Georges Salles

Spécialiste de l’Orient, Georges Salles a fait des fouilles en Iran, en Afghanistan et en Chine. Il est alors conservateur au département des Arts asiatiques du Musée du Louvre, puis, en 1941, directeur du Musée Guimet. De la première Conférence Générale de l’ICOM, tenue à Paris en 1948, son président en exercice Georges Salles rapporte qu'« elle a permis une meilleure compréhension des qualifications nécessaires à notre époque au conservateur d'un musée s'il veut s'acquitter de ses devoirs d'une manière satisfaisante ». Entre 1945 et 1957, il est directeur des Musées de France. Avec Jean Cassou, il pose les bases d’une nouvelle conception du musée d’art moderne, afin de mettre l’art à la disposition du plus grand nombre. C’est avec son soutien qu’ont été réalisés le plafond de Georges Braque au Louvre, la fresque de Pablo Picasso et le mur de Joan Miró à l’Unesco, autant de peintres de renom dont il est l’ami. Collectionneur lui-même, il achète les œuvres de jeunes artistes comme Mark Tobey. Il publie une Histoire des Arts de l’Orient, puis Au Louvre, scènes de la vie du musée, et Le Regard, en 1939. Il dirige avec André Malraux la collection « L’Univers des formes ».

En 1953, il intègre le conseil culturel du Cercle Culturel de Royaumont.

« A few weeks later [in 1951], in Paris, I went to see Georges Salles, director of French Museums, a charming gentleman with whom I had formed a warm but casual friendship, having been introduced by Picasso. I was touched by the fact that in his office at the Louvre hung but a single work of art: a small etching of a girl's head by Cezanne, executed in 1873 under the tutelage of Dr. Gachet at Auvers-sur-Oise. I related my visit to Cezanne's studio and asked whether the French Museums might not eventually intervene to save for posterity this unique locale where so intense an evocation of Cezanne's spirit still survived. He replied that the prospect was highly appealing to him personally, but that he would have little hope of persuading superior authorities to subsidize it. Still, he promised to make inquiries at Aix-en-Provence and advise me of the situation there as concerned possible preservation of the studio. Some months passed before he invited me to tea in his beautiful apartment in the Louvre and told me that the studio was for sale for a sum then approximately between 25 and 30 thousand American dollars. At the time this was an appreciable amount but for what was at stake, it seemed to me almost trifling--a bargain in cultural value. Wouldn't it be possible, I suggested, to raise such an amount by appealing to French philanthropists and owners of works by Cezanne? Monsieur Salles suavely smiled in an expression of ironic skepticism. His compatriots, he said with a sigh, were rarely inclined to part with money for charitable purposes that would bring them but slight public prestige. He suggested that I try to raise money for preservation of the studio in America, where funds for such purposes were much more generously forthcoming. Meanwhile, he would keep an eye on happenings in Aix-en-Provence and try to prevent the studio's sale until, if possible, the purchase funds could be raised in America. For my part, I promised to do all I could to achieve that goal, though the promise must have seemed pretentious, to say the least, coming from a foreigner aged only 29 »

— James Lord, Art in America

« By inscribing the polis in the kosmos, we could also exemplify the preceding with this sentence from Georges Salles: 'An art differs from the one that precedes it and realizes itself because it sets forth a reality of a nature different from a simple plastic modification: it reflects another man... The moment one must seize is the one in which a plastic plenitude responds to the birth of a social type. »

— Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 85. La phrase de Salles a été citée auparavant par Jean-Louis Déotte dans Le Musée, origine de l'esthétique, L'Harmattan, Paris, 1993, p. 17