After a longtime Palais de Tokyo patron controversially cut off support for the Paris museum, denouncing it for mounting a show contending with Palestine, nearly 200 artists, curators, and critics have thrown their support behind the institution.
In an open letter that was first published in Le Monde on Monday and now available via the DCA, a network of French contemporary art museums, the signatories said that the situation posed a potential threat to “institutional freedom” in France.
“Like art and artists, our cultural institutions must remain free, or else risk disappearing,” the letter reads. “To remain free, they must be able to work with the professionalism and peace of mind that allow them to provide the conditions for the confrontation of ideas that is at the heart of their mission.”
Among the letter’s signatories were artists Éric Baudelaire, Camille Henrot, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Pierre Huyghe; Emma Lavigne, former director of the Palais de Tokyo; Alexia Fabre, curator of the forthcoming Biennale de Lyon; and dealer Jocelyn Wolff.
The letter referred to the resignation of collector Sandra Hegedüs from the Amis du Palais de Tokyo, a patrons’ group that she had been affiliated with for 15 years.
She said she would no longer support the museum after one of its current shows, whose description refers to efforts toward Palestinian liberation. Hegedüs wrote that the exhibition “proposes, without perspective, some biased views and lies about the history of this conflict,” and accused the museum of supporting “wokeism, anti-capitalism, pro-Palestine, etc.”
Philippe Dian, the president of the Amis du Palais de Tokyo, said that the job of patrons of the museum was “not to pass judgment on its programming”; the museum’s director Guillaume Désanges said that the institution’s purpose was to “shed light upon, to question and to put into perspective – particularly historical perspective – the current events that are shaping society.”
In France, conservative publications have seized on the situation, with the right-wing outlet Causeur accusing the Palais de Tokyo of disseminating “propaganda” with its exhibitions in the wake of Hegedüs’s letter.
It is the second major controversy that the Palais de Tokyo has weathered in the past two years, the other revolving around a Miriam Cahn painting made in response to violence in Ukraine. Right-wing politicians and publications claimed that the work promoted pedophilia, an accusation that even made its way to court in France. Ultimately, French legal authorities ruled that the painting did not harm children.
Monday’s open letter included mention of the Cahn fracas, which the letter called another example of the ways that the Palais de Tokyo had been “targeted.”
