People enjoy Paris breaks for many reasons,and one of the most popular is to visit the many museums and art galleries Paris has to offer. The most famous are the Louvre of course, the Musee d’Orsay, The Picasso museum and the Rodin museum, but there are many many other smaller mueums and galleries as well as these. For example,  Paris has the Quai Branly museum, which it has to be admitted has caused a lot of controversy among the French and also international visitors since opening on June 23, 2006. Despite or maybe even because of this continued controversy, the Musee Quai Branly has become hugely popular.

The Musée Quai Branly contains an impressive collection of over 300,000 artifacts from Africa and Oceania that was previously displayed at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology, near the Eiffel Tower

The controversy surrounds the nature of the objects in the museum’s collection, and how they came to be owned by the French state. Such things as Alaskan headdresses, Nigerian statues, Senegalese beadwork, and ornamental wear from India help to make up the main collections. So many are against the display of objects plundered from France’s colonial conquest and believe they should be returned to their countries of origin. There’s another type of criticism which complains that the displays are too dependent on on aesthetic appeal and extreme lighting, rather than having usueful descriptions in a proper context. So it’s impossible for me to recommend that you go to The Quai Branly museum and make your own mind up, for that would be encouraging yet more visitors.  Make your mind up before you set out on Paris breaks which museums you want to see and then have the best possible time in Paris.