"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.

Having become the owner of the building, Jules Cantini, an art lover and prominent marble worker who participated in the construction of numerous civil and religious buildings in Marseille during the Second Empire, donated it to the city of Marseille in 1916 so that it could become a museum devoted to modern art.

This prestigious Marseille cultural institution has since pursued an active policy of acquisitions and exhibitions, in collaboration with the most important national and international museum institutions.

The museum presents a broad panorama of modern art, focusing on a number of historical periods 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, owing to 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 many 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 offering remarkable groups of works centered on artists such as Jean Dubuffet, André Masson, Victor Brauner and Antonin Artaud, as well as movements sometimes little known to the general public, such as the Japanese Gutai group, highly active and particularly 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 deposit, complementing 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 taking care, embrace the sand, enter the body of the shore through a clear incision, a sound, a word without possible translation, an escaped language, a language streaming 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 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 within a colonial context, the Phocaean city gradually became a site of resistance and uprisings, a place where other relationships with the world were conceived. A city of hospitality where borders fade, conducive to cultural mixing, it is also a port of exile and wandering, the shore of a marine cemetery of women and men hoping to find refuge.

Marseille, sunny and harsh, 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 situated in its territory, enabling it to broaden its scope to other journeys, other sensibilities and other visual forms. From Surrealist cosmogonies to experiments with the sign conducted 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 next to Alfred Manessier, and Antoni Tàpies with Kader Attia.

A new focus on intersections and hybridizations in artistic production leads to breaking down the barriers between art forms and materials, by showcasing 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 highlights 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.

Materializing this new dynamic, the graphic design of this display, conceived 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 is inspired by the Ruq’ah lettering of 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 accommodate the diversity of identities and cultural heritages.

This new presentation anticipates the next exhibition at the Musée Cantini, "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 May 8, 2026 to April 25, 2027 Free admission

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