Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

Museum · Palais de Tokyo / Alma (16th)Paris,France

Paris's own twentieth-century collection in a 1937 world's-fair wing, with a curved room built for Dufy's six-hundred-square-metre painting of electricity.

The Musée d'Art Moderne is the city's own collection of twentieth-century art, in a wing of a building put up for the world's fair of 1937. Two long wings of pale stone face the river, with a colonnade along them and an open terrace between. Nothing here was updated to another decade: the stripped columns and the sculpture on the river front are 1937 through and through. You arrive across that terrace, which is where the fair crowds arrived too, and go in from there. One room here was built for a single painting. Raoul Dufy's La Fée Électricité runs round a curved wall in 250 panels and covers about six hundred square metres, which makes it one of the largest paintings ever made in France. The electricity company commissioned it for the fair, and it shows a hundred and ten scientists and thinkers who had a hand in electricity, with gods above them. Two versions of a Matisse mural hang here as well, including the one he had to paint again because the wall measurements turned out to be wrong. In 2010 a man cut five paintings from their frames overnight, and none has been recovered.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The permanent collection is free — There is no ticket for the Dufy room or the Matisse murals, and only the temporary shows are charged for.
It is the quiet museum on this stretch of river — There are far busier collections within a short walk, and this one is rarely crowded even in August.
The Dufy room is dim on purpose — The lighting is deliberately low, so give your eyes a minute to adjust after you come in from the terrace.
The permanent collection moves around — This is a city collection rather than a fixed hang, so what is on the walls beyond the two big murals differs from one visit to the next.
Two rooms carry the visit — Most visitors come for the Dufy painting and the Matisse murals, and both deserve more time than the rest of the floor.

Things to do

1
Sit down in the Dufy room
Raoul Dufy's painting La Fée Électricité curves round three sides of a room that was built to hold it. There is nowhere far enough back to see all of it at once. Sit on the bench in the middle and turn your head slowly through the full sweep of it. Then pick one figure and work out what he is holding.
2
Compare the two versions of Matisse's Dance
Both versions hang where you can see them together. Compare where the arms and legs run off the edge in each one, and see how differently the same bodies fill a slightly different shape. One of the two is the version Matisse had to paint again, because the wall measurements he worked from turned out to be wrong.
3
Go out onto the terrace, then down to the quay
The steps between the two wings run down to an open terrace above the river, outside the museum and free to walk onto. The Eiffel Tower stands across the water to the left, and skateboarders use the far end of the stone floor. Carry on down to the embankment and look back up. A long carved relief runs the whole width of the building, and from there the terrace, the columns and the steps line up as a single design — the side the 1937 fair crowds arrived at.