Musée Barbier-Mueller

The Musée Barbier-Mueller is a private museum, founded in Geneva in 1977 to study, display and publish its collection of traditional non-western art. Josef Mueller started the collection in 1907 and his son-in-law Jean Paul Barbier, a collector himself, completed it by enriching it and giving it coherence. The collection today houses about 7,000 objects, including art from classical and tribal antiquity as well as sculptures, fabrics and ornaments from civilisations all around the globe.  The collection began after the First World War, which accounts for the many “historical”artefacts it comprises. In the early 1920s, Swiss collector Josef Mueller moved to Paris where he met artists and art dealers who introduced him to non-western art.