 Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac | |
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| Established | 2006 |
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| Location | 37 Quai Branly, 75007 Paris, France |
| Coordinates | 48°51′39″N2°17′51″E / 48.8608°N 2.2975°E /48.8608; 2.2975 |
| Type | Museum for the traditional art of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas in Paris, France |
| Visitors | 1,150,000 (2016)
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| Website | www.quaibranly.fr |
TheMusée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (French pronunciation:[myzedykebʁɑ̃liʒakʃiʁak]; English:Jacques Chirac Museum of Quay Branly), located inParis, France, is amuseum designed by French architectJean Nouvel to feature the indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The museum collection comprises more than a million objects (ethnographic objects, photographs, documents, etc.), of which 3,500 are on display at any given time in both permanent and temporary thematic exhibits. A selection of objects from the museum is also displayed in theGallery of the Five Continents of theLouvre.
The Museum Quai Branly (MQB) opened in 2006; it is the newest of the major museums in Paris and received 1.15 million visitors in 2016.[1] It is jointly administered by the French Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and serves as both a museum and as a center for research.
The museum is located in the7th arrondissement of Paris, on the left bank of theSeine, close to theEiffel Tower and theAlma Bridge. Since its conception, the museum has been the subject of praise as well as controversy, with some journalists, scholars, and governments calling for therepatriation of parts of its collections that were acquired throughcolonial conquest.
Following the tradition of French presidents building museums as monuments to their time in office, as exemplified by PresidentsGeorges Pompidou (Centre Georges Pompidou);Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (Musée d'Orsay) andFrançois Mitterrand (Grand Louvre), the project for a new museum celebrating the arts ofthe Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania was brought to completion by PresidentJacques Chirac.
Since the first half of the 20th century, a number of French intellectuals and scientists, includingAndré Malraux,André Breton, andClaude Lévi-Strauss, had called for a single and important museum in Paris dedicated to the arts and cultures of theindigenous people of the colonized territories. These had been considered by the science of that time as "primitive" peoples without a culture of their own. Non-European cultural objects were considered as mere ethnographic items or at best as "exotic" art, as exemplified by the large collections gathered by French explorers, missionaries, scientists and ethnologists.
A proposal for such a museum had been made by the ethnologist and art collectorJacques Kerchache in a 1990 manifesto in the newspaperLibération, called "The masterpieces of the entire world are born free and equal." The manifesto was signed by three hundred artists, writers, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians. Kerchache brought the idea to the attention of Jacques Chirac, then Mayor of Paris, and became his advisor. Chirac was elected president of France in 1995, and in the following year announced the creation of a new museum combining the collections of two different museums:
The two museums and collections were very different in their purposes and approaches; the MAAO was first and foremost an art collection, run by art historians and conservators, while the Museum of Man was run by ethnologists and anthropologists and thus was interested in the social-cultural context and uses of the objects. As a result of this division, the new museum was put under two different ministries; the Ministry of Education, which oversaw the ethnological teaching and research; and the Ministry of Culture and Communication, which oversaw the artworks.[2]
In addition to these existing collections, gathered by French explorers and ethnologists from around the world, the directors of the new museum acquired ten thousand further objects.[3]
The first venture of the new museum was the opening of a new gallery within theLouvre Museum, in thePavillon des Sessions, dedicated to what were called thearts premiers, the "first arts". This new section met immediate resistance; traditionalists felt that this kind of art did not belong in the Louvre, while many ethnologists felt that it risked splitting the collections into two parts, with the best objects going to the Louvre. The issue was resolved by a decree by President Chirac and the government of Prime MinisterLionel Jospin on 29 July 1998, to construct an entirely new museum at 29–55 Quai Branly on the banks of the Seine not far from the Eiffel Tower in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. In December 1998, the museum was officially established, and Stéphane Martin was named its president.[2]
The site selected for the new museum, covering an area of 25,000 square meters, was occupied by a collection of buildings belonging to the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism. PresidentFrançois Mitterrand had originally intended it for one of his grand projects, an international conference center, but that project had been abandoned because of intense opposition from the residents of the neighborhood. At the beginning of 1999 a jury was formed and an international competition was held to select an architect. The competition was won by French architectJean Nouvel, whose other major works include theInstitute of the Arab World (1970), and theFondation Cartier (1991–94) in Paris, the renovation of theLyon Opera (1986–93), the Palais de Justice inNantes, and the ParcPoble Nou inBarcelona (2001).
In his design, Nouvel took into account the criticisms of the neighbors who had blocked the Mitterrand project. The new museum was designed to correspond to the adjacent buildings as much as possible; the main building appears lower than the buildings around it and is partially screened from view by its gardens. The shape of the main building follows the curve of the Seine, and the three administrative buildings are constructed to harmonize with the Haussmann-period buildings next to them.[2]
In an attempt to create "an original venue that would do justice to the infinite diversity of cultures",[This quote needs a citation] the museum is designed in a way that that is supposed to feel open and inclusive. Nouvel designed the interior of the museum in such a way as to liberate artifacts from the traditional design of museums by not including walls, barriers and railings in the gallery spaces. There are no physical or spatial barriers separating the four main geographical areas, so that visitors can go on a simulated "journey" by traveling from one continent to the other. Labels are discreet, and plaques with ethnological context are brief, emphasizing theaesthetic qualities of the displays rather than their cultural history.[4]
Construction of the new museum began at the beginning of 2001 and was completed in 2005. The Musée du Quai Branly was inaugurated on 20 June 2006 and opened to the public on 23 June.[5][6][7]
The museum opened under the nameMusée du Quai Branly, after the street alongside which it is built, aquay of theSeine named for the scientistÉdouard Branly. Earlier suggestions wereMusée duTrocadéro, after the home of the Musée de l'Homme where it was initially to be located,Musée des arts premiers ("first arts", corresponding to the politically incorrect "primitive art"), orMusée [de l'homme,] des arts et des civilisations ("museum of [man,] the arts and civilizations").[8][9] The location-based name was chosen to avoid controversy over terminology, although cynics felt it was a temporary name that would make it easier to rename it later afterJacques Chirac, the president who instigated the project.[10][11] In June 2016 "Jacques Chirac" was appended to the museum's name.[12]
The museum contains the collections of the now-closedMusée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie and theethnographic department of theMusée de l'Homme, plus recently acquired objects. The permanent collection has 300,000 works, 700,000 photographs, 320,000 documents, 10,000 musical instruments, and 25,000 pieces of textile or clothing.[6] The main collections area displays about 3500 objects, rotating 500 each year.[6] The museum presents both permanent exhibitions and large temporary exhibits that change every six months. It also offers thematic exhibits featuring masks and tapa cloth from Oceania, costumes from Asia, and musical instruments and textiles from Africa.[citation needed]
Temporary exhibits at the Museum touch upon a wide variety of subjects and themes. Themes of the exhibits in the summer of 2014 included the history and culture oftattoos, propaganda posters from Vietnam, and an exhibit about the influence of the culture of Oceania on American popular culture in the 20th century. This last exhibit, called "Tiki Pop", featured films, posters, music, clothing, and a recreation of a Polynesia-themed "tiki bar" from the 1960s.[citation needed]
Among its collections of ethnographic objects from Africa, Asia, America and Oceania, the museum has notable collections of objects, gathered during the French colonization of North America, from Quebec to Louisiana, in the 17th and 18th centuries. Another group of items presents the role of women voyagers in the 18th and 19th centuries.[citation needed] It also has a collection of paintings byAboriginal Australians, in particular paintings made on eucalyptus tree bark. A small selection of the museum's objects was first displayed in 2000 in thePavillon des Sessions of theLouvre Museum. In December 2025, 77 artworks of this selection were included in the newly designed Gallery of the Five Continents. Juxtaposing artworks from all continents, this new gallery presents non-European artistic traditions alongsideWestern art in a global narrative ofworld cultures.[13]
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The museum complex has four buildings, occupying 30,000 square metres (320,000 sq ft), which, along with the garden, cost 233 million euros to construct.
Visitors enter the main building through a small entrance, and then follow a winding ramp up a gentle slope to the main gallery, two hundred meters long. The main gallery is relatively dark inside, with a small amount of sunlight entering from outside, and with direct lighting only on the exhibited objects from the permanent collection. Thirty different galleries are placed on the north side, which are visible on the outside of the structure as boxes of different colours. Three mezzanines look down on the main gallery; the center mezzanine is the multimedia center, and the other two mezzanines are used for temporary exhibits. The west mezzanine has a new exhibition every 18 months, while the exhibition on the east mezzanine changes each year. The garden side of the building contains an auditorium, classrooms, lecture hall,multimedia library and a bookshop.
The auditorium, named after notable French cultural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, is situated under the main hall and is also accessible from the garden. It was designed by Jean Nouvel with the cooperation ofdUCKS scéno for the scenography and Jean-Paul Lamoureux for its acoustics. This auditorium is used for concerts, film shows or public conferences. It allows several configurations thanks to acoustic curtains conceived byIssey Miyake.[citation needed]
In the original project for the museum, 7,500 square meters of the 25,000-square-meter site were set aside for gardens. The winning architect, Jean Nouvel, increased the size of the gardens to17,500 m2. They were designed by landscape architectGilles Clément, and present the exact opposite of a traditionalFrench formal garden: There are no fences, no lawn, no gates, no monumental stairway; instead, Clément composed a tapestry of small gardens, with streams, hills, pools, and groves, using the native French plants and imported plants accustomed to the Paris climate. Originally, 169 trees and 72,000 plants were planted.
On the north side, facing the street along the Seine, the garden is protected by a high double wall of plate glass, which blocks most of the sound from the street. The gardens on the north side practically hide the museum building. Instead of straight paths and a long axis to the entrance, the paths wind through the gardens, with no apparent destination.
Another notable feature of the Museum garden is thegreen wall, or wall of vegetation, created by botanistPatrick Blanc. This living wall of greenery covers800 m2 of the façades of the museum, and150 m2 of the interior walls. It includes 15,000 plants of 150 different varieties, coming from Japan, China, the Americas and Central Europe.[18]
The museum has a library with 3 main departments:
Many of the specialized scientific journals, data bases, documents, visual or audiovisual objects can be accessed online.[19] Moreover, the library also holds collections from important ethnologists, includingGeorges Condominas, Françoise Girard, and Nesterenko, as well as that of art collector Jacques Kerchache.
The museum has published many catalogues and various other publications, among them:
It has also co-published several noted ethnomusicology audio sets with Frémeaux & Associés, including booklets in both French and English, among which:
Discussions about the museum's name prior and after its opening reflected criticism about its scope and political viewpoints.[20] In a summary review of 2006The Guardian reported that theFinancial Times appreciated the museum’s architectural and curatorial design, praising features such as the layered galleries that create "an animated, occasionally jarring dreamscape."[21] This review characterized the museum as a "real gift" for Paris.The Washington Post called it "visually stunning, inside and out."[21]
Other reviews in public media were more critical: TheInternational Herald Tribune commented on the architecture: "Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love."[22]Newsweek wrote that "the jungle metaphor is so overdone that it starts to seem silly, or condescending."Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic ofThe New York Times, published a review on 2 July 2006 entitled "Heart of Darkness in the City of Light". He called the museum "a missed opportunity and an inexplicable exercise" and said it was "devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic. The place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. [...] The place simply makes no sense. Old, new, good, bad are jumbled all together without much reason or explanation, save for visual theatrics."[23]
In 2007 Bernice Murphy, co-founder of theSydney Museum of Contemporary Art and later National Director of Museums Australia and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the International Council of Museums was quoted that she found the whole of Quai Branly to be a "regressive museology" and the presentation ofAboriginal art "in a vegetal environment" to be "an exoticmise en scène" in the worst taste.[24]
On the museum’s tenth anniversary in 2016,The Art Newspaper highlighted its ambitious role in bringing together vast collections of non-Western art and acknowledged its importance as a cultural institution. The article noted that the museum’s founder, Jacques Chirac, was committed to increasing public appreciation of ethnographic collections and the museum’s rich permanent holdings. The article noted the 97 temporary exhibitions during the first decade and quoted Steven Engelsman, the director of Vienna’sWeltmuseum, who said that the Quai Branly has “worked miracles to increase the public appreciation of ethnographic collections and museums”.[25]
Another discussion has focused on what political role the museum has played for the interior and exterior politics of France. At the time the museum opened in 2007, France was attempting to reconcile increasingethnic diversity among the nation's population within its republican model of assimilation. From this perspective, the museum has been seen as a symbolic effort to reach out to people from non-Western background, while at the same time proclaiming the country's open attitude to the world. Given this supposed motivation behind the museum, there has been some controversy among intellectuals as to what the museum's ultimate purpose is, and whether or not the presentation of the galleries actually achieves this purpose.[4]
Shortly after the museum's opening in June 2006, art historianJames Clifford published his impressions concerning the mission and possible future development of the institution. Among other aspects, he commented on the "proper balance betweenaesthetics and anthropology" and wrote: "In the Musée du Quai Branly, 'illusion' and the 'work of art' coexist uneasily with the realism of ethnography and history."[26] After years of debate on these two approaches to presenting cultural objects in museums, the aesthetic approach has been favored in the museum's design and its presentation of the permanent collection. Stéphane Martin, the founding president of Quai Branly, envisaged a new kind of institution that aims to be more than a traditional art or ethnographic museum. Rather, Martin saw the museum as a cultural centre with multiple functions, serving diverse audiences with different needs and backgrounds. Further, Clifford wrote: "In practice, museums like Quai Branly do not answer to stable constituencies of artconnoisseurs or social scientists."[26]
In his 2006 article forThe New York Times, Michael Kimmelman said: "The dichotomy between ethnology and aesthetics is too simple. It's not possible to draw a line between form and function, which are inseparably mixed in ways that constantly shift." Further, he asked: "Will religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the modern, Western sense, be showcased likebaubles, with no context?"[23]
The anthropologistNélia Dias referred to these questions with caution by examining the relationship between museum anthropology and general museum practices. In her 2008 article "Double erasures: rewriting the past at the Musée du quai Branly", she wrote: "If thedichotomy of formal presentation versus contextual presentation is no longer relevant to museum anthropology practice, Branly does not seem to solve, in its permanent gallery, the dilemma between anthropology and aesthetics. By contrast, its temporary exhibits attempt to overcome such a dilemma and to open new venues through the display of objects in an historical and cross-cultural perspective. Whether this will lead to a new path remains to be seen."[4]
A 2017 article in the scientific journalMuseum Anthropology reported about interviews and observations of museum staff and visitors. This study aimed to provide further insight into the relationship between the museum's approach to presenting its collection either as artworks or as cultural objects in ethnographic ways. According to the study, the museum's design creates an "immersive experience" and visitors have experienced a "disorienting journey through colonial context collections." At the same time, visitors had perceived a lack of historical context as well as reflections oncolonialism and cultural disappearance. Further, this had raised questions about the representation andownership of cultural artifacts.[27]
In 2018, the museum was at the center of a debate about therepatriation of objects that were removed from former French colonies during the period of colonialism. This was following the release of a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron and prepared by two academics,Bénédicte Savoy of France andFelwine Sarr of Senegal, who were asked to draw up areport on the restitution of African cultural heritage. This report[28] argued that artifacts that were taken unlawfully throughout the French colonial period should be returned, if the country in question asks for them.[29] Of the 90,000 sub-Saharan artifacts in France, 70,000 are in the archives or public exhibition of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.[29]
Following the report's publication, Macron promised to return to theRepublic of Benin 26 pieces that were forcibly removed during war from territory in historicalDahomey that now comprises part of Benin,[30] though no French law or legislation existed at the time that would have enabled such a promise.[31] This was a complete shift from preceding French policy on the restitution of cultural objects collected during the colonial period. As an example, in 2016 the French government had refused to return artifacts requested by the president of Benin, on the grounds that the French national collections are "inalienable", i.e. no part of them could be given away.[29]
By late 2021, the 26 objects were ready to be returned to Benin and the museum hosted a final exhibition on this occasion, including lectures, discussions and historical documentary films.[32] Since the publication of the Sarr/Savoy report, the international discussion about restitution of looted cultural heritage has gained new momentum, and major museums and other collections not only in France have intensified restitutions and their cooperation with African institutions and art historians.[33]
The MQB was involved in a controversy over the return ofMaori tattooed heads held in France and known asmokomokai. The controversy arose after a museum in Normandy decided to return a tattooed head to New Zealand. Since 2003, theTe Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand's national museum, had embarked on a program of requesting the return of Maori remains held in institutions around the world.[34] While the MQB was initially reluctant to return themokomokai to New Zealand, a change in French law in 2010 allowed for discussions which resulted in repatriation.[34] Themokomokai were formally returned to New Zealand on 23 January 2012 and they are now housed at Te Papa, but are not on display.[34]
In 2024, theParliament of the Central Tibetan Administration criticized the museum for removing the word "Tibet" from its catalogues and exhibitions in favor of theChinese government term "Xizang Autonomous Region."[35][36][37] The use of the name "Xizang" was considered an "historical fraud" in an article publish by a group of Asian scholars published on 3 September 2024 in the French newspaperLe Monde.[38] By the end of September, the Musée du Quai Branly had formally apologised to a delegation of six Tibetan activist groups and said it will revert to using the description "Tibet".[39]
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