Organization
National Museum of Cambodia
សារមន្ទីរជាតិកម្ពុជា
The National Museum of Cambodia (សារមន្ទីរជាតិកម្ពុជា) is Cambodia's main museum of Khmer art and archaeology, in Phnom Penh.[1][2] It was designed by the French artist and scholar George Groslier and opened at Khmer New Year in 1920.[1] Its collection holds pre-Angkorian and Angkorian objects from the 4th to the 13th century.[3] The Royal University of Fine Arts, which grew out of the arts school Groslier also founded, stands behind it.[1][4]
History
The museum began with Groslier's plan for a museum tied to the Cambodian arts school. Known as the Musée du Cambodge from 1919, it was renamed the Musée Albert Sarraut in 1920, after the Governor-General of French Indochina.[1] The foundation stone was laid on August 15, 1917, and the museum was inaugurated on April 13, 1920, at Khmer New Year, in the presence of King Sisowath, the French Résident-supérieur François-Marius Baudoin and Groslier, its director.[1] Groslier stayed on as its curator until 1945.[5] The publisher Kent Davis, who has researched Groslier's life, says that he replaced the French staff of the museum and the arts school with Cambodians in the years after they opened.[4]
France handed control of the museum to Cambodians on August 9, 1951. Cambodia became independent in 1953, and on November 7, 1956 the two countries signed accords on the museum, by then called the Musée National de Phnom-Penh. Madeleine Giteau directed it from 1956 to 1966. In 1966 Chea Thay Seng became its first Cambodian director; he was also dean of the new Department of Archaeology at the Royal University of Fine Arts.[1]
The museum was closed from 1975 to 1979, the years of Khmer Rouge rule, and reopened on April 13, 1979.[1] It turned 100 in 2020.[6]
The building
Groslier designed the building in a traditional Khmer style. It is 54 meters wide and 66 meters deep and stands on a platform 2.5 meters high.[3] Wings were added at both ends of the eastern front in 1924.[1] Inside, a giant Garuda greets visitors, and the hall opens into two wings; one of them is a gallery of statues of the Buddha, set out like a shrine. The galleries surround an inner courtyard with a pavilion that holds a replica of a statue of Yama.[7]
Collection
In 2005 the museum had about 1,500 objects on display and about 14,000 more in its basement.[5] Its first catalogs were made by Groslier, and later by Jean Boisselier and Solange Thierry.[1] Boisselier numbered the collection in the early 1950s, and a Khmer numbering system followed in the early 1980s, so some objects carry three numbers. A bronze bust of a reclining Vishnu, found at Angkor in 1936, is one of them. From 2004 an inventory funded by the Leon Levy Foundation and Shelby White set out to record every object.[5] That year the museum also began a project to build or restore provincial museums and train their staff.[5]
Objects in the collection with pages on KhmerConnection include:
- Devi, a seventh-century sandstone goddess from Kratie province
- Visnu, a sixth-century sandstone statue from Prey Veng province
- Lintel with Visnu on Garuda, a tenth-century lintel from Prasat Sralao
- Jayavarman VII, a portrait statue of the king
The museum also holds a head of King Jayavarman VII found at Preah Khan Kampong Svay. In 2000 the archaeologist Christophe Pottier found a torso near the same temple that matched it, and the two were joined at the museum that year.[8]
Returned statues
Statues cut from their bases at Prasat Chen, a temple of Koh Ker in Preah Vihear province, and taken out of the country in the 1970s, came back to Cambodia in 2014. Christie's returned a Balarama and the Norton Simon Museum a Bhima, and a Duryodhana came back after a legal dispute involving Sotheby's. The three once stood together with six other statues in a battle scene from the Mahabharata.[9] Together with two statues returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the five went on show at the museum in October 2014, in a three-month exhibition supported by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Visitors could watch the museum's restoration workshop at work on them. The museum planned a permanent Koh Ker display for them.[10] For its centenary in 2020, the museum prepared a book, with UNESCO's support, telling how looted Cambodian objects had been brought home.[6]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 National Museum of Cambodia, Museum history (undated)
- ↑ The Cambodia Daily Khmer, report on George Groslier's novel (July 23, 2016; in Khmer)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 National Museum of Cambodia, Museum history (undated; in Khmer)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 The Cambodia Daily, Museum Founder's Book on Cambodian Dance Reprinted (February 5, 2011)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 The Cambodia Daily, In the National Museum's Basement, Order Emerges From the Chaos (January 8, 2005)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 The Cambodia Daily, National Museum to publish "The return of stolen cultural objects to Cambodia" (November 18, 2020)
- ↑ The Cambodia Daily, An Anchor to Cambodia's Past (August 6, 2022)
- ↑ Christophe Pottier, "A propos de la statue portrait du roi Jayavarman VII au temple de Préah Khan de Kompong Svay", Arts Asiatiques 55 (2000), pp. 171-172 (in French)
- ↑ The Cambodia Daily, Ancient Statues Reunited on Cambodian Soil (June 4, 2014)
- ↑ The Cambodia Daily, Returned Statues Set to Go on Display at National Museum (September 30, 2014)