Since 2017, the NMNM has raised awareness among final-year high school students about contemporary art and one of the museum’s roles: collecting art.
The Apprentice Collectors educational programme immerses students in the world of artistic creation through a series of events, talks, visits and workshops. Every year, they attend several prestigious contemporary art fairs in Europe to select one or several works with an acquisition budget of €20,000.
The NMNM collection includes over 10,000 works, most of which date from the 19th to 21st centuries. One important collection comes from the Musée des Beaux-Arts of the Villa Sainte-Cécile, which exhibited sculptures, ceramics, optical views, paintings, drawings and prints about the Principality of Monaco and its surroundings, including Neo-Classical works by François-Joseph and Jean-François Bosio, a sculptor and engraver, respectively.
In the late 1960s, more than 500 dolls and mechanical automatons, exhibited at Villa Sauber between 1972 and 2008, were donated to the collection, followed by works by Claude Monet and Kees Van Dongen that are connected to Monaco and the region. The collection includes pieces about the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo by Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, Michel Larionov, André Derain, Jean Cocteau and Serge Lifar. Since 2002, the museum has kept 4,000 costumes and 400 models of sets from the Monte Carlo Opera, contributed by the Société des Bains de Mer. The monumental works of Guy Lartigue, Alexander Calder and Victor Vasarely, along with the sculptures of Anish Kapoor, Claire Fontaine and Michel Blazy are also part of the NMNM’s collection.
With the opening of Villa Paloma in 2010, the museum shifted its acquisition policy towards modern and contemporary artwork and acquired pieces by Lucio Fontana, Brassaï, Valerio Adami, Andy Warhol and Mark Dion, which now resonate with older collections.
