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Georges-Henri Rivière (1897–1985) was a French
museologist, and innovator of modern French ethnographic museology practices.
Rivière studied music until
1925, when he began museum studies at
the Ecole du Louvre, from which he graduated in
1928. During the following years, he cared for the D. David-Weill
collection, which included Chinese porcelains, Greek and Roman
antiquities, and European decorative arts and paintings. In 1928,
Rivière curated his first show of ancient American art at the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs and joined Paul Rivet as his vice-director to begin the
renovation of the dusty Musée du Trocadéro, which was reintroduced to
the public as a fully modernized Musée de l'Homme in 1938.
In 1929 and 1930, Rivière was on the editorial board of Documents, to which he also
contributed articles, such as “The Ethnographical museum of the
Trocadéro" (1929, issue 1), as well as chronicles on popular
culture such as “Religion and ‘Folies-Bergère’” (1930, issue 4),
and profiles on jazz musicians such as Eddie South and Hayman Swayze. During the
thirties, Rivière financed ambitious research projects such as the
Dakar-Djibouti mission, headed by Marcel Griaule, and the Sahara-Soudan
mission, which provided in-depth research and enough material for
over seventy ethnographic exhibitions between 1928 and 1937.
That year, he launched the Musée National des Arts et Traditions
Populaires, also based on the Trocadéro museum's ethnographic
collections. Oriented toward public education, its collection and
exhibitions programme first focused on popular traditional art
forms before dedicating itself to science and research with the
introduction of the Centre d'Ethnologie Française, inaugurated
shortly after the Second World War.
Between 1948 and 1965, Georges-Henri Rivière served as the first
acting director of ICOM, the International Council of
Museums, to which he returned as Permanent Advisor in 1968.
Widely credited for introducing the concept of the ecomuseum, which attempts
to portray civilizations in their natural environments, he was one
of the most highly esteemed museological entrepreneurs in modern
France. The review Museum dedicated an entire issue to
ecomuseums (No. 148, 1985), and included an article by
Georges-Henri Rivière titled, "The ecomuseum, an evolutive
definition". La muséologie selon Georges-Henri Rivière,
was published posthumously in 1989.
Works
- La muséologie selon Georges-Henri Rivière (1989)
Articles
- Isac Chiva, George-Henri Rivière: un demi-siècle
d'ethnologie de la France, Terrain, Numéro 5 — Identité
culturelle et appartenance régionale (Octobre 1985), put online 17
July 2005 [1] (in French)
External
links
Sources
French Ministry of Culture
- Definition of the ecomuseum according to Georges-Henri Rivière
(1976)[3] (in
French)