Max Manent, Le musée de l'insolite / The museum of the unusual

pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her weblog

Loriol-sur-Drôme is a commune of around 6,600 inhabitants, situated in the Rhône valley in the south of France, between Valence and Montélimar. 

In a street in the centre of this commune, not far from the town hall, there is a house with a large number of rooms, of which more than ten are lavishly decorated, as shown in the images around.

Life and works

The house named Musée de l'insolite was inhabited and provided with a unique exhibition by Max Manent (1925-2023), who was born in Montélimar, a little over twenty km south of Loriol-sur-Drôme.

Max Manent grew up in a family where the father was a nougat manufacturer and apparently a quite open-minded person, because at the age of 15 the boy was allowed to travel through France, something that was quite unusual at the time.

However, for the young man it was a pleasure to explore the world, and once he was an adult he lived abroad for a while and then he stayed in Paris, where he met many people, among whom a number of artists.

He became a painter, and he focused on only one subject: women…. Whether he followed a training course of several years to be a painter is not known.

In 1979, when Manent was in his mid-50s, he moved to Loriol, where he took up residence in the spacious house along the Grand Rue.

Settling in this house, Manent must have felt that this was his final destination, because he began to decorate the rooms he did not use for living, with all that he had collected during the previous many years

He would indeed stay there for more than 40 years, time enough to transform the interior into a special indoor art environment.

The more than ten rooms are filled with a variety of objects such as the hundreds of crucifixes in the very first image, a wall completely covered with all kinds of colorful drawings and posters, as in the image above, but also a collection of ten to twelve thousand cigar bands with special images, rare musical instruments,  matchboxes, African art .....

Manent also used a wall to exhibit some of his his own paintings

In some rooms children were not allowed, because what was shown there was not suitable for them. Manet had his own ideas about the unusual and the unexpected

A very special exhibit is the wooden coffin in which he could be carried to his grave, a coffin decorated with silhouettes of women. 

Max Manent passed away on October 30, 2023 at the age of 97.

Whether the coffin he had prepared was actually used at his funeral is not clear, like there also is no information about what's going to happen with the collection.

Documentation

* Article (2015) on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit

* Article (2012) in newspaper le Dauphine 

Max Manent

Le musée de l'insolite

28 Grande Rue 26270

Loriol-sur-Drome, dept Drome, region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

currently the museum is closed