Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro

Numerous modern artists visited it and were influenced by its "primitive" art, in particular Picasso during the period when he was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

[4] These were exhibited with large paintings of locations in Peru and Colombia by de Cetner and Paul Roux and plaster casts of archeological artifacts made under the direction of Émile Soldi.

[5] The success of this temporary exhibition and the advantage for a country then in the midst of colonial expansion of encouraging popular interest in distant places persuaded the Ministry to make the museum permanent.

However, adaptation of that building was judged too expensive by the Ministry, which instead chose to use part of the Trocadéro Palace, against the advice of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the head of the site commission.

It continued to benefit from gifts and from expeditions after his death in 1908, particularly as a result of publicity activities by Paul Rivet (its director from 1928) and Georges Rivière among socialists and humanists in sympathy with the museum's mission of popular education, and among artists who in some cases offered art from their collections.

[7] The museum promoted itself through a fashion show inspired by the collections and a gala benefit at the Cirque d'Hiver, at which Marcel Mauss reputedly shadow-boxed with featherweight champion Al Brown.

[9][10] Canadian National Railways donated the totem pole from British Columbia, now an emblem of the Musée de l'Homme.

This section is a bit neglected, all the interest being drawn by the Breton interior, to the great detriment of those details that accomplish the true objective of the ethnographic museum.

Together with Georges Rivière, his assistant director, he set a modernization and reorganization project in motion,[17] but the always inadequate quarters in the Trocadéro Palace were demolished in 1935 to be replaced by the Palais de Chaillot, built for the 1937 World's Fair.

In 1884, on Landrin's initiative, it opened the French Gallery that later formed the nucleus of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires.

One of Hamy's arguments for its creation was that ethnology could serve as a reference and source of important information for the other sciences, as well as for crafts and manufacturing, even for foreign trade.

[22][23] Later, during the reform era under Rivet and Rivière that began in 1928, certain Surrealists aligned themselves with the ethnologists in promoting a view of objects within their social and human context, rather than from a purely esthetic perspective.

For two years, ethnologists such as Rivet, Rivière, Marcel Griaule, and André Schaeffner and dissident Surrealists such as Georges Bataille collaborated in a journal called Documents.