"Par une langue échappée", nouveau parcours des collections modernes et contemporaines - Collections permanentes du Musée Cantini

The Musée Cantini is housed in a private mansion built in 1694 by the Compagnie du Cap Nègre.

After acquiring the building, Jules Cantini, an art lover and prominent marble worker who contributed to the construction of many civil and religious buildings in Marseille during the Second Empire, donated it to the City of Marseille in 1916 to become a museum devoted to modern art.

This prestigious cultural institution in Marseille has pursued an active acquisition and exhibition policy, in collaboration with leading national and international museum institutions.

The museum presents a broad overview of modern art, focusing on a number of historical movements, including Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and the various post-Cubist trends of the 1920s–1930s. Surrealism is also a major focus of the collection, owing to the historical ties between the movement and the city of Marseille, which welcomed thousands of refugees in 1940–1941, among them many artists, writers and anti-fascist activists fleeing Nazism. Many members of the Surrealist group were among them, gathered around André Breton at the villa Air-Bel.

The collections span the period through to the end of the 1970s, covering a wide variety of artistic movements and including notable groups of works by artists such as Jean Dubuffet, André Masson, Victor Brauner and Antonin Artaud, as well as by movements less familiar to the general public, such as the Japanese group Gutaï, highly active and especially innovative in abstraction and performance art in the 1960s.

A special partnership with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, has enabled exceptional works to be placed on loan, completing and enriching the collections. The display is regularly renewed.

New display to discover from May 8.

"Par une langue échappée" New presentation of the modern and contemporary collections

“And, without noticing, embrace the sand, enter the body of the shore through a sharp incision, a sound, a word that cannot be translated, a language escaped, a language flowing through the fingers I want to enter the earth through water / and water through the imprint of water” Samira Negrouche, Traces, 2021

The new presentation at the Musée Cantini invites visitors to reconsider its collections from the perspective of Marseille, its port history, its lived or imagined territories and its diasporas. Connected by sea routes to the shores of the Mediterranean, the Americas and Asia, Marseille was a key hub for numerous intellectual and artistic exchanges in the 20th century. At the heart of a global economy and within a colonial context, the Phocaean city gradually became a site of resistance and uprisings, a place where other relationships with the world could be imagined. A welcoming city where borders fade and cultural mixing can flourish, it is also a port of exile and wandering, the shore of a maritime cemetery for women and men hoping to find refuge. 

Marseille, sunlit and rugged, is the starting point for a story of modern and contemporary creation that is plural and open to the world. Renewing its scientific and cultural project, the Musée Cantini is now rooted in an art history that is both global and grounded in its own territory, allowing it to broaden its scope to include other journeys, sensibilities and artistic forms. From Surrealist cosmologies to experiments with signs carried out from one shore of the Mediterranean to another, Wifredo Lam engages in dialogue with Matta and Joaquìn Ferrer, Baya is shown alongside Ahmed Cherkaoui, Saloua Raouda Choucair alongside Alfred Manessier, and Antoni Tàpies alongside Kader Attia. 

A new focus on intersections and hybrid forms in artistic production leads to a breaking down of boundaries between art forms and materials, highlighting links between painting, photography, cinema, sculpture and poetry. Thanks to recent acquisitions, the collection gives greater visibility to women artists, extends its geography to the southern shores and brings to light experimentation with other materials and techniques. New loans, generously made by public institutions—the Centre national des arts plastiques, the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque de l’Alcazar—and private collections support this initiative.

Bringing this new momentum to life, the graphic design for this display, created by Joseph Benoit, is based on two contemporary typefaces designed by women. Used for the titles, “Rakkas” is an Arabic and Latin typeface designed by Zeynep Akay. The Arabic design draws inspiration from Ruq’ah lettering on Egyptian movie posters from the 1950s and 1960s, while the Latin design captures its spirit without ever imitating it. “Adelphe,” created by Eugénie Bidaut, is designed to incorporate several forms of inclusive writing. Each typeface reflects on how writing can embrace the diversity of identities and cultural heritages.

This new presentation anticipates the Musée Cantini’s next exhibition, “Juste au-dessus du silence, femmes engagées pour l’indépendance de l’Algérie,” scheduled to open in 2028.

Curators: Amélie Lavin, director of the Musée Cantini, and Louise Madinier, curator at the Musée Cantini Musée Cantini - from 08 May 2026 to 25 April 2027 Free admission

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