Musée municipal de La Roche-sur-Yon, Municipal art museum in La Roche-sur-Yon, France.
The Musée municipal de La Roche-sur-Yon is an art museum in a pale stone building with four tall pedimented windows above and an arched window below. Its holdings include 175 paintings, about 3,000 graphic works, some 40 sculptures and 108 contemporary photographs. A glazed curved canopy marks the entrance.
Created in 1847, the museum first occupied the first floor of the town hall. In 1854 the Société d'Émulation de la Vendée was tasked with gathering fine art, archaeology and natural science items for it. Construction of its own building, designed by city architect Auguste Boudaud, was voted on 15 May 1877 and finished in 1880, housing the tribunal on the ground floor and the museum above.
The museum's name links it to the municipal collection begun in 1847, and its support association, the Amis du Musée Yonnais Municipal, still backs its exhibitions. Since 2003 works have been shown only in rotating thematic displays, four to five a year, and the museum also runs the contemporary art space at the Cyel, with four temporary exhibitions annually.
The museum has been closed to the public since the end of June 2019, so it cannot be visited at present. Its collections are due to move in 2028 to the former Conservatoire on Place Napoléon. Until then, the museum's contemporary art programme continues at the Cyel, the building shared with the conservatoire and art school, which hosts four temporary exhibitions a year.
The contemporary photography collection began in 1983 and grew to 108 works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. A separate fund of about 500 small-format plates from the 1920s and 1930s documents local life ethnographically.
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