The story
For about 150 years, from the Napoleonic era until 1963, the royal abbey of Fontevraud in the Loire valley served as a prison. One of its service buildings, a late 17th-century hay barn known as the Fannerie, was used as a storeroom in those years. Since 2021 its broad beams and old timber roof have sheltered a museum of modern art built around a single gift.
The givers were Léon Cligman, a textile industrialist born in Moldavia in 1920, and his wife Martine, a painter who signs her work Martine Martine. Her parents, Pierre and Denise Lévy, had already given their collection to found the modern art museum in Troyes. In 2017 the Cligmans handed nearly 900 works to the French state and the Pays de la Loire region, pieces bought over some 60 years on personal enthusiasm more than by plan.
The rooms set 19th and 20th century paintings beside antiquities and objects from Africa, Asia and Oceania. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the painter of Montmartre, appears in a self-portrait seen from behind. There are canvases by the landscape painter Camille Corot, the Cubist Juan Gris and Chaïm Soutine, sculpture by Edgar Degas and Germaine Richier, and 36 drawings by André Derain for an edition of the Satyricon, the Roman novel by Petronius.
