACIFIQUE. Above the shore a Polynesian man is cutting cane with a knife. Large taro leaves obscure his legs and his knife reaches towards a banana tree. Above him a woman wearing a flower garland reclines beneath a breadfruit tree, stretching out her hands to a flock of petrels. The ground she reclines on is inscribed TAHITI. Off the Tahitian coast, in the upper corner of the relief, a man sits in the prow of a boat inscribed ILES MARQUISES. The man holds a rope attached to an oyster pearl diver whose feet are tied to a large stone weight. The net basket around his neck is empty. The water beside him is inscribed ILES GAMBIER. In the final panel extending to the floor, two additional small islands protrude into the composition, populated only with leaves, shells, stones and coral. I. TOUAMOTOU is inscribed between them. At the bottom of the final panel, the South Pacific edge of the French world, we are looking at fish, crab and seaweed at the bottom of the ocean.
We have been presented with a coherent vision of the world seen from France in the early twentieth century. We can also look at the composition not as ancient history but as a representation of the world we live in today. The twenty-first century Francophone world is the evolution of this same cultural geography. We find engraved in stone the names of all the current overseas departments and territories (DOM-TOM) of the Fifth French Republic. We find the names of sovereign nations in Africa and Asia where French is spoken. If we live in France today, we see the homelands of our neighbors, our cousins, our grandparents, our co-workers and our friends. We see the origin of our tastes, of the foods we find in our markets, of the places we travel for vacations, and of the many shades of our skin.
JANNIOT’S STRATEGY
The Musée permanent des colonies was conceived in 1931 with a complex design program. Albert Lapadre, the chief architect, wanted to create an entirely modern architect, devoid of reference to African or Asian styles. The decoration of the building was intended to represent the benefits of the French colonial world to the citizens of France. These decorations included interior murals, mosaics, furniture, and pedagogical exhibits, along with Janniot’s façade. Each was meant to carry parts of the program.
As a result, Janniot did not choose which portion of the world-view he would represent. His assignment was to represent the products flowing into France and the global geography of the Empire. He chose to model the relief technique on Hindu-Khmer tradition in which figures are intertwined with vegetation and all space is filled. This created the density of the composition. The composition mixes this with reference to Egyptian silhouette. The naturalism he chose for the people is segregated from the Greco-Roman style used to represent European culture.
Though it exists in three-dimensional space, the overall coherence and balance of the composition is impossible to see until we unbend it from the three sides of the building, remove the obstructing pillars and porch railings, and viewing it as a continuous panorama. With the exception of the symbolic panels around the central doorway, ninety percent of the composition is about the people of each region engaged in agriculture, hunting, gathering, mining and fishing. The chosen activities focus on the export products, ignoring the local economies. The names of twenty-seven colonies and thirty different products are engraved on the relief. Each colony is shown as a combination of people engaged in work and the products they produce.
Janniot chose to represent the people and production techniques in a realistic fashion. The realism includes details of dress, hairstyles, facial characteristics and tools. Each working group includes men and women, and along the lower portion the groups include children. The people are engaged with each other and their work. Their facial expressions are natural and peaceful, their body motions graceful. Everyone looks healthy. Tension appears only on the faces of the African men engaged in hunting.
The organization of the locations makes reference to geography, but within that constraint the layout is driven by multiple criteria, both aesthetic and practical. Coastal North Africa is placed along the top, joined directly below with the equatorial forests, omitting any representation of the French Sahara region, which had no economic importance at the time. Colonies in the Indian Ocean are placed on the west side, facing the Caribbean, perhaps because Africa was already crowded. The larger number of locations in Africa (11) versus Asia (3) is balanced by more Asian figures for each location and repeated detail of rice farming and fishing.
The composition also features plants, animals, birds and fish that are characteristic of each region and activity. The placement of large animals balances the central façade. African elephants on the west and Asian elephants on the east both move towards France in the center. Draft animals — camels on the west and water buffalo on the east — face in the opposite direction. The area just above the windows contains mirrored examples of gazelle and deer. The African lion on the west and Asian leopard on the east are facing in opposite directions.
In the early twentieth century, the French Empire was woven together by a global maritime network. The upper layer of the composition is filled with representation of ships bearing products to France. Sailing ships in the foreground and steamships in the background move towards the center. A single airplane faces Asia. This transportation layer shares space with representations of local architecture: North African cities on the west and Asian temple complexes on the east.
The lateral movement of the transportation of goods is intertwined with a vertical movement of products drawn from the earth and sea between the windows. In these parts of the composition that rise from the porch, human figures are drawing nets from the sea and raising animal and agricultural products upward.
The areas around the central door are transition zones, where vegetation and ships create the space to move from the naturalistic representation of people and products to the Greco-Roman symbols representing France. Even in the Atlantic Ocean where the two styles appear side by side, the goddesses that float on the sea between the Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands do not touch the figures on the land.
Janniot did not have to represent France’s military or cultural presence in the colonies. The history of military conquest was represented by a list of names carved into the western wall of the building beyond the façade. The religious, scientific and educational benefits French civilization brought to her colonies were the theme of murals and exhibitions inside the building.
To better appreciate the information Janniot captured, we should avoid the common mistake of reading the composition from the figures around the door and looking from there to the outside world. Instead we should appreciate this transition from the outside moving inward. When we see these people lifting products from the earth, passing products to the transportation network moving towards the door, we can appreciate another of Janniot’s strategies, the way in which he segregates his presentation of the colonies from his presentation of France. In the ideology of the time, the people of the colonies were not French. Janniot’s sculpture focuses entirely on the working population of each colony. These were a combination of the population as the French found them and Africans people displaced to the Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies as slaves. By segregating the products and the people that produce them from European culture, the composition shows us a world in which the French do not exist. Nowhere in Jannot’s sculpture do we see a French farmer, soldier, sailor, trader, missionary, overseer or administrator. As a result, the bas-relief represents La Plus Grande France as a group of autonomous people engaged with their natural resources producing goods for international trade. The representation may have come from colonial ideology, but it is as close to the economic reality of the current century as it was to world of the previous one.
APPRECIATING JANNIOT’S BAS-RELIEF
We can appreciate Janniot’s sculpture on several levels.
As a work of art, it is an example of Art Moderne on a grand scale. The artist blends the Asian and Egyptian relief tradition, realism, and 1930s streamlining to combine images drawn from ethnography and natural history. We can compare his composition to the murals of Diego Rivera in Mexico and the United States, the intertwined men and machines of Fernand Léger, and the murals and reliefs of heroic workers that defined Soviet Socialist Realism. All these works are contemporary with Janniot’s creation.
The realism he employed in his portraits of the workers is uncharacteristic of Janniot’s other major relief sculptures, which still grace the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the doorways at New York’s Rockefeller Center. These works from the late 1930s resemble the style used to represent European France around the doorway. The realism employed suggests that some figures were modeled from life, using people from the colonies living in Paris. Most of the composition may have been based on contemporary photographs or engravings. The representation of plants and animals in the relief is so precise, and so diverse, that it must have been drawn from documentation. The heron beneath the zebus of Madagascar has the plumage and profile of Humblot’s Heron (Ardea humbloti), unique to this region. The goat the woman milks in Senegal is a local breed known as khar bii. The Tahitian woman holds out her hands to South Pacific petrels.
On a political level, the sculpture is part of the French tradition of representing non-European peoples. The men and women of the Caribbean, North Africa, Asia, Australasia and the South Pacific are dressed for the tasks they perform as farmers, shepherds, weavers, field hands, miners, and fishermen. The same is true of the farmers, field hands and hunters of Equatorial and West African, though in these parts of the world, workers and hunters wore little clothing. Janniot took advantage of the expose anatomy to capture a great deal of male and female frontal nudity. This fascination with black African nudity was as characteristic of the time; so was representing French culture in the form of Greco-Roman goddesses. Despite the conventionality, it is very striking to find this combination of the two in a single composition on such a grand scale. It is equally striking how Janniot segregates his Colonial peoples from his French symbols. To contemporary eyes, the anatomical grace of the working men and women of Senegal and Dahomey seem much more powerful expressions of humanity than the goddesses Ceres and Pomone swooning beneath the symbol of France. Whatever Janniot’s personal politics may have been, his art separated the humanity of his subjects from the symbols of his own culture.
While it is a powerful mnemonic for the Colonial era, we can also view the composition as a visual encyclopedia.
We can re-use Janniot’s focus on the forms of labor practiced throughout the former French colonies, his representation of agricultural, fishing and mining technique, his selection of flora and fauna, as a summation of the Francophone world’s natural and cultural resources. The sheer volume of information encoded into the composition is a major accomplishment. There are no generic plants, no general animals, no imaginary tools or clothing. Each leaf is from a specific plant. Each animal is indigenous to the region being represented.
The information he chose to represent tells us a great deal about the connections between the former colonies, the French economy and the French imagination.
Sources
Germain VIATTE (sous dir.), Yvonne Brunhammer, Maurice Culot, Catherine Hodeir, et Dominique Jarrassé. Le palais des colonies. Histoire du Musée des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, RMN 2002.
Patricia A. Morton. Hybrid Modernities, Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris, MIT Press, 2000.
Claire Maingon, « Le palais de la Porte Dorée, témoignage de l’histoire coloniale », L’Histoire par l’image, RMN & DMF/DAF
Maureen Murphy, Un Palais pour une cité, du Musée des colonies à la Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris, éd. RMN, 2007.
Le Bas-relief du musée des Colonies. Préface de J. Charbonneaux. Ce bas-relief a été composé, dessiné et sculpté par Alfred Janniot, de 1928 à 1931. Gabriel Forestier et Charles Barberis ont collaboré à l’exécution, Paris, libr. d’art Louis Reynaud, 52, rue d’Assas, 1931.
Georges Petit. « La faune exotique dans les bas-reliefs du musée des Colonies » La Terre et la vie. Revue d’histoire naturelle. N.1 février 1931
