Best Museums in Paris, France

The Best Museums

• Palais de Tokyo: The Palais de Tokyo is a contemporary "art mall" that displays radical emerging art -- even its hours (noon-midnight) are radical. After its 2011 renovation and expansion, the museum has become even more monumental, with double the exhibition space. You're bound to see thought-provoking exhibitions that you'd be unlikely to see elsewhere.

• Musée du Louvre: The Louvre's exterior is a triumph of French architecture, and its interior shelters an embarrassment of art, one of the greatest treasure troves known to Western civilization. Of the Louvre's more than 300,000 paintings, only a small percentage can be displayed at one time. The museum maintains its staid dignity and timelessness even though thousands of visitors traipse daily through its corridors, looking for the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo. I. M. Pei's controversial Great Pyramid nearly offsets the grandeur of the Cour Carrée, but it has a real functional purpose.

• Musée d'Orsay: The spidery glass-and-iron canopies of a former railway station frame one of Europe's greatest museums of art. Devoted mainly to paintings of the 19th century, d'Orsay contains some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the French Impressionists, along with sculptures and decorative objects whose designs forever changed the way European artists interpreted line, movement, and color. This is also where Whistler's Mother sits in her rocker.

• Centre Pompidou: "The most avant-garde building in the world," or so it is known, is a citadel of modern art, with exhibitions drawn from more than 40,000 works. Everything seemingly is here -- from Calder's 1928 Josephine Baker (one of his earliest versions of the mobile) to a re-creation of Brancusi's Jazz Age studio.

• Musée Jacquemart-André: The 19th-century town house, with its gilt salons and elegant winding staircase, contains the best small collection of 18th-century decorative art in Paris. The building and its contents were a bequest to the Institut de France by the late Mme Nélie Jacquemart-André, herself an artist of note.

• Musée National du Moyen Age/Thermes de Cluny: This museum houses some of the most beautiful medieval art still in existence. Dark, rough-walled, and evocative, the Cluny is devoted to the church art and castle crafts of the Middle Ages. It is more celebrated for its tapestries -- among them the world-famed series of The Lady and the Unicorn. Here you can also visit the ruins of Roman baths, dating from around A.D. 200.

• Musée Marmottan Monet: On the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, this museum is home to 130 paintings, watercolors, pastels, and drawings of Claude Monet, the "father of Impressionism." A gift of Monet's son Michel, the bequest is one of the greatest art acquisitions in France. Exhibited here is the painting Impression: Sunrise, which named the artistic movement.

• Musée Rodin: Auguste Rodin, the man credited with freeing French sculpture from classicism, once lived at and had his studio in this charming 18th-century mansion across from Napoleon's tomb. Today, the house and its garden are filled with his works, including The Thinker crouched on his pedestal, the Burghers of Calais, and the writhing Gates of Hell.