Recent scholarship on the interwar French art milieu has overcome, on the one hand, ethnonationalism as the main interpretive framework for examining the relationship between art and politics and, on the other, a celebratory narrative that made Paris the liberal and democratic interwar art centre. Building on these recent studies, my thesis aims to reassess the nexus between art and politics in interwar France. I do this by asking what kind of Republican imaginaries were created in the modern art promoted by public institutions. In order to answer this question, the thesis builds on a second, recent body of scholarship that re-examines French politics and Republican political culture through new lenses. This work highlights the polysemic and plastic nature of Republican ideology, the variety of stances contained within Republicanism, and hence the existence of different and competing understandings of the French Republic. By delving into four case studies, namely the Musée des écoles étrangères, the Musée de Grenoble, the tapestries realised at the Manufacture des Gobelins and the mural art projects financed by the state in the late 1930s, the thesis demonstrates that the modern art promoted by public institutions engendered political imaginaries that testify to the simultaneous existence of conservative, liberal, civic or communitarian, that is, local Republics. While making modern art the bearer of competing views on the French Republic in the 1920s and 1930s, the imaginaries that were created by modern art institutions and practices mythologised Republican universalism. Yet, these imaginaries revealed all the ambiguity contained in France’s universalistic project. At a time marked by the never-ending bellicosity that ensued from the First World War and the political and economic crises of the 1930s, the imaginaries created by modern art thus gave birth to a Republican visual politics. As the thesis argues, this Republican visual politics had a sociopolitical meaning. Modern art, especially figurative art, created imaginaries that could confront, above all, the interwar crisis of the Republic and its universalism, and the crisis in social and political representations that stemmed from the political turmoil and instability of the interwar years.