Chirac opens new Paris museum for non-Western art

Jun 20, 2006, 10:54 GMT

Paris - French President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday opened the Branly Museum, a spectacular building housing some 300,000 pieces of indigenous art from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Guatamalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu as well as French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and several of his predecessors were also present for the opening of the museum, which cost 232 million euros (290 million dollars).

Designed by star architect Jean Nouvel, the Branly Museum will exhibit only a little over a tenth of its collection of primitive masks, musical instruments and sculptures - 3,500 pieces - on its 40,600 square metres of exhibition space.

Conceived by Chirac shortly after he became president in 1995, the Branly's collection is the result of some 25 million euros' worth of investment in new acquisitions and what has come to it from the former Musuem of African and Oceanic Arts and the ethnographic department of the Museum of Man.

Its varied collection includes such pieces as an 18th-century sculpture from Hawaii made of whicker, shells and dogs' teeth; an Aztec mask dating from 1521; a Dogon sculpture from the 17th century; a 19th-century Haida mask from British Columbia; and a 15th-century Ifuago mask from the Philippines.

Situated on the Quai de Branly, on the bank of the Seine across from the Eiffel Tower, the museum is expected to receive more than a million visitors during its first year.