Partly because France surrendered to the Nazis before any harm could be done to Paris, Paris is the art capital of the world. Consequently, it has an impractically large number of great museums. Tourists can’t reasonably be expected to visit all of them—Paris has a dozen or so museums dedicated just to modern art. So, when tourists want modern art, they go to the two center-piece modern art museums—the Musee D’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou. Each gets about three and half million visitors a year. In contrast, the dully-named City of Paris Museum of Modern Art gets about 700 thousand visitors a year. That’s about 50,000 fewer than the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Despite having been regulated to second-class status, tourism-wise, the City of Paris Modern Art Museum contains what is arguably the single most interesting room in any museum in Paris: the Room Dufy.
