Museums - Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

This museum occupies half of the Palais de Tokyo, which was built for the International Exposition of 1937. The present institution was inaugurated in 1961. It owes the strength of its collection to the generosity of its donors, mostly collectors and artists but most notably to the gifts of Dr. Maurice Girardin. The material in the museum reflects French artistic trends of the twentieth century from fauvism to conceptual art. Today, new acquisitions favor contemporary creations. The museum also houses an ethnographic collection. Although small in number, the objects in it are of great quality. It is effectively comprised of African and Oceanic works from the Girardin collection, obtained from the fauvist artist Maurice de Vlaminck. This collection of about a hundred pieces has been on permanent display since 1986. It includes important Baule, Fang, Kota, Bembe, Yaka, and Chokwe works from Africa, and Oceanic pieces from New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. Two of the Oceanic sculptures and a New Ireland Malanggan mask were collected in 1893 and 1898 by Count Festetics de Tolna.