A musée imaginaire or imaginary museum is a collection of works of art that a person holds as essential or favourite, so that given the opportunity he or she would bring them together in a single ideal museum. The term is closely associated with

André Malraux Georges André Malraux ( ; ; 3 November 1901 – 23 November 1976) was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel ''La Condition Humaine'' (''Man's Fate'') (1933) won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed ...

's ''Musée imaginaire'', an essay from 1947 in which the principle it refers to is dramatised. Malraux organized an actual imaginary museum exhibition at the

Fondation Maeght The Maeght Foundation or Fondation Maeght () is a museum of modern art on the ''Colline des Gardettes'', a hill overlooking Saint-Paul de Vence in the southeast of France about from Nice. It was established by Marguerite and Aimé Maeght in ...

in 1973. To his own admission, "" () Despite that, he believed that the "birth" of the imaginary museum and the one of contemporary art were intertwined phenomenon. Other personalities have since made their own selection known, such as

Michel Butor Michel Butor (; 14 September 1926 – 24 August 2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator. Life and work Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille, the third of seven chil ...

in ''Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor'', published in 2015 and republished in 2019. More recently, Nicolas Malevé has compared the scale of Malraux's ''Musée imaginaire'' to that of datasets for training

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

, such as

ImageNet The ImageNet project is a large visual database designed for use in Outline of object recognition, visual object recognition software research. More than 14 million images have been hand-annotated by the project to indicate what objects are pictur ...

. As

Douglas Crimp John Douglas Crimp (August 19, 1944 July 5, 2019) was an American art historian, critic, curator, and AIDS activist. He was known for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theories and art, institutional critique, dance, film, ...

noted, Malraux's ''Musée imaginaire'' depends upon the existence of photographs. In Malevé's words, Crimp argued that "art history cannot produce a universal plane of comparison without another organising device: photography“.

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{{Authority control Art collections Anthologies

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