Situated in the heart of Old Geneva, the Musée Barbier-Mueller is dedicated to the preservation, study, and publication of the remarkable art collection begun by Josef Mueller in 1907 and carried on to this day by his heirs. Born in 1887 in Solothurn, Switzerland, Josef Mueller took an early interest in the acquisition of art, and as early as 1918 had amassed a group of important modern paintings that included many works by such masters as Picasso, Cézanne, Braque, Renoir, Matisse, and others. Mueller began collecting tribal art in the 1920s, and though his collection continually grew, it was extremely rarely exhibited in his lifetime. Mueller's son-in-law, Jean Paul Barbier, was an art collector in his own right, and when the two collections were eventually combined, the Barbier collection brought a previously unsought coherency to the collection of Josef Mueller, and in the process created one of the greatest, if not the greatest, collection of tribal art in the world.
The Musée Barbier-Mueller was opened in 1977, shortly after Josef Mueller's death. The museum's collection, which is constantly enriched by Jean Paul Barbier, today comprises 7,000 works of art, including sculptures, masks, textiles, and objects of prestige and corporal adornment. The principal areas of collection are, in order of importance, Africa, the East Indies ("primitive" Indonesia), Oceania, the Americas (pre- and post-Columbian), tribal Asia, and, in a more general manner, the prehistoric or archaic phases of certain great civilizations, including Greece, Italy, Japan, and the East Indies.