THE GUIDE MUSEUMS 2016 The best museums in France


Above and left: Musée Grévin, France’s Madame Tussaud’s; Rodin’s Thinker PARIS


Musée du Louvre 75058 Paris


This is the daddy of them all. Over nine million visitors throng to the Louvre every year, the lion’s share over the summer months. Try catching a glance of La Joconde (that’s The Mona Lisa) in August and you can find yourself 50-deep behind sweaty tourists from every country of the world. Apparently it would take you nine months just to glance at all the 35,000 objects in this, the world’s largest, museum. So to avoid exhausting yourself, take in little bits of the Louvre on separate visits. And if you can see only a handful of works, try these for starters: Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus de Milo, Great Sphinx of Tanis, Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the


140 ❘ FRANCE TODAY Aug/Sept 2016


People, Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, and Botticelli’s Venus with Three Graces. Oh, and the Mona Lisa – if you can get through the crowds. www.louvre.fr


Musée National d’Art Moderne 75004 Paris


On the fourth and fifth floors of Paris’s mighty Centre Georges Pompidou you’ll find more than 100,000 works of art by over 6,000 artists in one of Europe’s largest modern art museums, the unmissable Musée National d’Art Moderne. Painting, sculpture, drawing, print, photography, cinema, new media, architecture and design… Every possible medium from the beginning of the 20th century onwards is here in all its glory. Among the gems on offer are works by Matisse,


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