Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris

French modern art from Fauvism and Cubism through the School of Paris, anchored by two rooms without equivalents elsewhere in Paris: the Matisse Dance triptychs and Raoul Dufy's mural La Fee Electricite. A secondary, less publicised strength is the 1937 Art Deco furniture and decorative-arts collection, shown as room settings. Contemporary and experimental programming runs through the museum's separate ARC department.

The Palais de Tokyo was built for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, on Avenue du President Wilson in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The building has two wings either side of a central colonnade, and the two halves have gone in different directions ever since: the west wing became the Palais de Tokyo, an independent contemporary-art centre with no permanent collection of its own, run separately since 2002. The east wing is this museum, the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris, a museum of the City of Paris and part of the Paris Musees network of fourteen municipal museums. It is a distinct institution from the Musee National d'Art Moderne, the state collection housed inside the Centre Pompidou since 1977, on the other side of the river. All three neighbours are easy to conflate on a map of the same few streets; they hold different collections, answer to different owners, and a photograph or a fact that belongs to one does not belong to the others.

The museum's own collection began to form in the 1930s, through gifts gathered around the Salon d'Automne, but the building a visitor walks into today opened to the public in 1961. In October 2019, after an eight-month closure and a 10 million euro renovation of its public spaces by the Paris firm h2o architectes, the museum reopened with a new curved, glazed entrance sequence and lobby, replacing the previous approach.

The single gift most often credited with shaping the museum's core holding of early 20th-century French painting is the 1953 bequest of the collector Dr Maurice Girardin. Without it, accounts of the collection's formation agree, the museum's depth in Fauvism, Cubism and the School of Paris would be considerably thinner. The collection has grown since to somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 16,000 works.

The museum is still being built by gift, not only by purchase. In 2025 Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, a descendant of Henri Matisse, gave the museum 61 works by the artist, including seven paintings such as Marguerite endormie (1920). A collection whose single most prized modern name is still receiving fresh donations in the year this record was written is not a closed inheritance.

The permanent hang runs broadly chronologically from Fauvism and Cubism through the School of Paris: Matisse, Braque, Delaunay, Modigliani, Foujita, Soutine, Vuillard and Bonnard are all represented, largely from the Girardin bequest and the gifts that followed it. Alongside the paintings, the museum holds a substantial body of Art Deco furniture and decorative art gathered from the 1937 Exposition Internationale and shown as complete room settings rather than as isolated objects behind glass, a strength of the collection that gets less attention than the paintings around it. A photography collection of roughly 3,000 works, as counted in 2024, is shown in rotation. Contemporary and experimental programming runs through a distinct department, ARC (Animation, Recherche, Confrontation), established in 1967, which is where the museum's temporary exhibitions and newer acquisitions are most often placed.

The Salle Matisse holds two related triptychs, La Danse inachevee (1931) and La Danse de Paris (1931-1933), from the commission Matisse received from Dr Albert Barnes to decorate the main gallery of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. A wall piece by Daniel Buren shares the room, set deliberately against the historical work. The Salle Dufy holds a single mural, La Fee Electricite, some 600 square metres of painted panels that Raoul Dufy completed in 1937 on commission from the Compagnie parisienne de distribution d'electricite for the Palais de la Lumiere et de l'Electricite at that year's Exposition. The mural traces the history of electricity from classical myth to the modern power station across more than a hundred identifiable figures, and the museum has kept it on view in its own dedicated hall since the 1960s. A 2020 published review of the museum, discussed below, singled out these two rooms by name as the reason to come.

On the night of 19-20 May 2010, a man named Vjeran Tomic broke into the museum through a grille and a broken window on a side facade, found that the building's alarm system was not functioning, and removed five paintings without being challenged despite roughly 30 security cameras on site. The paintings taken were Pablo Picasso's Le Pigeon aux petits pois, Henri Matisse's Pastorale, Georges Braque's L'Olivier pres de l'Estaque, Fernand Leger's Still Life with Candlestick, and Amedeo Modigliani's La Femme a l'eventail, together valued at around 100 million euros. Tomic, the antiques dealer Jean-Michel Corvez, and the metalworker Yonathan Birn were convicted in 2017 and sentenced to eight, seven and six years respectively. Birn testified that, panicking, he had destroyed the paintings by putting them out with household rubbish; investigators have never been able to confirm or disprove that account, so the five works remain formally unrecovered. The theft prompted lasting public scrutiny of the museum's security arrangements, which by multiple published accounts had left an alarm disabled on the night in question.

The permanent collection is free to everyone, every day the museum is open, with no reservation required; an optional 5 euro donation ticket is offered at the desk. Temporary exhibitions are priced per show. Visitor comment converges on the same two points as the published review discussed above: the Salle Matisse and Salle Dufy are the reason to come, and the rest of the permanent collection, while solid, is not where most visitors report finding a single unmissable masterpiece. The most consistent published criticism concerns the representation of women artists in the permanent hang, described as thin. A minority of visitor accounts also describe the front-of-house staff as unhelpful. None of this is a reason to skip the museum; a reader planning a visit should simply know that the two named rooms, not the general collection, are what other visitors say made the trip worthwhile, and should be careful, walking up Avenue du President Wilson, to look for the east-wing entrance rather than the Palais de Tokyo's separate one next door.

Visitors consistently single out the free entry to the permanent collection and the two dedicated Matisse and Dufy rooms as the reasons to come; the most repeated reservation is that, outside those two rooms and a temporary exhibition, the collection is described as solid rather than a must-see, with weak representation of women artists and, in a minority of accounts, brusque front-of-house staff.