พิพิธภัณฑ์และโครงการพิพิธภัณฑ์เก บรันลี – ฌัก ชีรักMusée du quai Branly — Jacques ChiracMusée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac

The museum was assembled out of two older ones with incompatible purposes: the 25,000 objects of the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, created for the Colonial Exposition of 1931, and the 250,000-object ethnology collection of the Musée de l'Homme, created for the Paris Exposition of 1937. One was run by art historians, the other by anthropologists. The new museum was put under two ministries to match, and ten thousand further objects were bought.

Critics went at it from both directions on opening. Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, 2 July 2006, called it "a missed opportunity and an inexplicable exercise" and asked whether religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the modern Western sense, would be showcased "like baubles, with no context". James Clifford wrote that in this museum "'illusion' and the 'work of art' coexist uneasily with the realism of ethnography and history". Others praised the same building: the Financial Times called the layered galleries an "animated, occasionally jarring dreamscape", the Washington Post called it visually stunning.

The returns argument has a paper trail. In 2016 the French government refused objects requested by the president of Benin on the ground that the national collections are inalienable. In 2018 the report Emmanuel Macron commissioned from Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr argued that artefacts taken unlawfully in the colonial period should go back when asked for. Macron then promised Benin 26 pieces taken by force from Dahomey; no French law then existed to permit it. By late 2021 the objects were ready and the museum staged a final exhibition around them. Separately, after a change in French law in 2010, the museum returned mokomokai — Māori tattooed heads — to New Zealand on 23 January 2012.

In December 2025, 77 works from the museum's Louvre selection were installed in the Louvre's new Gallery of the Five Continents, shown alongside Western art. This project has not read the museum's own image-rights statement and makes no claim about whether its collection photographs are openly licensed; the safe assumption for this atlas's picture pipeline is that they are not.