Maurice Girardin, the Curious Dentist

The exhibition Hommage à Maurice Girardin: collectionneur, galeriste et mécène, presented at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris brings back into focus a figure who played a decisive role in the very creation of the institution. Maurice Girardin, a dentist and surgeon by profession, was above all a curious collector, an attentive gallerist and a patron capable of grasping the significance of modern art at a time when Paris was the crossroads of the avant-gardes. In 1920 he founded the Galerie La Licorne, actively supporting young artists and developing a collection that, upon his death in 1951, he bequeathed to the city of Paris with the explicit wish of contributing to the establishment of a museum devoted to modern art. The exhibition presents around one hundred works selected from his legacy of more than five hundred pieces, including names such as Raoul Dufy, Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. Alongside the paintings, archival documents, photographs, illustrated books and art magazines shed light on the cultural and commercial network within which Girardin worked. The display highlights not only his taste as a collector but also his idea of art as a continuous dialogue between Europe and the extra-European world, an interest also reflected in the variety of materials he gathered. The exhibition layout reconstructs the atmosphere of 1920s Paris, when Galerie La Licorne served as a meeting point for artists, critics and enthusiasts. What emerges is a story of relationships, exchanges and forms of support that reveal a highly engaged approach to collecting. Girardin acquired, exhibited, advised and fostered connections. His collection was not an encyclopaedic archive but a living portrait of a city and its creative energy, capable of linking the historical avant-gardes to new international developments. The curatorial approach insists on this relational dimension. The works are not presented as isolated icons but as nodes within a cultural network that helped shape the museum’s identity. The Girardin bequest became one of the founding pillars of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and continues to offer a key to understanding its purpose: a museum born not only to conserve, but also to support the vitality of modern art in the city that more than any other forged its languages. The result is a tribute that restores visibility to a protagonist too often confined to the margins of the narrative of French modernism. Maurice Girardin emerges as a central figure, a cultural mediator who turned a private passion into a public heritage destined to endure.