Roger Boulay (1942-2024) Roger Boulay (1942-2024)By Marion Bertin Roger Boulay was born in Parigné le Polin, in the Sarthe region of central France. In the 1960s, during the first period of his professional life, he worked as an instructor for various organizations. He was also an active member of several associations, including the Centre d'entraînement aux techniques d'expressions (Center for Training in Forms of Expression) and Animation Jeunesse (Youth Movement), a French Catholic scout network. It was in this context that he began studying stone-cutting and metallurgy, which would later play a major role in his work and hone his sensitivity to the materials and techniques used to create objects. He also went on a training trip to Dakar in 1966, at the same time as the World Festival of Black Arts was being held there. Roger Boulay in the Quai Branly Museum, during the exhibition "Kanak, l'art est une parole", 2013 © Photo Martin Bureau/AFP. Roger Boulay’s first visit to New Caledonia took place in 1979, while the cultural effervescence that followed the Mélanésia 2000 festival organized in 1975 was in full swing. At the request of Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1936-1989), Boulay produced an inventory of the Kanak woodcarvers then active on Grande Terre. Following this initial research, Jean-Marie Tjibaou asked him to work on a second project, and it would become Roger Boulay’s central activity for four decades: the creation of an inventory of the dispersed Kanak cultural heritage, in other words of Kanak objects held in museum collections around the world. In the 1980s, he began working on this assignment by himself, with the support of the Ministère de la Culture (French Ministry of Culture) and the Office scientifique culturel et technique canaque (Kanak Scientific and Technical Cultural Office). Emmanuel Kasarhérou began participating in the work in Oceanic museums beginning in 1985, after he was appointed curator and director of the Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie in Nouméa. Together, the two men produced the De Jade et de Nacre exhibition at the Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie and the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie in Paris in 1990, and it presented the first results of their inventory of the dispersed Kanak cultural heritage. At the same time as he was actively working on this project, Roger Boulay obtained a master’s degree in ethnology under the supervision of Jean Guiart (1925-2019) at the École Pratique des Hautes-Études, and then, in 1986, he submitted and successfully defended his doctoral thesis in ethnology at the Université Paris 1, also under Guiart’s supervision. His thesis focused on the large Kanak houses and the connections between architecture and sculpture. From 1982 onwards, he was in charge of the Oceanic collections at the Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie in Paris and set about reorganizing their displays to put greater emphasis on the arts of Vanuatu and New Guinea, as well as on contemporary Aboriginal painting. Boulay acquired an important collection of works from the Yuendumu community in Central Australia for the museum and devoted an exhibition to them in 1993. In the years that followed, he collaborated with several French museums, notably the Musée d'Angoulême and the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Rochefort-sur-Mer and helped them update and improve the exhibitions of their Oceanic collections. At the request of the Direction des Musées de France, he produced a directory of Oceanic collections held in French museums, a tool that was published in 2007 and became essential for research on these collections. He was also involved in the planning for the creation of the Tjibaou Cultural Center, which opened in Nouméa in 1998. Finally, as a lecturer at the École du Louvre from 1985 onwards, he became the first to hold its newly created History of Oceanic Arts chair in 1995 and trained several generations of students. In 2011, a project funded by the New Caledonian government was launched to complete the inventory of the dispersed Kanak cultural heritage. Between 2011 and 2015, the team working on this was made up of several members, including Marianne Tissandier, head of collections at the Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie and of the inventory database there, and Emmanuel Kasarhérou. It was with the latter that Roger Boulay co-curated the exhibition Kanak, l'Art Est une Parole (Kanak – Art is a Word), seen first at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and then at the Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa in 2013-2014. From 2010 onwards, Roger Boulay regularly took his sketchbook and his watercolors with him on museum visits. The artworks he created underscored his interest in technical details and materials. He also produced a number of paintings for comparative purposes. Some of these have been exhibited to the public, notably in the Carnets Kanak exhibition at the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Rochefort, the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and the Tjibaou Cultural Center between 2020 and 2024. Morning mask (19th cent., probably North of the Grande Terre of New Caledonia), preserved in Le Havre Museum of Natural History (Inv. 2012.2.5). This mask was amongst the first objects inventoried by Boulay in the 1980's © Le Havre Museum In his work, Boulay always combined fieldwork in New Caledonia, where he made technical and technological observations, with research carried out on groups of objects held in collections. It is in his work on Kanak houses that this dual method of research is most apparent. He goes into great detail on the construction of the large huts, from the choice of wood species and the tools used, to the symbolism of the decorations and gestures and their connections with the ancestors. His own training in stonework and blacksmithing was what sparked his interest in the technical nature of objects and the relationships between tools and techniques. In this respect, the influence of Hélène Balfet (1922-2001), a member of the Comparative Technology Department at the Musée de l'Homme, was certainly seminal. Another important influence was that of Louis Perrois (1942-2023). For Roger Boulay, the inventory of the dispersed Kanak cultural heritage was intended to be a tool that would make it possible to perform more complete studies of Kanak art based on more extensive corpuses of objects. The inventory indeed helped to considerably broaden the corpus previously established by Jean Guiart, Maurice Leenhardt and Fritz Sarasin. For instance, as a result of it, more than 200 roof spires are now referenced and can be compared to reveal differences in quality and stylistic development. More precise study of the roof spires has also helped to dispel the notion that Kanak art is crude, and has brought the great skill, finesse and artistry that is so evident in the works of certain Kanak sculptors the recognition they deserve. Kanak roof spines sketched by Roger Boulay. This plate is part of the publication Boulay Roger, 2015. Art kanak: savoirs-faire traditionnels: planches aquarellées. Paris, Éditions de l’Étrave. Roger Boulay’s research was also part of a larger undertaking to elaborate a history of collections, at a time when interest in doing so was just getting started. From the earliest inventory projects on the dispersed Kanak heritage, Roger Boulay set out to understand the history of the objects and to retrace the biographies of the people who collected them. The De Jade et de Nacre exhibition and the accompanying catalog are a good example of this and they provide comprehensive insights into the objects in the show. The same is true of the directory of Oceanic collections held in French museums, which takes both those who originally collected the objects and those whose collections they now are as its point of departure. Boulay worked extensively on this subject with Sylviane Jacquemin, who devoted her thesis to the history of Oceanic collections in Paris museums since the end of the 18th century. A final aspect of Roger Boulay’s work lies in the interest he had in popular culture around Oceania and in the stereotyped images of Oceanic peoples that prevailed among Europeans. The exhibition Kannibals et Vahinés was a testimony to this. The Kanak – Art is a Word exhibition combined the history of collections with the history of stereotypes of the Kanak people and their art, and those had always been two central topics for Roger Boulay. Deeply attached to his native region, Roger Boulay returned to it for the last years of his life, while continuing to visit and design both public and private collections of Oceanic objects.
