The Original Sexy Beast

An exhilarating new Tarzan exhibition in Paris celebrates the high, low, and pop culture meaning of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape man. Anthony Haden-Guest swings by.

A weathered man was playing the sax alongside the Seine as our cab turned into the Musée du Quai Branly. Then to our left, a startlingly close Eiffel Tower leaped into the sky. More perhaps than any other great city, Paris wallows in its dreams and it seemed appropriate that we were going to a show rooted in a dream, albeit one born far from here, the just-opened mixed media mini-extravaganza: Tarzan! Or Rousseau Amongst the Waziri. The museum was opened by Jacques Chirac in June 2006 and has replaced the old-fangled Musée de l’Homme as a venue to show non-Western arts and artifacts. It’s the work of France’s best-known starchitect, Jean Nouvel, who delivered not one of his skyline-hogging stunners but an agglomeration of unpretentious spaces where it’s the objects and images on view that knock your eye out.

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We skedaddled through another show on the premises, The Jazz Century. Carl van Vechten’s 1936 photographs of Bessie Smith, caricatures by Vanity Fair’s Miguel Covarrubias, a 1919 Man Ray, Jazz, and a Mondrian sketch for Broadway Boogie-Woogie hung alongside material that I don’t think we’ll be seeing in a New York or London museum any time soon, such as a photograph of two performers in blackface belting out My Little Zulu Baby, Paul Colin caricatures and sheet music for A Darktown Cakewalk. But French culturati tend to take a robust attitude to this guilt-edged terrain, as in: That’s the way things were, deal with it!

All in all, Jazz was an appropriate aperitif for Tarzan!, a deliciously over-the-top show, which was the brainchild of Stephane Martin, president of the museum, and curated by an anthropologist, Roger Boulay. It’s an unashamed piece of creative curating and I say unashamed because “creative curators,” by and large, are cultural apparatchiks who build their careers by folding the works of serious artists into their own not always convincing academic structures. But here Boulay and Martin have delivered something rich and strange and very much their own.

The ape man, the enduring pop myth at the core of the show, first swung on a creeper in Tarzan of the Apes, a 1912 pulp by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a Chicagoan who was unfamiliar with Africa but had read his Kipling. Tarzan, the son and heir of a British milord, Lord Greystoke, hit the spot and Burroughs, a born entrepreneur, was soon pioneering a trail to be followed in later decades by the originators of Superman and Batman, by seeing to it that his creation was embedded in comic strips and comic books, radio serials, movies—there would be 46 of these, not including the last and best, Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke—and every sort of promotional ephemera. And the spirit of the Chicagoan—who ended his days in that part of Southern California now known as Tarzana—is mighty yet. A prominent sign in the museum reads: TARZAN OWNED BY EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS INC AND USED BY PERMISSION and as with the ape man’s own treetop ululations, this is both boast and warning.

Tarzan imagery dominates. Some comes from the movies—which Burroughs seldom cared for—but the comic visuals dominate, especially the dramatic inklings of Burne Hogarth, one of the greats of early 20th-century American popular arts, which are here both in cutouts and as original sheets, loaned by the French collector, dealer and publisher of such material, Bernard Mahe. But Tarzan is also the armature for a heady display which reaches way beyond the simple chronicling of a pop phenomenon. After all, the French have form where a preoccupation with non-Western cultures is concerned. Within the Musée du Branly, for instance, is the Theatre Claude Levi-Strauss, a memorial to the author of Tristes Tropiques, and Paris was not only where Josephine Baker and La Revue Negre found glory but also where first Derain, then Picasso focused on the tribal carvings, which had been imported as colonial souvenirs, and transmitted that huge energy into their art.