Musee du Quai Branly
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Musee du Quai Branly
A short distance upstream of the Eiffel Tower, the brash new Musée du Quai Branly (Tues, Wed & Fri-Sun 10am-6.30pm Thurs 10am-9.30pm; €8.50; www.quailbranly.fr; M° léna/RER Pont de l’Alma) cuts a postmodern swathe along the riverbank. Even if you’re not interested in non-Western art, it’s well worth visiting for Jean Nouvel’s exciting architecture. As with his other Parisian buildings, the Fondation Cartier (see p.176) and Institut du Monde Arabe (see p.138), Nouvel’s design palys divide between structure and outside world. Fronting the riverbank is a tall glass wall, which turns the garden into a half-indoor space. The building itself unfurls in a long curve through the middle of the garden – in fact the garden actually runs underneath it at one point – and the outline is delf-consciously broken up be greenhouse-like sections. Elsewhere, brightly coloured stretches of red, purple and brown paneling reveal sudden cavities or box-like swellings that pop outwards from the skin of the structure.
Parisians have rather taken to Nouvel’s design. The museum, however, has proved deeply controversial. When commissioned, it was the pet project of then-President Jacques Chirac, who has a passion for non-Western art. Ethnographers bewailed the plundering of existing collections while art-lovers decried the whole quasi-colonial enterprise of ethnography. Certainly, there is something dubious about lumping together folk artefacts from every part of the world except Europe and North America, and the truth is that the museum is founded on collection of what used to be called Art Premier or “Primitive Art” – a term that’s rightly enough no longer considered acceptable.
Inside the museum, the objects are arranged by their place of origin, as if this ethnography. But they’re dramatically lit by spotlights as if to underline their art status (or as if to emphasize some sort of ethnic spookiness – throughout the museum, you follow a trail in semi-darkness on blood-red flooring between curving "mud" walls in brown leather). Unfortunately, the ambient lighting makes it hard to read the too-brief explanatory panels, and while occasional screens show film footage collected in the field by anthropologists and other agents of imperialism, it feels like a token effort. Carping aside, the actual artifacts (or artworks) are stunning. Even if their original contexts aren’t always made clear, it’s hard not to be moved by the potency and craftsmanship of – to follow the museum’s own example and take a few random examples – Papua New Guinean full-body masks which tread a fine line between the anthropomorphic and the monstrous, Aboriginal Australian do-paintings which illustrate the journeys of different ancestral spirits, exquisite Indonesian gold jewelry, or man-sized wooden statues of the spirits of god-kings from Abomey, in West Africa.
