1923 - 2023:
The Friends of the Museum celebrated their 100th anniversary!
Centenary: Restoration Projects
To celebrate 100 years of friendship between the Guimet Museum and its Friends, we appealed to your generosity through a fundraising campaign to support two restoration projects that are particularly close to our hearts, as these works entered the Guimet collections thanks to the Friends.
Acquired in 1939 and 1975 respectively, these works had never been exhibited to the public due to their fragile condition. They were displayed for the first time during the SAMG Centenary exhibition.
Restoration of the Portrait of the Monk Kobo Daishi: Mission Achieved!
This portrait is a masterpiece of 15th-century Japanese painting, dating from the Muromachi period. It was donated to the Guimet Museum by the Friends of the Museum in 1939. Originally mounted as a scroll, it had suffered the ravages of time and its "Western-style" mounting. It was shown to the public for the first time in the SAMG Centenary exhibition.
This restoration, with a budget of €20,000, allows both the restoration of the painted surface and the reinstatement of a mounting according to traditional methods.
Restoration of the 146 Cambodian Leather Shadow Puppet Figures
It was in 1975, amidst a highly tense historical context, that this set of 146 shadow puppet figures, crafted by Cambodian artisans, entered the collections of the Guimet Museum with the support of its Friends.
The leather figures were in need of restoration. A complete restoration was estimated at €120,000.
SAMG Centenary Gala Dinner, June 27, 2023
Relive this gala in honor of the association's centenary!
Centenary: The special Book
To coincide with the Centenary exhibition at the Guimet Museum (June 7 to September 4, 2023), you can purchase the unpublished book about the history of the Friends of the Museum online here!
Find the Centenary book at the bookstore!
Dedicated exhibition (07/06/2023 to 04/09/2023)
The centenary exhibition, which opened in June 2023, retraced the main lines of the relationship between the Guimet Museum and the Society of Friends, highlighting some of its key figures: the Sanskrit scholar Émile Senart (1847-1928), the financier David David-Weill (1871-1952), the explorer and Tibetologist Jacques Bacot (1877-1965), and the archaeologist and sinologist Paul Pelliot (1878-1945). It also underscored the key moments that marked its role in supporting the institution: during the Second World War and during the unrest that plunged Cambodia into chaos (1970-1975). Since then, the Society of Friends of the Guimet Museum has also expanded, notably to the United States with the American Friends of the Guimet Museum, and even to Hong Kong.
This century of shared history was presented in the narthex on the museum's second floor, with previously unseen archival documents and a selection of some thirty works that entered the Guimet Museum's collections thanks to the generosity of the SAMG from 1933 to the present day. Some of these are now among the essential masterpieces of the Guimet Museum, covering all geographical areas, chronological periods, and artistic techniques: Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan sculpture; paintings, prints, and objets d'art from Japan; shadow puppet figures from Cambodia; and ancient and contemporary ceramics.