There was an Arlesian in Troyes: the Museum of Modern Art. Closed in 2018 for renovations, its reopening was boldly but recklessly announced for 2019. It took place in 2024, albeit in several parts. Only a part, then the whole, with a constantly postponed inauguration (it finally took place on Friday, October 11, even though the museum had been fully open since April) by the “protocol service” of the town hall, which seems to have an advantage in the local events calendar.
It must be said that its renovation is part of a much broader and more ambitious framework, which includes that of the City of Stained Glass, inaugurated in December 2022, and the Museum of Fine Arts of the Abbey of Saint-Loup, with presentations completely obsolete. whose work will last from 2025 to 2028. Without forgetting the creation of common reserves, currently in the project phase.
Now fully accessible to the public, the Museum of Modern Art is worth a visit, especially for its collections: it is, for example, one of the rare ones, along with the Petit-Palais in Geneva, which has them all (76 pieces). of the bronze sculptures of André Derain (1880-1954), today very well presented. This was thanks to a textile industrialist, Pierre Lévy, who financed its printing. According to his wife, Denise, he donated part of his collection to the State in 1976, that is, about 2,000 works (including 1,200 drawings) of the 4,000 he owned, on condition that it be presented in his city of Troyes. In 1982, a stream of holy water from the cathedral was installed in the buildings of the old episcopal palace, the main modification being a magnificent spiral staircase made by colleagues, now unused, but fortunately preserved.
Exemplary renovation
Those who visited it at the time preserve the memory of one of the beautiful collections of provincial modern art, perhaps comparable to the donation of Masurel, from Villeneuve-d’Ascq (North), with this nuance that the Lévys’ tastes were, if not more bourgeois, at least more classic: few cubist, if not colorful and legible, therefore more the work of the second knives of the movement, including a very beautiful and important set by Roger de La Fresnay. A surprising double-sided Robert Delaunay (Angela Lampe, curator of the Pompidou Center, identified on the back a portrait of Bella Rosenfeld, Chagall’s first wife), painted on the occasion of the Paris Olympic Games (those of 1924). No abstraction, except for little Nicolas de Staël and some Bissière. This last gap is made up for by another donation, that of 2011 from Jeanne Buttner, whose husband, Raymond, collected abstracts from the Paris school in the 1950s.
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