MAM reopens

From October 11, 2019 MAM reopens with a renovated lobby and an access for all.

To mark its reopening after renovations lasting a year, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is presenting two exhibitions and a new presentation of the permanent collection.

Hans Hartung, la fabrique du geste (October 11, 2019 to March 1, 2020)
To mark its reopening after renovations lasting a year, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is presenting La Fabrique du Geste, a monographic exhibition by Hans Hartung from October 11, 2019 to March 1, 2020. This exhibition brings a fresh eye to the oeuvre of this major 20th-century artist and his crucial role in art history: Hartung was a forerunner of abstraction, one of the most influential artistic discoveries of his time.

The visitor is introduced to the wide range of media, the wealth of technical innovations and the array of tools used during six prolific decades. For Hartung experimentation was all-important, as was the uncompromising, conceptually inflected modernism he embodied. The essays on colour and format as a rigorous studio methodology, together with framing, photography, enlargement, repetition and—even more surprising—identical reproduction of quite a few of his works, were all elements of his research into the original and the authentic and have lost nothing of their relevance today.

You, works from the Lafayette Anticipations Collection (October 11, 2019 to February 16, 2020)
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is presenting fifty works by French and international contemporary artists from the Lafayette Anticipations Collection, the Moulin family endowment fund in Paris, which now comprises over 300 items. This is the first time a part of this family collection—the product of a passion for art going back several generations—had been shown in a museum.

Centering on works and installations acquired since 2005 and involving sculpture, video or performance, the exhibition takes a look at the latest developments in art and sums up artists’ ability to investigate and decipher our changing world. Its underlying concern is with the concepts of proximity, sharing and, especially, dialogue—the way artworks interact with the public and respond to each other, but are also transformed by mutual contact. Each work seem shot through with the memory of their own past, but with the promise of their possible reinvention as well.

Modern life, a new presentation of the permanent collection
In tandem with the temporary exhibitions, the public can get acquainted with La vie moderne (modern life), a new presentation of the permanent collection. This is the opportunity to rediscover a century of art history via its key works.

The presentation is a blend of the chronological and the thematic, centred on the principal works acquired through the generosity of donors like Vollard in 1937, Girardin in 1953, Amos in 1955 and Henry-Thomas in 1976, 1984 and 1986. Thus the museum can now

offer the works of artists including Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Derain, Dufy, Freundlich, Léger, Buffet, Rouault, Bonnard, Vuillard, Fautrier, Picabia, Ernst and De Chirico. Echoing the movements that shaped the history of art in the wake of Fauvism and Cubism, the accent is on both Surrealism and the various forms of realism, as well as the new postwar trends that blossomed in Paris, “the modern art capital.”

Museum director
Fabrice Hergott

Exhibition curators

Hans Hartung: Odile Burluraux

You: Anne Dressen

Modern life: Jacqueline Munck, Hélène Leroy, Fanny Schulmann, François Michaud

Press officer
Maud Ohana
maud.ohana [​at​] paris.fr