Housed in a magnificent mansion, built in 1694, the Cantini Museum was bequeathed to the city of Marseille in 1916 by the famous marbler Jules Cantini. The building was subsequently renovated and extended several times, notably in 1986, 2000 and 2012.

The museum’s collection offers some beautiful sequences around Fauvism (André Derain, Charles Camoin, Émile Othon Friesz, Alfred Lombard), early Cubist experiments (Raoul Dufy, Albert Gleizes) and post-Cubist or purist currents of the 1920s 1940s (Amédée Ozenfant, Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Laure Garcin, Jacques Villon, Jean Helion).

Some of his works reveal the fascination of many artists at the beginning of the 20th century for light and southern landscapes, Cassis by Derain in 1907, the Mediterranean landscape created by Friesz the same year and L’Estaque painted in the footsteps of Cézane by Duffy in 1908.

Another major focus of the collection is the surrealist revolution, most of whose representatives gathered around André Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba passed through Marseille on their way to the United States in 1940-1941, as shown by the works of Victor Brauner, Matta, André Masson, Jacques Hérold, Max Ernst and Juan Miro. Finally, we should mention the donation by Aube and Oona Elléöuet-Breton of the game of Marseille, made by the members of the surrealist group at the Villa Air Bel in 1940-1941.

Lyrical or gesture abstraction is represented by works by Nicolas de Staël, Camille Bryen, Simon Hantaï, Arpad Szenes, Maria Elena Vieira Da Silva. The museum also preserves a collection of works by the Japanese group Gutaï, which was active in the 1955-1960s and has close ties to the French informal movement thanks to Michel Tapié’s critics. Subsequent decades were illustrated by the matierist experience of Jean Dubuffet, Antonio Sora, Antoni Tapiès Jean-Paul Riopelle and the large-scale abstract landscapes of Olivier Debré, Raoul Ubac, Pierre Tal-Coat, Hans Artung etc.

Somewhat apart from the organized groups, the collection includes some great individuals who profoundly marked the 20th century such as Oscar Kokoschka, Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Baltus and Francis Bacon. Finally, the photographic collections offer an overview of the history of this art from the period of the great pioneers (Édouard Baldus, Charles Nigger, Gustave le Gray, the Bisson Brothers), the movement of the new vision and the fascination exerted by the Marseille ferry bridge on many artists (Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Bovis, René Zuber, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Ergy Landau, André Papillon etc), until the 1960s-1970s (Jean-Pierre Sudre, Jean Dieuzaide, Linda Bénédard) Rick Jones, Ralph Gibson, Martine Frank, etc).

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