The history of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac

Every museum is an argument about what belongs in a museum, and this one has had that argument more openly than most. The building is only twenty years old, but the collection inside it is the product of a century of French institutions renaming themselves, and the debate about what to call the objects, and where they should be, is not finished.

From the Musée des Colonies to the Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie

One strand of the collection begins in 1931 with the Musée des Colonies, opened for the colonial exhibition of that year. It became the Musée de la France d’outre-mer in 1935 and, after the empire was gone, the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. Each name tells you what the objects were thought to be for at the time: first evidence of possession, then evidence of a relationship, then, at last, art.

The Musée de l’Homme

The other, larger strand came from the ethnography holdings of the Musée de l’Homme at the Trocadéro, across the river. Those objects had been collected as scientific specimens of human societies rather than as works of art, and their transfer to a museum that would light them like sculpture was the single most contested decision in the project. Whether you call the results art or ethnography still shapes how you read the labels on the plateau. The museum itself now speaks of the arts and civilisations of four continents, and avoids the older phrase “arts premiers” in its own description.

Chirac’s project: 1996 to 2006

Jacques Chirac, a collector of non-European art since long before he was president, announced a “musée des Civilisations et des Arts premiers” in 1996. The public institution charged with building it was created on 14 July 1998. Jean Nouvel won the architecture competition; Gilles Clément designed the garden and Patrick Blanc the green wall (more on both on the garden page). The museum opened in June 2006 with roughly 3,500 objects on display out of some 370,000 in the collection, a proportion that still holds. In 2025 it welcomed 1,394,000 visitors, one of its best years.

The 2016 renaming

In 2016 the museum added Chirac’s name to its own, becoming the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. The site keeps the shorter form because that is what everyone in Paris says, but the long form is on the tickets and the signage. The museum held its twentieth anniversary festival from 19 to 21 June 2026; the 2026 exhibitions page covers the anniversary events still to come.

Who was Édouard Branly?

The quay, and so the museum, is named after Édouard Branly (1844–1940), a physicist who taught at the Institut Catholique de Paris and who in 1890 invented the coherer, an early detector of radio waves. He has nothing to do with the collection; the museum simply took the name of its street, as Parisian institutions often do. Then in 2021 the city renamed the quay itself Quai Jacques-Chirac, which is why the address is now 37 quai Jacques Chirac while the museum keeps “quai Branly” in its name. It confuses taxi drivers and search engines alike; the how to get there page uses both.

Restitution

Like every European museum holding objects from former colonies, the quai Branly is part of France’s ongoing restitution discussions, and the labels in the Africa section in particular have grown more careful about provenance in the years I have been visiting. I will leave the specifics to the museum and the governments concerned.

The building as history

Nouvel’s building was itself an argument: a museum on pilotis above a garden, hidden from the quay by a glass screen, with a single wall-less plateau instead of rooms and coloured boxes pushed out of the north facade. It was meant to feel unlike the Louvre, and it does. Whether that was the right way to show these particular objects is a question I still turn over on the ramp; the what to see page gives you the route to judge for yourself.

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