Abstract. – Something that we in the West now consider a work of art was, for a Mongol at the beginning of the twentieth century, simply a religious object to be worshipped. For him, a work of art that brought prestige and aesthetic pleasure was a useful, everyday object that an artisan had given special treatment to. The banning of religion in the Communist era, since 1924, brought about the destruction of an enormous quantity of artistic wealth. The idea of the museum and of art itself developed gradually, in the facts and in the terms used to describe them. Modern art par excellence was then socialist realism, represented by oil paintings. The other artistic form, proclaimed typical national art, used gouache to express itself in a naive style, without the depth of perspective, in the native tradition of religious painting. Both styles had as their mission to provide official propaganda : to praise the socialist nation and the good worker at its service. In post-Communist Mongolia, traditional art has been recreated so as to decorate the reconstructed temples with the masses of thangkas, statues, and banners that are proper to them, and also to glorify more than ever national characteristics that are considered to be eternal. [Mongolia, patrimony, national heritage, traditional art]