Marseille's new museum on the Med makes a dazzling statement, but the exhibitions are something of a muddle
Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean – in pictures
Another week, another port, another museum. Last Sunday I wrote about the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth, where powerful exhibits were enclosed in a building of studied sobriety. Now it is Marseille, and the Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean, or MuCEM, where a questionable display has been given a spectacular wrapper. Where the architects of the Mary Rose museum exude the kindly wisdom of geography teachers, the magus of MuCEM, Rudy Ricciotti, has a different style.
Marseille is one of this year's European Capitals of Culture, and the occasion has been taken to make commercial opportunities for the local business community while pursuing the well-worn idea that architectural icons can transform cities. So there is the Villa Mediterranée, "a centre for dialogue and discussion", alongside MuCEM, where an extravagant and pointless cantilever has been achieved at the expense of quality of detail and generosity in the internal spaces. There is a charming pavilion in the Vieux Port by Foster + Partners, where a mirrored ceiling reflects crowds and water. Parts of the city's seawall have been opened to the public and decorated with artworks.
Of these projects, MuCEM, which cost a stonking €191m, sets out to be the grandest and most dazzling, the high point of the year. Its theme is vast, the millennia of beauties and horrors of the sea that stretches from Beirut to Gibraltar, and there are noble promises to create "an exchange of perspectives", but it also contains a trap. It could be a melange of everything and nothing, a case of mixing all the colours and ending up with mud, of serving vague political ideals at the expense of curatorial direction. It's a trap into which the museum's administration (who were represented at last week's launch by 12 white men sitting in a row, with two women attached at the end) have plunged with the fervour of maenads on Naxos.
You pass from Franco Zecchin's mafia-themed photographs of Palermo to 1960s beach girls, to a painting by Joan Miró, to the colonisation of Algeria, to a poster for a shipping line, to Byron at Missolonghi to a Candida Höfer photograph of the inside of the Louvre, to a replica of the Rosetta Stone, to photographs of employees of the Ottoman Bank, 1906-24. Elsewhere there's a video inspired by Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, in which the people turn on Liberty and butcher her. Some ideas link these objects, but wordy captions mean you lose the desire to find out.
There is a note of colonial regret – to call it "guilt" would be overstating – and some wish to show that, when it comes to both destruction and creation, everyone is as good and bad as one another. A small room is papered with photographs of "shattered cities", such as Smyrna 1922, Barcelona 1936-9, Marseille 1943, Jerusalem 1948 and Algiers 1962, where the perpetrators of atrocities are Muslim, Christian, Jewish and others. Not far off, some more space is given to Sarajevo and Beirut, but if the aim is to make you reflect on these horrors, the effect is to trivialise them.
There are the germs here of maybe 30 decent exhibitions. Zecchin's photographs, for example, are compelling, and MuCEM has also taken over the rich collections of the former National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Paris. Sometimes they prick your curiosity or move your sympathy. But they gain nothing from being piled together like 1970s crockery and alarm clocks in a brocante.
While touring the displays you are aware of something possibly more compelling going on, on the other side of gauzy curtains and glass walls. Depending on the way you entered, you might have experienced it already, a "ziggurat" of glittering ramps wrapped around the cuboid containing the exhibition space, and then saturated with dappled shadows from a lacy screen in dark concrete. This has been compared to a mashrabiya, and a mantilla, and an abstraction of a Cézanne painting, but its architect, Ricciotti, says it is "the rocky bottom of the ocean, lifted up".
From the top of the museum a bridge flies across the water to the historic Fort St Jean, which also contains exhibition space, from where another bridge connects to the rest of the city, making an urban promenade that connects the waterfront to the raised part of the town. This, however, may be too prosaic a way of describing the ensemble: for Ricciotti, it "expresses the existential question of architecture, which is the difficulty of living". It "touches the people of Marseille with its femininity and fragility", but at the same time "relies on very powerful structural solidity", which is by implication male.
The architects in Portsmouth didn't talk like this. Neither have they, as Ricciotti has, made a film in which he talks on architecture while his near-naked girlfriend kneels in front of him and caresses him extravagantly. ("A joke," he explains, "and very ironic, a criticism of discourse.") Nor did they go off message, as Ricciotti does when he departs from MuCEM's notions of cultural interchange. Seeing a veiled Muslim woman in the distance, he says: "I hate that, covering the face, and it will cause problems in Marseille. This is a north Mediterranean city."
For Ricciotti, aged 60, is a showman, presenting beneath a mop of greying hair the mournful world-weariness of a disillusioned romantic. "I don't work in pleasure," he says, "I am very anxious." He combines shock with charm, taking your arm and holding your look, and adapting his remarks to your nationality. "I fell in love with Lady Diana," he tells me.
Of his building he continues: "It is like the body of an Ethiopian athlete, bones and sinew, but it also has the flesh of a bather of Ingres." It resists "the terror of minimalism". "Look at that," he says happily, "very vulgar!" And there is indeed splendour in the dazzle of light, shadow and shiny metal. The bridges (which, says Ricciotti, are built with exacting precision and would "explode" if there were any mistake) are impressive long monoliths of quiet force.
But there is a disconnect between the magnificence of the wrap and the building it is meant to serve. The gallery block feels like an ordinary box, and although the project is in theory about porosity and flow, its internal circulation is cramped and stuttering. And after a turn or two of the square spiral of ramps, their glitter becomes monotonous, and I find myself heading to the escape stairs, to get a quicker way out.
I have higher hopes of another Marseille project, Mamo, where the locally raised, Paris-based design prodigy Ora-Ïto has restored the derelict gymnasium on the roof of Le Corbusier's majestic Unité d'Habitation of 1952. Ora-Ïto is making it into an art gallery, starting with an installation by Xavier Veilhan that opens on Thursday – incomplete at the time of visiting, so hard to judge for sure, but it was possible to appreciate the airy modernist cave that is the original gym.
There is some danger in Ora-Ïto's project, as the building's concrete roofscape is already a work of art, a grand composition of architecture, mountains and sea. It doesn't need embellishment. But if Ora-Ïto activates this place and brings people to it, he will fulfil Le Corbusier's dream for Unité's roof, which was to make a public space in the sky. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.
Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean – in pictures
Another week, another port, another museum. Last Sunday I wrote about the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth, where powerful exhibits were enclosed in a building of studied sobriety. Now it is Marseille, and the Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean, or MuCEM, where a questionable display has been given a spectacular wrapper. Where the architects of the Mary Rose museum exude the kindly wisdom of geography teachers, the magus of MuCEM, Rudy Ricciotti, has a different style.
Marseille is one of this year's European Capitals of Culture, and the occasion has been taken to make commercial opportunities for the local business community while pursuing the well-worn idea that architectural icons can transform cities. So there is the Villa Mediterranée, "a centre for dialogue and discussion", alongside MuCEM, where an extravagant and pointless cantilever has been achieved at the expense of quality of detail and generosity in the internal spaces. There is a charming pavilion in the Vieux Port by Foster + Partners, where a mirrored ceiling reflects crowds and water. Parts of the city's seawall have been opened to the public and decorated with artworks.
Of these projects, MuCEM, which cost a stonking €191m, sets out to be the grandest and most dazzling, the high point of the year. Its theme is vast, the millennia of beauties and horrors of the sea that stretches from Beirut to Gibraltar, and there are noble promises to create "an exchange of perspectives", but it also contains a trap. It could be a melange of everything and nothing, a case of mixing all the colours and ending up with mud, of serving vague political ideals at the expense of curatorial direction. It's a trap into which the museum's administration (who were represented at last week's launch by 12 white men sitting in a row, with two women attached at the end) have plunged with the fervour of maenads on Naxos.
You pass from Franco Zecchin's mafia-themed photographs of Palermo to 1960s beach girls, to a painting by Joan Miró, to the colonisation of Algeria, to a poster for a shipping line, to Byron at Missolonghi to a Candida Höfer photograph of the inside of the Louvre, to a replica of the Rosetta Stone, to photographs of employees of the Ottoman Bank, 1906-24. Elsewhere there's a video inspired by Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, in which the people turn on Liberty and butcher her. Some ideas link these objects, but wordy captions mean you lose the desire to find out.
There is a note of colonial regret – to call it "guilt" would be overstating – and some wish to show that, when it comes to both destruction and creation, everyone is as good and bad as one another. A small room is papered with photographs of "shattered cities", such as Smyrna 1922, Barcelona 1936-9, Marseille 1943, Jerusalem 1948 and Algiers 1962, where the perpetrators of atrocities are Muslim, Christian, Jewish and others. Not far off, some more space is given to Sarajevo and Beirut, but if the aim is to make you reflect on these horrors, the effect is to trivialise them.
There are the germs here of maybe 30 decent exhibitions. Zecchin's photographs, for example, are compelling, and MuCEM has also taken over the rich collections of the former National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Paris. Sometimes they prick your curiosity or move your sympathy. But they gain nothing from being piled together like 1970s crockery and alarm clocks in a brocante.
While touring the displays you are aware of something possibly more compelling going on, on the other side of gauzy curtains and glass walls. Depending on the way you entered, you might have experienced it already, a "ziggurat" of glittering ramps wrapped around the cuboid containing the exhibition space, and then saturated with dappled shadows from a lacy screen in dark concrete. This has been compared to a mashrabiya, and a mantilla, and an abstraction of a Cézanne painting, but its architect, Ricciotti, says it is "the rocky bottom of the ocean, lifted up".
From the top of the museum a bridge flies across the water to the historic Fort St Jean, which also contains exhibition space, from where another bridge connects to the rest of the city, making an urban promenade that connects the waterfront to the raised part of the town. This, however, may be too prosaic a way of describing the ensemble: for Ricciotti, it "expresses the existential question of architecture, which is the difficulty of living". It "touches the people of Marseille with its femininity and fragility", but at the same time "relies on very powerful structural solidity", which is by implication male.
The architects in Portsmouth didn't talk like this. Neither have they, as Ricciotti has, made a film in which he talks on architecture while his near-naked girlfriend kneels in front of him and caresses him extravagantly. ("A joke," he explains, "and very ironic, a criticism of discourse.") Nor did they go off message, as Ricciotti does when he departs from MuCEM's notions of cultural interchange. Seeing a veiled Muslim woman in the distance, he says: "I hate that, covering the face, and it will cause problems in Marseille. This is a north Mediterranean city."
For Ricciotti, aged 60, is a showman, presenting beneath a mop of greying hair the mournful world-weariness of a disillusioned romantic. "I don't work in pleasure," he says, "I am very anxious." He combines shock with charm, taking your arm and holding your look, and adapting his remarks to your nationality. "I fell in love with Lady Diana," he tells me.
Of his building he continues: "It is like the body of an Ethiopian athlete, bones and sinew, but it also has the flesh of a bather of Ingres." It resists "the terror of minimalism". "Look at that," he says happily, "very vulgar!" And there is indeed splendour in the dazzle of light, shadow and shiny metal. The bridges (which, says Ricciotti, are built with exacting precision and would "explode" if there were any mistake) are impressive long monoliths of quiet force.
But there is a disconnect between the magnificence of the wrap and the building it is meant to serve. The gallery block feels like an ordinary box, and although the project is in theory about porosity and flow, its internal circulation is cramped and stuttering. And after a turn or two of the square spiral of ramps, their glitter becomes monotonous, and I find myself heading to the escape stairs, to get a quicker way out.
I have higher hopes of another Marseille project, Mamo, where the locally raised, Paris-based design prodigy Ora-Ïto has restored the derelict gymnasium on the roof of Le Corbusier's majestic Unité d'Habitation of 1952. Ora-Ïto is making it into an art gallery, starting with an installation by Xavier Veilhan that opens on Thursday – incomplete at the time of visiting, so hard to judge for sure, but it was possible to appreciate the airy modernist cave that is the original gym.
There is some danger in Ora-Ïto's project, as the building's concrete roofscape is already a work of art, a grand composition of architecture, mountains and sea. It doesn't need embellishment. But if Ora-Ïto activates this place and brings people to it, he will fulfil Le Corbusier's dream for Unité's roof, which was to make a public space in the sky. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.