From the Seine, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, you see almost nothing: a wall covered in plants, and behind it a garden of tall grasses and trees from which a long building emerges, raised on pillars, with coloured boxes projecting from its facade. This is the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, opened in 2006 and devoted to the arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
Inside, on the Plateau des Collections, some 3,500 objects are on display. It sounds like a lot, yet it is only 1% of the collection: the other 350,000 are in the stores, and every year the museum moves some twenty thousand works and lends about a thousand. I picked the seven works in this article from the collections guide the museum publishes in 2026, because for each one the museum tells not only what it is but how it came to Paris. Precisely because the Plateau rotates, some of them may not be on display on the day you go: at the end I tell you how to check.
The museum is closed on Mondays, except during the school holidays, and on Thursdays the museum stays open until 22:00.
How did a mask from Senegal end up in Versailles in the 18th century?
Let’s begin!
How the museum works
You go in from the garden and climb to the Plateau along a ramp, which takes you slowly into the collections. The route is divided into four large areas, Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the seven works follow that order.
Next to some works you will find a small logo: it marks the fifty or so whose journey the museum has traced: where they come from and how they entered the collection, which for many means colonial history. Keep an eye out for it, because those are the most interesting labels in the museum.
1. The bark paintings of Australia
Start with Oceania. A selection of paintings on eucalyptus bark and acrylic paintings tells the story of the art of Australia’s First Nations.
The oldest reached France in 1935, through an exchange with the museum of the State of Victoria in Melbourne. Most were brought back by the artist and anthropologist Karel Kupka in the 1950s and 1960s, with a documentation effort the museum calls invaluable: for each painting he recorded the artist’s name, the clan, the meaning of the motifs and the story tied to the land.
2. Maree Clarke’s Rituel et Cérémonie
In the same area, since December 2025, is a contemporary installation: Rituel et Cérémonie by the Aboriginal artist Maree Clarke, devoted to mourning in Aboriginal communities.
Why are there headdresses lying on the floor of the case?
They are mourning caps, the kopi. Women once wore them until they fell apart by themselves. Clarke moulded them directly on the heads of the people she photographed, women and men from her own circle, with the marks of mourning: the trace of white ochre around the eyes, the long black dress of the women. At the centre of the case is a photograph bearing her thumbprint, which recalls the fire of the family camp. It is the point in the museum where the collection stops speaking in the past tense.
3. The Phi Ta Khon masks of Thailand
Move on to Asia. The museum’s Asian collections are devoted to popular and minority cultures, and complement those of the Guimet museum, devoted to the classical arts of Asia.
In 2013 the head of the Asian collections went to Dan Sai, in Thailand, to study the masks of the Phi Ta Khon festival, the guardian spirits. He took part in the festival, interviewed the craftsmen and bought six masks and costumes directly from the people who made them. He is still in touch with some of them, and lets them know every time their works go back on display. It is the most direct way, and the cleanest, for an object to enter a museum.
4. The kebul mask from Casamance
In Africa the mask from the opening question is waiting for you. The museum considers it the most emblematic of the first objects to reach France from sub-Saharan Africa: an initiation mask from Casamance, in present-day Senegal, made by the Diola people, with two large horns.
In the mid-18th century this mask travelled the route of the triangular slave trade, passed through Louisiana and ended up in Versailles, in the cabinet of curiosities of the Marquis de Sérent. Look at it with that journey in mind: an object made for an initiation rite, ending up among a marquis’s curiosities in the wake of the slave ships.
5. The kono objects and the Dakar-Djibouti mission
What does it mean for an object to have been «requisitioned»?
The museum explains it with an example, without beating about the bush. Between 1931 and 1933 the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission crossed Africa from west to east, collecting objects. In 1931, in Mali, its members requisitioned several ritual objects of the kono initiation society, despite the refusal of the cult leader.
Ninety years later, between 2021 and 2025, the museum retraced the route: French researchers and eight colleagues of other nationalities worked on the fourteen countries the expedition crossed. They went back to the places, including the old kono sanctuary, and spoke with the descendants of the cult leaders. Today the museum uses a precise vocabulary for its works: purchase, fraudulent purchase, commission, exchange, gift, requisition, theft.
6. The painted hide of the three villages
In the Americas about 450 objects are on display, and among them is a collection the museum calls unique in the world: objects of the native peoples of present-day Canada and the United States, which reached France between the 16th and 18th centuries, with the colonisation of New France. They are older than most of the native objects kept in the United States itself.
The stop is the painted hide of the three villages, by the Quapaw of the Mississippi valley, from the 18th century. Because of the care with which it is decorated, the museum thinks it was a diplomatic gift: in those regions meetings between nations opened with the calumet and the exchange of symbolic objects, and the French took part in them with their allies.
7. The Cubeo mask costume from Brazil
The last work has a restoration story. It is a dance costume of the Cubeo people of Brazil, with a skirt of plant fibres and beaten bark.
It was so fragile that the museum had to reshape it by misting it with water, consolidate the tears with threads and tiny pieces of Japanese paper and re-sew the open seams. And while working on it, the restorers discovered that one of the sleeves had been mounted inside out: they took it off and put it back the right way. What you see is also the work of the people who kept it standing.
The plant wall and the garden
On your way out, stop on the quai Branly side. The facade of the building facing the street is a plant wall, a vertical surface covered in plants.
The garden around the museum opens earlier and closes later than the building, and after two hours in the half-light of the Plateau it is the right place to sit in the shade, a few minutes from the Eiffel Tower.
Practical information
Data checked on 22 September 2026 on the official website quaibranly.fr and in the museum’s 2026 collections guide. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. A full ticket costs 14 euros, reduced 11 euros, and covers the permanent collections and the exhibitions. The joint ticket with the Musée Rodin costs 23 euros. Free admission. On the first Sunday of the month the collections and the exhibitions are free for everyone. Opening hours. The museum opens from Tuesday to Sunday from 10:30 to 19:00, and on Thursdays until 22:00. The ticket desks close at 18:00, on Thursdays at 21:00. It is closed on Mondays, but opens on Mondays during the French school holidays, except in July and August. The garden opens at 9:15 and closes at 19:30, on Thursdays at 22:15. Works on display. The museum lends about a thousand works a year and moves about twenty thousand. If you are coming for a particular work, ask at the reception desk whether it is on display: it is the quickest answer. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is covered by the Paris Museum Pass. Getting there. The address is 37 quai Branly. RER C stops at Pont de l’Alma, and from the Eiffel Tower it is a ten-minute walk along the Seine. How long to allow. The seven works need two hours. Thursday evening, when the museum stays open until 22:00, is the right time if your day is already full.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The classical arts of Asia, which the Quai Branly leaves out by choice, are at the Guimet museum, on place d’Iéna: I will write about it soon. In the meantime, along the Seine in twenty minutes you reach the Invalides and the Musée de l’Armée, and the joint ticket with the Musée Rodin takes you straight to the sculpture garden.
Photo credits: garden and plant wall by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); the museum seen from the Eiffel Tower by Medium69 (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons. The photograph of the kebul mask is in the public domain.
