The Musee du Quai Branly – the largest museum to open in the city in decades – offers an exploration of ancient civilizations; the recently renovated Musee de l’Orangerie invites visitors on a visual stroll through Monet’s tranquil waterlily ponds; and the improved Petit Palais allows a peek at the lavish lifestyles of Parisians in centuries past.
The settings of each are dramatic, and the exhibits are entrancing enough to wow the most seasoned museum aficionado. Each museum offers a journey through a different era in time. But the themes remain constant – glimpses of the pleasures and challenges of everyday life as interpreted by artisans, whether they were carving figurines from a tree in a South African jungle or capturing sunlight on canvas on a summer evening near Paris.
Musee du Quai Branly
A decade in the making and the main cultural legacy of President Jacques Chirac, the Musee du Quai Branly opened Friday. It contains one of the world’s largest collections of ancient African art, along with large exhibitions of statues, textiles, masks and weapons from the Americas, Asia and Oceania.
If your past experiences with ancient art collections consisted of
worn exhibits in a musty setting, toss out all preconceptions. This museum is visually stunning, inside and out.
The museum rambles along the bank of the Seine, its curved glass exterior mimicking the bend in the river. The Eiffel Tower rises just beyond it. The five-story facade of the administrative building is a vertical garden, lushly carpeted with 15,000 plants indigenous to Europe, the United States, China and Japan.
Inside the museum, collections of carved totems and early weapons, masks and statues are juxtaposed with modernistic architecture. The alternating use of darkness and subdued lighting creates the illusion of exploring mysterious caves and forests and stumbling upon the treasures of lost civilizations. It is a museum designed to enthrall adults and youngsters alike.
An exquisitely carved statue from 10th- or 11th-century Mali appears ready to step off its stand and greet visitors with a raised arm. Next to an exhibit of ancient weapons from the Solomon Islands, an attack unfolds in a video reenactment of how ancient peoples may have staged an assault through high grasses. A display of drums from West Africa is accompanied by the rhythmic sounds of the ancient instruments that chiefs used for communication.
The museum has no corridors or hallways. It’s easy to become lost among the free-flowing displays of brilliant feathered headdresses from the Amazon or brightly painted masks of cobwebs and clay from Pacific islands. And that’s exactly what the designers intended: to give visitors a ‘sense of disorientation, breaking from the traditional codes governing museums,’ according to a description of the museum by its curators. ‘Visitors become explorers.’
In the United States, presidents leave papers and notes in libraries named for themselves. In France, presidents leave cultural icons. Francois Mitterrand hired I.M. Pei to design the renovations at the Louvre that resulted in the glass pyramid; Georges Pompidou created the cultural center that bears his name. Chirac, whose hobby is collecting ancient artifacts, commissioned the Quai Branly, which is named for the street on which it is located. Chirac confessed unabashedly last week that he’d love to see the museum named after him.
And just as the museum legacies of previous presidents were controversial when they opened, Quai Branly has stirred political debate over the issue of stripping cultures of their own patrimony and artifacts to create museums in distant cities. Many of the museum’s 300,000 artifacts were brought to France from former colonies.
The museum is an easy 15-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower, making it convenient to pair a visit to the city’s best-known tourist destination with its newest museum.
Musee du Quai Branly (51 Quai Branly, 7th arrondissement, 011-33-1-56-61-7000, http://www.quaibranly.fr) is open daily, except Mondays, 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and till 10 p.m. on Thursdays. Admission
is $10.75. Metro: Iena, Alma-Marceau, Pont de l’Alma, Bir Hakeim.
Musee de l’Orangerie
On the right bank of the Seine, in a corner of the sprawling Tuileries Gardens, the newly renovated Musee de l’Orangerie – with its massive murals of Monet’s ethereal water lilyponds – is one of the most enchanting art museums in Paris.