The Musée du Quai Branly opened in 2006 in a building by Jean Nouvel, a structure partly raised on stilts, with a living plant wall, set between the Eiffel Tower and the Seine. Its collection of objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas was drawn together from the former Musée de l'Homme and the Musée des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, and added to by acquisitions and gifts.
The museum presents its collection as art rather than anthropology, which shapes both what is shown and how. The approach has been praised and criticised in equal measure, and the tour addresses that tension directly. The objects themselves, masks, sculptures, textiles, instruments and ritual pieces, are often extraordinary. The question of how to look at them, and what their presence in a Paris museum means, is part of the visit.
What you will see
The collections. Sculpture, masks and ceremonial objects from across Africa, with particular depth in the West and Central African traditions, one of the finest collections of Pacific art in Europe, with work from Papua New Guinea, the Sepik and the islands of Melanesia, and the pre-Columbian Americas, objects from Mesoamerica, the Andes and North America that trace the traditions Europeans encountered and largely destroyed.
The building. Jean Nouvel's architecture is a statement in itself, the stilt structure, the plant wall, the long internal ramp, all of it a deliberate argument about how to frame non-Western objects inside a Western institution.
Africa and Oceania · the pre-Columbian Americas · the building itself
Pépin's advice
The question of provenance is part of the tour. Several objects in the collection have contested histories, and the tour takes on the debate about colonial collections and repatriation, because it is inseparable from the objects themselves.
Combine it with the Eiffel Tower. The museum stands immediately beside the tower. A morning at the Quai Branly and an afternoon on the Champ de Mars is a natural pairing.
