This is a “finishing” in style. At the end of the “Matisse and Marguerite” exhibition. A father’s gaze at the Paris Museum of Modern Art (MAMP) (April-August 2025), Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, wife of Matisse’s grandson, donated to the museum the 61 works she had loaned for the exhibition. This set includes seven paintings, a sculpture, twenty-eight drawings, eight etchings, six lithographs, five posters and six illustrated books. Almost all of these works were shown for the first time in France.
Fabrice Hergott, director of the museum, salutes the “generous gesture” of Barbara Dauphin Duthuit. This lot is added to the approximately twenty works by Matisse already preserved at the MAM in Paris, including two monumental versions of The Dance (1930-1933). The procedure for accepting the donation was voted on by the board of directors of Paris Musées. Barbara Dauphin Duthuit had already donated the canvas to the Center Pompidou in 2013 Marguerite with the black cat (1910).
This is not the first significant donation to MAMP. Since 2007, more than 800 works have been donated to the Museum of Modern Art. Starting in 2007, the Hartung-Bergman Foundation donated 102 works by Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987), including fifteen canvases, fifteen works on paper, five “mini-paintings” and 67 prints. In 2012, German gallery owner Michael Werner offered 127 paintings and sculptures by 20th century, modernist and contemporary artists. Françoise Marquet-Zao, wife of Zao Wou-ki (1920-2013) donated on January 4, 2019 a set of works by her late husband. This set notably includes the Hommage à Matisse (1986), one of his most important works, in reference to Matisse’s painting French window in Collioure (1914). In 2019-2020, the Moulin Family Endowment Fund made a donation of five works created by women artists: Pauline Curnier Jardin, Trisha Donnelly, Marguerite Humeau, Anne Imhof and Mélanie Matranga. In 2020 the German painter Georg Baselitz donated 6 works.
These donations came after the considerable theft during the night of May 19 to 20, 2010 of five paintings including Pastoral (1905) by Matisse. The estimated value of the paintings is 100 million euros, much more than the 88 million euros from the Louvre theft. Despite the fact that the paintings have not been found, donors retain all their confidence in the museum.
