La Coopérative-Musée Cérès Franco Reopens in Montolieu With Musée de France Status
A museum shaped by one collector’s convictions is returning to public view in southern France. La Coopérative-Musée Cérès Franco in Montolieu reopens on June 20 after a four-year hiatus and a major renovation, now strengthened by the official recognition of Musée de France status.
The institution is housed in a 1939 Art Deco winery, a setting that has been expanded and upgraded to meet the demands of a national museum. In December 2025, after a €4.6 million remodel, the culture ministry added it to the official roster of 1,220 museums nationwide. That designation fulfilled a condition attached to Cérès Franco’s gift of nearly 1,750 works, which she wanted safeguarded by the French state.
Franco’s collection is far larger than the donation alone suggests. Over the latter half of the 20th century, between 3,000 and 4,500 works passed through her hands, many by artists still absent from France’s public collections. The holdings include major figures linked to CoBrA and New Realism, as well as outsider artists, art brut practitioners, and folk artists. Franco was especially drawn to naïve artists from South America, particularly Brazil’s Primitivos, and the museum now holds France’s leading collection of works by artists of Brazilian heritage.
The reopening also marks a practical turning point. When the museum first opened in 2015, it lacked proper storage, offices, and temperature control; the toilet was still an outhouse in the garden. The new status brings access to a national peer network and financial support from the Direction Régionale et des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC). Fortier said the museum recently completed an urgent insect-removal conservation project, a €43,000 operation that received €25,000 in DRAC aid.
The ministry’s announcement described Franco as a visionary defender of singular artists often pushed to the margins of mainstream taste. That description fits her career closely. Born in 1926 in Bagé, Brazil, Franco studied art history at Columbia University under Meyer Shapiro before moving to Paris in 1951. She quickly entered an experimental circle and began organizing thematic exhibitions long before curation became a formal profession. In 1962, she mounted L’Œil de Bœuf, inviting artists to work in round or oval formats; in another project, she asked them to create a stamp of herself, “Cérès,” the Roman goddess of agriculture and the figure on the first French postage stamp, the 20 centimes noir.
She opened her first gallery, L’Œil de Bœuf, in 1972 at 58 rue Quincampoix, near the Centre Pompidou. Among the artists who shaped her outlook were Guillaume Corneille and Michel Macréau, whom Fortier says is represented at the museum in a way no other Musée de France can match. The reopening gives Franco’s archive and collection a more secure institutional frame, while also clarifying the museum’s larger purpose: to preserve artists and histories that French public collections long overlooked.
