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

The Musée Cantini presents several fine sections devoted to Fauvism, the first Cubist experiments, and the various post-Cubist or Purist movements of the 1920s–1940s.­ The Musée Cantini is housed in a private mansion built in 1694 by the Compagnie du Cap Nègre. Jules Cantini, an art lover and prominent marble worker who contributed to the construction of numerous civil and religious buildings in Marseille under the Second Empire, became the owner of the building and donated it to the city of Marseille in 1916 so that it could become a museum devoted to modern art. Since then, this prestigious Marseille cultural institution has pursued an active policy of acquisitions and exhibitions, in collaboration with the most important national and international museum institutions. The museum presents a broad overview of modern art, focusing on a number of historical periods and movements such as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and the various post-Cubist trends of the 1920s and 1930s. Surrealism is also a major focus of the collection, because of the historical ties forged between the movement and the city of Marseille, which welcomed thousands of refugees in 1940–1941, including many artists, writers, and antifascist activists fleeing Nazism. Among them were a large number of members of the Surrealist group, gathered around André Breton at Villa Air-Bel. The collections cover a period extending to the late 1970s, addressing a wide variety of aesthetic movements and presenting several remarkable bodies of work centered on artists such as Jean Dubuffet, André Masson, Victor Brauner, and Antonin Artaud, as well as movements that are sometimes little known to the general public, such as the Japanese group Gutaï, which was highly active and particularly innovative in the fields of 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, complementing and enriching the collections. The presentation is regularly renewed. > New presentation to discover from May 8. “Through a Language Escaped” New presentation of the modern and contemporary collections “And, without taking care, embrace the sand, enter the body of the shore through a clear digging, a sound, a word with no possible translation, a language escaped, a language trickling through the fingers I want to enter the earth through water / and water through the imprint of water” Samira Negrouche, Traces, 2021 The Musée Cantini’s new presentation invites visitors to reconsider its collections from the perspective of Marseille, its port history, its lived-in or imagined territories, and its diasporas. Linked by shipping routes to the shores of the Mediterranean, the Americas, and Asia, Marseille was, in the 20th century, the nerve center of multiple intellectual and artistic exchanges. At the heart of a global economy and situated within a colonial context, the Phocaean city gradually became a place of resistance and uprisings, a place where other relationships with the world were imagined. A hospitable city where borders fade, conducive to cultural intermingling, it is also a port of exile and wandering, the shore of a marine cemetery for women and men hoping to find refuge.  Marseille, both sun-drenched and rugged, is the starting point for a story of modern and contemporary creation that is plural and open to the world. Renewing its scholarly and cultural project, the Musée Cantini is now rooted in an art history that is both global and grounded in its territory, enabling it to broaden its scope to other journeys, other sensibilities, and other artistic forms. From Surrealist cosmogonies to experiments with the sign carried out from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other, Wifredo Lam enters into dialogue with Matta and Joaquìn Ferrer, Baya stands alongside Ahmed Cherkaoui, Saloua Raouda Choucair beside Alfred Manessier, and Antoni Tàpies with Kader Attia.  A new focus on intersections and hybridization in artistic production leads to a breakdown of the boundaries between art forms and materials, revealing the links between painting, photography, cinema, sculpture, and poetry. Thanks to recent acquisitions, the collection gives greater visibility to women artists, expands its geography to the southern shores, and brings to light experimentation with other materials and techniques. New loans, generously provided 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 momentum. Giving material form to this new dynamic, the graphic design of this presentation, created by Joseph Benoit, is based on two contemporary typefaces designed by women. Used for the headings, “Rakkas” is an Arabic and Latin typeface designed by Zeynep Akay. The Arabic design is inspired by the Ruq’ah lettering of Egyptian cinema 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 of these typefaces reflects on how writing can embrace the diversity of identities and cultural heritages. This new presentation of the modern and contemporary collections foreshadows the Musée Cantini’s next exhibition, Just Above the Silence, devoted to women committed to Algeria’s independence, presented from October 1, 2026, to March 21, 2027. Curators: Amélie Lavin, director of the Musée Cantini, and Louise Madinier, curator at the Musée Cantini Musée Cantini - from May 8, 2026 to April 25, 2027 Free admission ► To be certain of