PRESIDENT CHIRAC will fulfil a ten-year-old dream on Tuesday when he opens a spectacular but controversial museum by the Seine that will be the first significant new gallery in Paris since 1977 and the world’s biggest showcase of non-Western art.

The Quai Branly Museum, a curving building set in 2.8ha (7 acres) of jungle-like garden near the Eiffel Tower, will be the sole grand projet of the President’s 12-year rule when he steps down in May.

Unlike François Mitterrand, who spent £3.5 billion of taxpayers’ money stamping his memory on the capital, M Chirac has had only one architectural obsession — building a worthy display for the indigenous arts that have been his lifelong hobby.

The last such presidential legacy was the futuristic museum named for the late Georges Pompidou, a passionate collector of modern art. His successor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, created the Musée d’Orsay, home of the State’s Impressionist collection, out of a former railway station.

M Chirac’s 17-year tenure as mayor is remembered for promoting office buildings while Mitterrand threw up his monuments, often in a damaging rush to meet deadlines. The whale-like Opéra Bastille was botched in the race for the July 14, 1989, bicentenary of the Revolution.

M Chirac’s semi-camouflaged museum fits with the trend of preserving the cityscape. This “heritage” policy was confirmed this week when Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor of Paris, and his left-wing council approved a 20-year development plan that maintains the ban on tall buildings. Critics dubbed it the “Amélie” plan after the 2001 film of that name because it mainly keeps Paris the way that residents and tourists love it rather than competing with high-rise London and Shanghai.

In true Chirac form, his £165 million museum is entangled in politics. It is a statement in the direction of the US and what the President sees as its cultural hegemony. “The political message is . . . all cultures are equal,” M Chirac said, presenting his pet project on television this week. “This museum is a symbol of a France that recognises the diverse cultures of the world.”

An aide explained: “The President is shocked by the pretension of a culture that considers itself dominant.” M Chirac took a similar swipe at the US in 1992, when, as mayor, he staged a Native American exhibition rather than celebrating Columbus’s “discovery”.

However, the Musée Chirac, as it will certainly become known, is also making some French intellectuals and antiracist campaigners unhappy because, they say, it perpetuates colonial stereotypes with its vast collection of 300,000 statues, masks, totems, fetishes, shields, musical instruments and other artefacts. The entire notion of ethnic art is patronising to the peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, the critics say.

Mitterrand’s monuments, which include the now-loved Louvre Pyramid and the still unpopular National Library of France, with its four towers, often drew critical fire on aesthetic rather than political grounds. The Chirac museum is winning praise for its clever avant-garde design by Jean Nouvel, the country’s star architect whose work includes the Institut du Monde Arabe, one of Mitterrand’s monuments.

Along with Nouvel’s trademark mix of steel and glass, the building uses curved surfaces, earth tones and vegetation to evoke a feel of bush or rainforest. Another striking feature is a high vertical garden with forest-like foliage that covers an outside wall.

M Nouvel said that he had aimed for “a place marked by the symbols of the forest, the river and the obsessions of death and forgetting”.

Those are fighting words to opponents of the museum, which was so politically sensitive that its founders decided not to define its contents, naming it simply the Musée du Quai Branly.

In the early phase, when the collection was being assembled from the National Museum of Africa and Oceania and the Museum of Man, they called the Chirac project the “Museum of Man, Art and Civilisations”. M Chirac, who has been a collector since his teenage years, prefers the term les arts premiers (primary arts).

However, Stéphane Martin, the museum president, said that this caused trouble. “ ‘Primary’ suggests that there was something first that then evolved, and it makes the ethnologists scream,” he said this week. The terms “primitive” and “tribal” art were unacceptable. “With decolonisation the word ‘primitive’ took on a racist meaning in French,” M Martin said.

The collection, brought to France by its colonial adventurers and research missions, are displayed by continent. M Chirac and M Martin emphasise the themes of dialogue and respect. “We want to be a portal, an interface between Western and non-European societies,” M Martin said.

The opponents see the museum as an extension of the notion of “Negro art”, which influenced early 20th-century art after Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were inspired by artefacts that they found in the Trocadero flea market, which was next to the site where, a century later, the Chirac museum would be built.

Even before the arrival of political correctness, dispute raged between the ethnologists and the collectors, with the scientists insisting that it was wrong to perceive art as an object that had a practical function. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the great French ethnographer, said in 1996 that a museum of ethnic art made no sense any more because primitive societies had come under Western influence. “If we really wanted to display the ethnography of New Guinea, we should display a Toyota alongside the masks,” he said.

Gilles Manceron, an historian and civil rights activist, criticised the architecture of the Chirac museum this week for “giving a traditional representation of nature, of the idea of the savagery of these peoples that Europeans perpetuate unconsciously”. If the ethnic art was considered true art then it should be displayed in the Louvre alongside Western art.

The museum, on one of the last prime empty spaces in one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, is generally being hailed as a splendid addition to a capital that needs a boost. “Chirac’s project is opportune. I am extremely enthusiastic,” M Delanoë, a political opponent of the President, said this week. “Chirac has done better for Paris as President than Mayor.”

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