In the Palm of the Hand: The Medal in France in the 19th and 20th century, exhibition

Tiny pieces of history.

During the nineteenth century, the art of the medal took on an ever growing status within French artistic life. The Salons devoted a separate section to medals, and from the 1890s, under conservationist Léonce Bénédite, the Musée du Luxembourg (an institution dedicated to living artists and the "ancestor" of the Musée d'Orsay), began a collection of its own. Part of this collection of more than two thousand medals is thus presented here.

Roger Marx, collector and critic, founded the Society of Friends of the French medal in 1899. Medal collections were established in many places around the country. Like sculpture, in the twentieth century the medal suffered from the aftermath of the disenchantment with the art of the nineteenth century, and was to disappear, with few exceptions, from art collections.

From prisons to hospitals, from work in the fields to moulding tyres, these medals present a living kaleidoscope of the changing world.