Paris Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

About

Four architects — André Aubert, Marcel Dastugue, J.-C. Dondel, and Paul Viard — raise the Palais de Tokyo for the 1937 World's Fair. At 11 Avenue du Président Wilson in the 16th arrondissement, one wing of that building takes another six years of construction before it can open as a museum in its own right: on July 6, 1961, collections transferred from the Petit Palais finally settle in, and the building becomes one of the City of Paris's fourteen municipal museums. Among the roughly 15,041 works recorded in the collection as of December 2018, nothing overshadows Raoul Dufy's La Fée Électricité. Stitched together from 250 wood panels into a span of sixty meters by ten — some 600 square meters in all — the fresco is completed in 1937 and finds its dedicated gallery in 1964. Matisse's La Danse, acquired at the 1937 exposition, gains its own room too, the Salle Matisse, after a second Matisse work joins the collection in 1993. The theft of five paintings — by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Léger, and Modigliani — in 2010 remains the museum's darkest chapter; the works Vjeran Tomić carried off were worth some 100 million euros. Having completed a renovation between June 2018 and October 2019 that improved accessibility and restored the terrace overlooking the Seine, the museum — under director Fabrice Hergott since 2007 — draws 409,162 visitors to its 2023–2024 Nicolas de Staël retrospective, eclipsing the previous record set by the 2010 Basquiat retrospective.