Tropenmuseum or Quai Branley...or both?
 

Hi. I like the art of Oceania, and Precolumbian art, so I would like to check out these museums - the Tropenmseum in Amsterstam and the Quai Branley in Paris.

What are your thoughts - is one "better" than the other, or are both well worth a visit?

The Quai Branly is not rich in pre-Columbian art for the simple reason that the collection reflects mainly its colonial past--it is rich in objects of the countries it occupied.

They're different. I'd have said the Tropenmuseum struggles in places with its own background in the Dutch colonial experience, where it's dealing with how it used to present information on the colonies (which wouldn't apply to what it does in relation to Oceania and Latin America). The Quai Branly, being a recent development, seems not only to cover a lot more detail, but also with a more up-to-date anthropological approach.

I wouldn't pick one over the other.

You might also like the small but brilliant ethnologic collection in the Louvre.

http://www.louvre.fr/en/departments/...n-des-sessions

The Quai Branly museum is worth a visit for its amazing architecture, on top of its collections.

I agree with Kerouac. It is truly a marvel!

Or, and, go see the Tropenmuseum before it closes. Over the last decades it has concentrated on doing "big shows", with its own collection as the foundation of the museum. That is a collection stemming from its past as the royal colonial institute, so, the Dutch East Indies figure heavily: and that part of the collection is excellent.

Its library has been sold of now, and the museum will probably close, due to lack of government funding

I've also been to Quao Branly, and sort of liked and didn't like it. It's Levy - Strauss's ideas materialized as a museum one might say. I've been on two occasions, one when it just opened and one a couple of years later. To my eyes, it's a museum that dates rather quickly, because so many of its ideas are built into the architecture itself. I like the "music boxes" upstairs best, but the rest of the exhibits are underwhelming. Perhaps precisely because of the programmatic architecture.

lots of typos, sorry.

My husband said the Tropenmuseum was the most boring museum he has ever been to.

He is not fascinated with Oceania like I am, but it was a disappointment to me, too. There didn't seem to be all that much there. The entire first floor was vacant.

I would not recommend it - there's so much more to see in Amsterdam.

Again, they're scuppering the entire place: the library has been sold and partly scrapped, and the museum proper is expected to lose the little bit of funding it still has and is supposed to close down somewhere in the near future. Completely different from the situation at Branly, a museum that is well financed with state grants and a lot of private sponsorship.