New Paris museum for tribal arts

"This museum in some way is the recognition of cultural diversity, of what it brings to today's world and how it is necessary for the respect of mankind and for peace," Chirac told a television documentary last week.

"Nothing is worse than the disparaging glances sometimes thrown by pseudo intellectuals on the art, production and talent of others."

The French president, whose office is surrounded by works of tribal arts and who has been caught during boring meetings leafing through auction catalogues, first set up a commission to study the project in 1995.

For architect Nouvel, the new museum of four buildings linked by walkways and footbridges and including three suspended galleries and a eye-popping vegetal wall, is directly inspired by the collection.

"It is a sanctuary for the scorned and censured works produced not so long ago in Australia and America. It is a haunted place, wherein dwell and converse the ancestral spirits of those who awoke to the human condition and invented gods and beliefs. "It is a strange, unique place. Poetic and disturbing," he wrote in his 1999 submission which won him the competition to design the museum.