Jeu de Paume (, Real Tennis Court) is an arts centre for modern and postmodern photography and media. It is located in the north corner (west side) of the Tuileries Gardens next to the Place de la Concorde in Paris. In 2004, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Centre national de la photographie and Patrimoine Photographique merged to form the Association Jeu de Paume.

History

The rectangular building was constructed in 1861 at the request of Napoleon III. Napoleon III tasked Charles Delahaye to oversee the construction of the building and he commissioned Hector-Martin Lefuel as the architect. It was designed for jeu de paume, which nowadays is known as real tennis, court tennis or royal tennis, but its exterior complemented the already-existing Orangerie building. In 1877, Delahaye commissioned Virant to design a second court on the East side of the building. However, as tennis supplanted jeu de paume as a sport, the Jeu de Paume proved an inadequate space and was transformed into a gallery in 1909.

When the Musée du Luxembourg opened its doors to foreign schools of painting at the end of the 19th century, the works it sponsored became important enough to require a separate exhibition space, and in 1909 the Jeu de Paume re-opened as a gallery with the "One hundred portraits of women from the 18th-century English and French Schools" exhibition. Operating first as an extension of the Louvre and Musée de l'Orangerie, it became an independent gallery from 1922, showing country and/or artist-themed expositions mostly modern foreign works. The gallery shifted towards an avant-garde style with the 1937 Exposition Internationale and an "Origins and development of Independent International Art" show organised by Jean Cassou, Matisse, Braque, Picasso and Léger.

Nazi sorting house

Jeu de Paume was used from 1940 to 1944 to store Nazi plunder looted by the regime's Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR) in France. These works included masterpieces from the collections of French Jewish families like the Rothschilds, the David-Weills, the Bernheims, and noted dealers including Paul Rosenberg who specialised in impressionist and post-impressionist works.

Post-war museum

Between 1947 and 1986, it contained the Musée du Jeu de Paume, an offshoot of the Louvre that held many important impressionist works now housed in the Musée d'Orsay. Widely considered as the "most famous museum of impressionist painting in the world", the rooms bore names such as Salle Degas, Salle Cézanne or Salle Monet.

From 1989, as part of the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand, the building underwent a $10 million renovation by architect Antoine Stinco, resulting in about 1180 square metres (12,700 square feet) of exhibition space spread across three floors. The formerly walled-in reception hall was transformed into an atrium-like open area flooded with natural light from large bay windows, allowing views of the neighboring Tuileries Gardens, Place de la Concorde, and Eiffel Tower.

Present

In 1991, the Jeu de Paume reopened as "France's first national gallery of contemporary art", Ellsworth Kelly (1992), Helio Oiticica (1992), and Eva Hesse (1993). In 1999, the museum chose American architect Richard Meier as the subject of its first-ever architectural exhibition.

In 2004, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Centre National de la Photographie and Patrimoine Photographique merged to form the Association de Préfiguration for the Etablissement Public (EPIC) Jeu de Paume.

Today, the Jeu de Paume is subsidised by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Attendance increased from 200,000 visitors in 2006 to over 320,000 visitors in 2008.

The museum's wartime history has been depicted, heavily fictionalized, several times on film. In John Frankenheimer's 1964 film The Train, starring Burt Lancaster and Jeanne Moreau, Rose Valland is represented as Mademoiselle Villard, played by Suzanne Flon.