The Museum of Modern Art in Troyes has been a long time coming. Closed for renovation in 2018, its reopening was boldly but unwisely announced for 2019. It took place in 2024, albeit in several stages. Part only, then the whole, with an inauguration constantly postponed – eventually taking place on October 11, despite the museum having been fully open since April – by the town hall's protocol department, which seems to have the upper hand on the calendar of local events.

The renovation is actually part of a much larger and more ambitious project, which included that of the Cité du Vitrail stained-glass exhibition center, which opened in December 2022, and the Fine Arts Museum at the Abbaye Saint-Loup, with its obsolete displays, which will be renovated between 2025 and 2028. And let's not forget the creation of joint reserves, currently in the planning stage.

Now fully accessible to the public, the Museum of Modern Art is well worth a visit, first and foremost for its collections: For example, it is one of the few, along with the Petit-Palais in Geneva, in possession of all (76 pieces) of André Derain's bronze sculptures (1880-1954), now remarkably displayed. This is thanks to a textile industrialist, Pierre Lévy, who financed their casting. In 1976, in agreement with his wife, Denise, he donated part of his collection – some 2,000 works (including 1,200 drawings) out of the 4,000 he owned – to the French state, on condition that it be displayed in his hometown of Troyes (northeastern France). In 1982, the collection was moved to the buildings of the former episcopal palace, a stone's throw from the cathedral, with the main modification being a magnificent spiral staircase built by journeymen, now unused but fortunately preserved.

Those who visited at the time will remember it as one of the finest collections of modern art outside of Paris, perhaps comparable to the Masurel Donation in Villeneuve-d'Ascq (northern France), with the nuance that the Lévy's tastes were, if not more bourgeois, at least more classical: Few cubists, if not colorful and legible, so more the work of the movement's second strings, including a very fine and important set by Roger de La Fresnay and a surprising double-sided Robert Delaunay – Angela Lampe, curator at the Centre Pompidou, identified on the reverse a portrait of Bella Rosenfeld, Chagall's first wife – painted for the Paris Olympic Games (1924). No abstracts, apart from a few small works by Nicolas de Staël and Bissière. The latter gap has been filled by another donation, made by Jeanne Buttner in 2011, whose husband Raymond collected abstracts from the Paris School in the 1950s.

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