The Museum of Modern Art opened in 2009 in a striking, white-walled building near the central park, designed by Jean Nouvel. The collection covers Azerbaijani art from the 1960s onwards — Soviet-era avant-garde, neo-primitivism, contemporary work — with roughly eight hundred pieces by around fifty artists, mostly drawn from a single private collection.
The strength of the museum is the building itself and the unexpected coherence of the post-Stalin work, which is rarely shown in any depth. There is also a small permanent display of European twentieth-century art (Chagall, Picasso, Dalí) given by various donors. A quiet, well-curated antidote to the bombast of Baku's bigger institutions.