The Museum Rietberg is the only art museum for non-European cultures in Switzerland. It was established in 1949 by the citizens of Zürich to house the art collection of Baron Eduard von der Heydt, which was donated to the City in 1952. In that year the museum opened to the public, housed in the mid-nineteenth-century Villa Wesendonck, a former cultural meeting place owned first by Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck and later by the Rieter family, which was bought by the City of Zürich in 1945. The collections soon outgrew the original building, and during the latter half of the twentieth century the museum saw renovations to the Villa Wesendonck and expansions into four additional buildings. The most recent of these is the Emerald extension, designed by architects Alfred Grazioli and Adolf Krischanitz and completed in 2007, which contains galleries dedicated to African, Asian, and Oceanic art.
First installed by the artist, teacher, and founder of the Bauhaus movement, Johannes Itten, the collections at the Museum Rietberg are internationally renowned, featuring a vast assemblage of works from Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, Oceania, Asia, and the Near East. The African collection, which stems from the original collection of Eduard von der Heydt, ranks among the most important in Europe, and includes Dogon objects, masks and figures from Côte d'Ivoire, seventeenth-century Benin bronzes, world-famous masks from the Cameroon Grassfields, Fang figures, and important works from the Luba, Songye, and Vili.
The small but exceptional collection of Ancient American art, which features part of the Carmen Dolores Oechsle Collection of ancient Peruvian art, focuses mainly on Mexico and Peru. Northwest Coast cultures are also represented, as well as tribes from the Arctic, Southeast, and Southwest. The museum's Oceanic collection, assembled by Eduard von der Heydt mainly in the 1920s and '30s, is also remarkable despite its relatively small size, featuring works from Papua New Guinea and greater Melanesia, the New Hebrides, the Marquesas Islands, and New Zealand. Further ethnographic holdings include an extremely significant collection of Chinese art, a major collection of objects from the Ancient Orient, and works from Java and elsewhere in Indonesia.