Review: The Museum of Modern Art Paris (March 2023)
Easily one of my favourite places in the French capital, the Paris Museum of Modern Art is well-rounded, approachable, delightfully uncrowded, and completely free.
Established in 1961, the Paris Museum of Modern Art, also known as the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris or simply MAM Paris, boasts one of the best collections of artworks surveying the output of French and international artists from the 20th century.
Not many museums manage to be succinct yet comprehensive with such a big category as Modern Art, but this one does a pretty good job of it. The permanent exhibition is laid out chronologically, for the most part, with an easily-digestible selection of artists whose works offer thematic insights into each sub-period.
The space itself is lovely, though I’d imagine that in the summertime, some rooms can get a little stuffy. Depending on your inclinations towards art, you can see everything in about 1.5-2 hours.
The Essentials:
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-6pm.
How to get there: Take the Métro Line 9 to Iéna or Alma-Marceau. The museum is in the eastern wing of the Palais de Tokyo complex, while exhibitions of 21st-century and contemporary art are held in the western wing. Entrance is at the centre bit or at the rear end of the building.
Food: There’s a restaurant with outdoor dining space open during the warmer months, usually May onwards.
Cloakroom: Free of charge, but no large bags are allowed inside (e.g. luggage).
Accessibility: Wheelchair lifts grant access to the permanent collection of the ground floor and additional exhibition space on upper levels. Staff can provide audio guides that can be fitted with magnetic loops, and a Museum lecturer can be onsite to give an oral guided tour for the visually impaired. Descriptions can also be read from the Museum’s bespoke app.
Review: 5/5 – Live, Laugh, Love
1 March 2023 — It was about 4.37pm, and I had actually come up from the Musée Quai Branly on the other side of the river. The bridge was a stereotype of Paris: lined with tourists and roadside ‘entrepreneurs’ selling designer dupes and ‘I Love Paris’ souvenirs. Up ahead, the white stone of the Palais de Tokyo looked rather flamboyant in the glow of a setting sun. It sure beat the 3.30pm sunsets of wintertime in London.
Tranquility rarely lasts in a place like Paris; the area past the river is a busy place. Street noise picked up again towards the end of the bridge, and you’re immediately faced with traffic separating you from the Palais de Tokyo complex. Buyer beware: my uncle (a Parisian local) would warn that this is a dangerous place to whip out a phone to take a photo with people everywhere. tuktuk
To be honest though, it’s not a great place for a photo anyways; I’m not sure anywhere is, for a good shot of the rather magnificent building. From across the road, enormous trucks and buses are constantly zipping by, and as soon as you’re in the courtyard space, you’re soon surrounded (or at least I was) by young people everywhere hurtling past you on skateboards, from every discernible direction. Or maybe you’d want some of this near-death-experience excitement before going to a museum — you do you.
Anyways the main point is that getting a nice Instagram-worthy shot in front of the building is trickier than you’d imagine.
the visionboard
Not The Vision
As now seems usual, there was a basic security scanner at the entrance. Luckily there was no queue, and I was through in less than a minute. The entrance area is quite small, and there are maps you can take in a number of languages before heading into the exhibition. Go down the stairs on your right to start your visit.
Some museums have a confusing layout; this is not one of those museums. They have a one-way system set up, which makes it easy to follow the curatorial vision. In fact, at one point a kind security guard waved me down to show me the right direction when I tried to go back to a previous room, much like the flying yellow turtle holding a reverse sign in Mario Kart. I clumsily replied, ‘Yes I know – I…forgot something.’
The all-important sentence, ‘I need to retake a shot for a reel’, was sadly not on the useful phrases handouts from my elementary school French teachers.
But back to the beginning. An airy hall greets you at the bottom of the stairs. A hall, if one can call it that: it’s more of a closed and remarkably warm loggia with so much sun shining through that I thought I might have to reapply SPF. Outside, the skateboarders were still doing their thing, but the chatter was muted by huge glass panes that stretched from what must’ve been the full height of the building, down to the simple concrete-stone ground. The wild colours of paintings hung up offered portals into alternate worlds. That said, the rooms further on which make up a bulk of the permanent exhibition don’t have quite as much flair – perhaps fittingly so, because there’s a marked shift from the cosmopolitan jazzy world of Paris in the 1920s and 30s, to the moodier postwar artworks further inside.
One thing’s for sure – you can go in knowing nothing about Modern art or the 20th century and come out with a decent grasp of the chronology and how everything and everyone is connected. The curation cleverly puts artists and their work in dialogue with each other and one another. One caveat is that the permanent exhibition predominantly shows paintings, though there are several sculptures tastefully incorporated. I won’t say too much more about what’s on display: the rotation might change, and things will go on loan, into conservation, or move into special exhibitions. If you haven’t been to the MAM before, probably best to explore for yourself. And if you have been there, you already know and have probably returned for the temporary exhibition anyways.
Now if you know me, you’ll know that I’ve been a little obsessed with the ‘School of Paris’ – not quite an art movement per se, but a grouping of émigré and foreign artists who descended onto Paris in the early decades of the 20th century.
So did I find what I came here looking for? It’s a very satisfying yes. The work and contributions of Tsuguharu ‘Léonard’ Foujita, Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun, and Wifredo Lam are displayed front and centre.
To be sure, the museum doesn’t offer an extensive or microscopic catalogue of the artistic landscape in France, or indeed event just Paris in the 20th century. But to do so, or claim to do so, would be impractical, if not for the limits of physical space; the site is expansive, but not sprawling or labyrinthine. Instead, the pared-down exhibition brings together typified artworks for each artist. This makes it highly-digestible museum even for the uniniatied – one can leave with a good idea of the general chronology, thematic concerns, and what each artist’s distinctive style was.
As far as structure, I’m glad that these four Asian artists were framed according to their respective practice or milieu first. Foujita was in the pre-war section first, then also contrasted with Modigliani in the ‘School of Paris’ section, while Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun were placed at the centre of opposite walls dedicated to the French variety of postwar abstraction. Incidentally, Zao’s wife was a longtime Curator of National Heritage at the Paris Modern Art Museum, which, you know, #justartworldthings. Wifredo Lam was sensibly positioned among the post-Cubists.
As for the gift shop – it was okay. They have the usual assortment of museum-branded trinkets and Paris souvenirs; more impressive, particularly for a specialist audience, would probably be the well-curated selection of books and monographs in French, English, and several other language. I picked up a copy of Zao Wou-Ki’s autobiography for 11€, which was cheaper than at FNAC, a French cross between Best Buy and Amazon (when it was still an online bookstore).
The Raoul Dufy room was close this time; it was apparently reserved for an event of some sort that evening. These were the closing days of Paris Fashion Week SS23, so I assume it must have been that.
I left around 5.40pm. The sun was setting, and the skateboarders had mostly gone home. I walked back along the river, partly glad to have finally visited, and partly wondering why, after many visits to Paris, I had never come here before. Perhaps I thought that surely no good things are ever free, and free this was.
Helen Kwong