By Pascale Mollard
www.yahoo.com
Forgotten and abandoned for over 70 years, casts of the art
treasures at the Khmer temple complex at Angkor in Cambodia are coming
out of storage to be rediscovered in a Europe that first shunned them.
The
statues, reliefs and temple decorations in the style of the original
ninth to 15-century monuments at the site in northern Cambodia are to be
exhibited in Paris' Musee Guimet in all their splendour.
The
casts made between 1870 and the late 1920s were commissioned by
Frenchman Louis Delaporte (1842-1925), a member of the expedition team
who "rediscovered" Angkor nearly 150 years ago.
Displayed at
Paris' Indochina Museum at Trocadero until its closure in 1936, the
works were passed from one storage site to another over the next seven
decades, some becoming damaged in the process.
A year ago, the
Musee Guimet took the pieces to a secure warehouse where they were
inventoried and in certain cases restored, ready for the exhibition
entitled "Birth of a Myth. Louis Delaporte and Cambodia" that opens
October 16.
Some 250 works will be shown including the casts and original Khmer art plus photographs and drawings.
For
several centuries the Angkor complex, now listed as a UNESCO World
Heritage Site, was the centre of the powerful Khmer Empire.
Stretching
over 400 square kilometres (250 square miles), the park contains
remains of Khmer capitals, with the impressive 12th-century Angkor Wat
temple its best-known treasure.
Delaporte's collection features
reliefs of Angkor Wat with extraordinary detail that far eclipses what
visitors to the original can see.
"At the site, the original
(reliefs) are high up and barely visible from the ground," said Pierre
Baptiste, exhibition curator and head of the Musee Guimet's southeast
Asia section.
Among the casts is a plaster tower covered with
smiling deities, like the one of the Bayon temple, a major monument at
Angkor. It was sawed into bits after 1936 but will be partially put back
together for the exhibition.
-- Left to gather dust --
Angkor
had already been visited by Europeans including a French naturalist,
Henri Mouhot, who wrote of the wonder, before Delaporte joined the
1866-1868 Mekong expedition
Delaporte was stunned by the sights he discovered and was determined that Europeans see the Khmer art for themselves.
In
1873 he organised a collection of statues, reliefs and architectural
pieces found in the temple ruins to be sent to French museums. At the
same time, he commissioned the casts.
At first they were ignored by Europe.
"When
his 102 boxes of Khmer pieces, including originals, arrived in France
in 1874, nobody wanted to know," said Baptiste. Even the Louvre refused
them.
In the end, the works were sent to a chateau north of Paris at Compiegne where Delaporte opened a museum of Khmer art.
Eager to complete his museum collection, Delaporte sent his sculptors to work in Cambodia and produce more casts.
But
as the 20th century arrived, interest in casts waned and, after the
closure of the Trocadero museum, Delaporte's collection was homeless.
In
1973, after nearly 40 years, the casts were finally housed in an abbey
in northern France but were kept in "dreadful conditions" in humid
cellars, said Baptiste.
Finally, in late 2011 the French culture
ministry took up the cause, moving the casts into proper storage and
treating some for fungus.
It is hoped the casts, at last proudly displayed in a complete exhibition, will seduce a 21st-century public.
The
signs are positive: already, people responding to a request by the
Musee Guimet for public funds to help restore the cast of a door at
Angkor Wat have given thousands of euros.
Nearly 20,000 euros
($26,770) in crowd-funding has also been donated through the MyMajor
website, with 10,000 euros more needed to include the door in the
exhibition.
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