The City of Paris museum of modern art occupies the east wing of a colonnaded palace built for the 1937 Exposition, on the slope that runs down from the Trocadéro to the Seine. The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris holds more than fifteen thousand works of the twentieth century and of our own, and its permanent collection is free.
With the Centre Pompidou closed for works until 2030, this is where you see twentieth-century painting in Paris without a ticket. The museum closes on Mondays and the ticket office stops at 17:15; on Thursdays it stays open until 21:30, but only for the temporary exhibition, which you do pay for.
What is one of the largest paintings in the world doing in a museum that asks for nothing?
Let’s begin!
1. Bourdelle’s La France, before you even go in
On the terrace, in front of the colonnade, stands a bronze woman nine metres tall with a spear in one hand, a scaled cuirass, a serpent climbing her flank and one arm raised above her eyes, like someone looking into the distance.
Read the base before you climb the steps. There is a line by Charles Péguy: Mère voici vos fils qui se sont tant battus, mother here are your sons who fought so hard. The statue is La France by Antoine Bourdelle, and this cast, the fourth, was made by the Hohwiller foundry and placed here on 18 June 1948, the anniversary of de Gaulle’s appeal, as a memorial to the dead of Free France. If you have seen the Musée Bourdelle in Montparnasse, you will know that raised arm.
2. La Fée Électricité, six hundred square metres of painting
How large can a painting be before it stops being a painting?
This one answers with a number: six hundred square metres, two hundred and fifty plywood panels two metres high and one metre twenty wide, ten metres tall by sixty long. It is La Fée Électricité, which Raoul Dufy painted in 1937 for the Palais de la Lumière et de l’Électricité at the international exposition, built by Robert Mallet-Stevens. It was installed here in 1964, a gift from Électricité de France.
Go back to the photograph at the top of this page and count what happens in a single stretch. High up the Fairy flies, her hair streaming; below her the cities of the world are drawn in outline on bands of colour, and you can pick out the Eiffel Tower, a dome, an obelisk, an arch; at the bottom right an orchestra is playing. Along the lower register Dufy set a hundred and ten scholars and inventors, from Archimedes onwards, the chain of people that led to electricity. Look for the thin lines cutting across the surface: they are the joins between the panels, and they are the only thing reminding you that this is not a frescoed wall.
3. The Matisse room, and the Danse found in a studio in 1990
A whole room, three arched lunettes on one long wall, pale figures dancing on grounds of blue and ochre. Below them are benches and stools, because the museum knows that people sit down here.
The story is worth the stop. In 1930 the American collector Albert Barnes commissioned Matisse to make a decoration for his foundation at Merion, in Pennsylvania, and for three years the painter worked on almost nothing else. He made a first version, judged it too decorative and set it aside; he made a second, La Danse de Paris, and found that the measurements did not fit the architecture; he made a third, which was installed at Merion in April 1933. The first two are here, in the same room. And the museum has the first, La Danse inachevée, because it was found in 1990 in Matisse’s studio in Nice, almost sixty years after the painter had put it away.
4. La Femme aux yeux bleus, and the eyes with no pupils
A small painting, eighty-one centimetres by fifty-four, made by Amedeo Modigliani around 1918, two years before he died.
Get close to the eyes and look for the pupils: there are none. The eyes are two solid blue almonds, and the rest of the face is built on a single vertical, from the knot of the hair to the point of the chin, with a long nose and a tiny mouth. The dark fur collar and the black coat leave only one hand showing, very long, resting in her lap. The ground is a blue-green wall with a paler vertical band, and it says nothing about who this woman is: Modigliani painted his sitters with no setting and no name, and the title was given by other people.
5. L’Équipe de Cardiff, and the one you find online is not this one
Why do two different versions of this painting circulate?
Because there really are two, and the large one is here. L’Équipe de Cardiff by Robert Delaunay is the second of a series painted between 1912 and 1913, it measures 326 by 208 centimetres and it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants of 1913.
The motif comes from a newspaper photograph, a leap in a lineout during a rugby match between Cardiff and Paris, and around that gesture Delaunay assembled the city: the Eiffel Tower, the big wheel and an advertising hoarding for Astra, which built aeroplanes. Look at where the forms overlap instead of sitting side by side, because that is where you see the step from cubism, which takes apart, to what Apollinaire called orphism.
Careful: the image search engines put at the top is almost always the other version, the one in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, which measures 130 by 97 centimetres, a sixth of the area. If you knew it from there, in the room it will look like a different painting.
6. Why Sonia Delaunay is not on this page
Why does a search for this museum turn up so many staircases and so few paintings?
For a reason that has nothing to do with the museum. In France works stay protected seventy years after the author’s death, and in a twentieth-century museum that boundary runs through the middle of the rooms: Dufy, who died in 1953, has been free since 2024, Matisse, who died in 1954, since 2025, and that is why the photographs above are legitimate.
Sonia Delaunay died in 1979, so her work stays protected until 2049, and the same goes for Braque, Picasso, Fautrier and Dubuffet, who are also in these rooms. You can read about them, not see them: that is why I tell you about them instead of showing them, and why what circulates online about this museum is mostly photographs of the colonnade.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site mam.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The permanent collections are free for everyone and need no booking, with a suggested donation of 5 euros. The temporary exhibitions are paid for, and the price changes from one to the next: you will find it on the page of the current show. Reduced rates. On the exhibitions the reduced rate applies to students of fashion, fine arts, art history and archaeology, to jobseekers, to people on social assistance and to artists registered with the Maison des Artistes, on proof. Under-18s get in free. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 to 18:00, and the ticket office closes at 17:15. On Thursdays it stays open until 21:30, but in the evening you can only see the temporary exhibition. Closing days. It closes on Mondays, plus 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. On 24 and 31 December it closes at 17:00. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is not included in the pass, but the permanent collection is free for everyone, so the pass is of no use to you here. Getting there. The entrance is at 11 avenue du Président Wilson. The stops are Iéna and Alma - Marceau on line 9, and the RER C stops at Pont de l’Alma. How long it takes. The six stops need an hour and a half, and with a large temporary exhibition you reach three hours.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
In the same building, in the west wing, is the Palais de Tokyo, which does only contemporary art exhibitions and has its own ticket. Five minutes further up, on the hill of the Trocadéro, are the Cité de l’architecture, the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée national de la Marine, all three inside the Palais de Chaillot. A short walk away, on avenue Pierre Ier de Serbie, is the fashion museum of Paris, the Palais Galliera. And the nineteenth-century painting all of this comes out of is at the Musée d’Orsay.
Photo credits: Fée Électricité by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 4.0); Matisse room by Alybnp (CC BY-SA 4.0); Bourdelle’s La France by Fred Romero (CC BY 2.0); Femme aux yeux bleus from the museum’s collections (CC0), from Wikimedia Commons.
