Playground for vacationers is home to culture

The Oceanographic Museum Across from the grand entrance at Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum is a monumental cabinet of curiosities. Filled with items ranging from marine specimens to a polar bear to a replica of the world’s first diving suit, the 33-by-60-foot wood, glass and steel structure seems at home in this stunning building that houses an aquarium once overseen by Jacques Cousteau. The cabinet, though, is not part of the museum’s scientific exhibitions. It is a permanent installation by the American artist Mark Dion.
Not too far up the congested slope of Monte Carlo is an exquisitely restored early-20th-century villa that is one of the two homes of the recently opened Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, filled with contemporary works. And over near Casino Square, site of the Anish Kapoor sculpture “Sky Mirror,” is an array of new galleries.
Monaco, a tiny principality that clings improbably to a limestone cliff on the southeastern coast of France, has long been known as a playground for vacationers with means who dabble in hobbies like gambling and Formula One car racing. Yet in recent years, it has become home to a distinctive and vibrant international contemporary art community, a new tourist draw in a country with no shortage of them.
“We know people come to Monaco for the sea and the sun, but we want them also to know that we are committed to culture and, in particular, to art,” Paul Masseron, the principality’s minister of the interior, said.
The commitment is evident in the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, which opened in its current configuration in 2010 under the direction of Marie-Claude Beaud. Its exhibitions are on view at both the Villa Paloma and the Villa Sauber, a belle époque structure on the harbor designed by Charles Garnier, the architect best known for his opera house in Paris.
In its short tenure, the museum has managed to produce ambitious shows like “La Carte d’Après Nature,” including a range of mediums, guest-curated by the German artist Thomas Demand, which was voted among the best exhibitions of 2010 in Artforum magazine. Its recent exhibition, “Le Silence. Une Fiction,” envisioned a modern city as a future ruin. This summer, an exhibition of work by Thomas Schütte, “One Man House,” which includes a freestanding house in the garden of the Villa Paloma, looks promising. (Set to open on July 5, the show will be presented in collaboration with the Castello di Rivoli of Turin.)
Monaco’s artistic resurgence was spearheaded in part by Ms. Beaud, who was selected by Princess Caroline of Monaco. After a 40-year career that included overhauling art institutions from the Fondation Cartier in Paris to the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, Ms. Beaud was asked to direct Monaco’s new national museum after the community abandoned, for ecological reasons, a proposal for a Dubai-like island complex with an art museum. Charged with finding a space in which to run the museum she would direct, Ms. Beaud saw the Villa Sauber, on the harbor, and the Villa Paloma up the hill, and insisted, “We have to make a museum with both of them.”
Still, Ms. Beaud credited Princess Caroline with the success of the museum and for helping to forge Monaco’s artistic community. “She’s in charge of all of the major cultural institutions, and she is really a strong personality.”
Princess Caroline spoke in an interview on the terrace of the bistro La Chaumière about her role in the arts. Asked if she had chosen Ms. Beaud because of her skilled problem-solving, the princess laughed and said, “No, it is because we get along.” The two collaborate closely, and Princess Caroline has also promoted culture, which she said has always been close to her heart.
And she isn’t afraid to raise hackles. “This notion of freedom and being able to take risks is what I’ve always believed in,” the princess said, adding that in presenting challenging art to the public, she has also sought to keep ticket prices down.
The museum’s arrival has spawned a growing number of contemporary art galleries. Vanessa Knaebel, director of Art & Rapy, an art and design gallery on Avenue Princesse Grace, attributed Monaco’s increased fascination with contemporary art to the hiring of the French-born Ms. Beaud.
“At first we felt all alone,” Ms. Knaebel said, referring to the gallery, which the local collector and real estate scion Delphine Pastor opened in 2003. Now, with the National Museum consistently mounting sophisticated exhibitions featuring internationally respected artists, Ms. Knaebel added, there’s a shared sensibility, “which for us as a gallery is very important.”
The unique makeup of Monaco is also a draw. The Belgian-Algerian art dealer Safia Al-Rashid, whose gallery SEM-ART opened two summers ago on Avenue de la Costa, said that Monaco, an “international melting pot,” inspired her to focus on such exhibitions as the recent “In the World of Zero,” presenting European artists who experimented with alternative approaches to painting in the 1960s and ’70s.
Given the principality’s limited space — it measures only three-quarters of a square mile, about half the size of Central Park — art tends to turn up in unexpected places, like Casino Square, where the Anish Kapoor sculpture sits. And cultural hubs like the Oceanographic Museum, the Museum of Prehistoric Anthropology, and the Grimaldi Forum, a glass behemoth down by the harbor, regularly include contemporary art in their programming.
For the past several years, the Monaco Project for the Arts has invited sought-after artists to create site-specific projects at the École Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques in an attempt to attract talented young students to the school’s summer program. (This summer’s installation by Yan Pei Ming will run from July 8 to Sept. 2.) And the Monte Carlo Ballet regularly commissions sets, costumes and even curtains for its stage. Frank Stella and George Condo are among the big names chosen.
All of this activity has produced a kind of domino effect that only reinforces the elaborate — and consistently provocative — exhibitions organized by the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.
The recent show at the Villa Paloma, “Le Silence. Une Fiction,” was inspired by a weeklong field trip to Detroit, initiated by Cristiano Raimondi, a curator at the museum and one of the show’s organizers. What Mr. Raimondi discovered in Detroit, he said, was a situation that somehow, miraculously, had not descended into anarchy, but that possessed, rather, a spirit of freedom and possibility. With the support of artists, he said, the struggling city “is turning into a different kind of utopia.”
Outside the museum another vision of utopia awaited: the sun-drenched exotic gardens, with a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean.