On a recent afternoon, Murielle Delporte stood in front of “Une soirée,” a glittering 1878 painting by Jean Béraud depicting a Parisian ball.
“It’s magnificent,” said Delporte, a social worker. “Usually, I only ever see these works in photographs, but having them right in front of me — it’s like a dream come true.”
“Une soirée” usually hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, the Paris museum dedicated to 19th-century art and housed in a former railway station. But Delporte, who has never set foot in the French capital, was admiring the painting in Sainte-Florine, a small town about 250 miles south.
She was standing in a repurposed truck that had come to Sainte-Florine as part of a free traveling exhibition titled “The Grand Ball,” celebrating the Musée d’Orsay’s 40th anniversary. It was one stop on a nine-month nationwide tour that is brining about 20 pieces from the museum’s collection to towns without art museums of their own.
In a country whose government spends big on culture, the traveling show is tackling one of France’s most enduring conundrums: how to extend access to national art collections to remote corners of the country. Paris receives a large chunk of the Culture Ministry’s funding: Every year, the state spends about 196 euros, or $220, per inhabitant in the greater Paris region, compared with €21 per inhabitant in the rest of France, according to the country’s statistics agency.
“Part of our mission is to share our collection with as many people as possible,” the Musée d’Orsay’s director, Annick Lemoine, said at the truck’s inauguration in Paris last month. While 7,000 of the museum’s works are currently on loan around the world, she said, the truck means that the collection can now reach parts of France that don’t have the infrastructure to host them.
MuM’Orsay, as the truck is called, is the latest in a series of museum trucks by MuMo, a mobile museum initiative founded by the entrepreneur Ingrid Brochard in 2011. Earlier versions have toured items from the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the FRAC network of regional museums, and another vehicle in the fleet serves as a traveling cinema.
These trucks, financed with a mixture of public and private funds, are run by the nonprofit Art Explora, which aims to democratize access to the arts. “I am convinced that art makes us better human beings,” said Art Explora’s founder, the entrepreneur and philanthropist Frédéric Jousset. “But there is a real cultural divide. For many people, art is far from where they live — it’s expensive and, sometimes, it’s boring.”
He pointed to a recent study showing that while 86 percent of French people consider culture essential to their quality of life, the share of those visiting museums and exhibitions dropped from 62 percent in 2017 to 43 percent in 2025.
The Orsay truck has been designed to recall a visit to the original museum. A large clock, like the one on the building’s facade, makes it instantly recognizable. Inside, wooden floors meet walls in crimson — the color considered best for showcasing 19th-century art. The ceiling imitates the vast glass vault that floods the Paris building with natural light, and metal beams recall the former railway station’s industrial framework.
Sainte-Florine, a former mining town of about 3,300 inhabitants, was included in the itinerary because it is far removed from the tourist route. The nearest contemporary art museum is closed for eight months of the year, while theaters and music venues are a 45-minute drive away in the city of Clermont-Ferrand.
“It’s not every day you get projects like this in a small town like ours,” said Josiane Coste, the mayor of Sainte-Florine. And a traveling show is less intimidating than stepping into a museum, she said. “A truck that comes straight to your doorstep is different.”
Since becoming mayor in March, Coste has tried to make Sainte-Florine livelier with a new community center and street parties known as “grandes tablées.” But the exhibition arrives after years of severe budget cuts, particularly in the arts sector. Last year, protests erupted across the country after the government axed €150 million of cultural funding. A 2027 draft budget, unveiled last month, would cut another €95 million.
It’s not just the central government making cuts. The Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, which includes Sainte-Florine, has cut millions of euros from its arts budget, year after year.
Stéphane Gemmani, a regional lawmaker in the area, said in an interview that a traveling exhibition, ephemeral by nature, risked overshadowing this broader issue. “Bringing museums to local areas is a fantastic idea, but it must not become a tool for local authorities to mask their own shortcomings,” he said.
After cutting €5 million in arts subsidies in 2022 and 2023 — including all of the funding for a major theater in Lyon — the region’s then-president, Laurent Wauquiez, said he wanted to redistribute funding to rural areas. He accused the culture ministry of “Parisianism” — a term sometimes used to denounce Paris as snobbish, particularly when it comes to culture.
With “The Great Ball,” the Musée d’Orsay is trying to distance itself from that image. The exhibition features paintings, sculptures and engravings that depict not just opera nights in Paris, but also village fairs and rural folk dances like the ones that remain popular in places like Sainte-Florine.
Coste, the mayor, said the exhibition was, above all, an opportunity for people in town to get out of the house and be part of something. “The situation is so bleak these days that you can sense that people here are eager for this kind of thing,” she said. “They want to come together.”
