May 2026
May 2026 at a glance: 7 exhibitions opened, 0 closed, and 48 more were on view across the city.

Centre Pompidou · Past
First major French show for Swedish abstraction pioneer Hilma af Klint, presenting her 'Paintings for the Temple' cycle (1906-15) and the monumental Ten Largest series. At the Grand Palais, co-produced with the Pompidou.

Grand Palais · Past
The first major French exhibition of the Swedish abstraction pioneer, presenting her monumental, symbol-laden "Paintings for the Temple" series, co-organised with the Centre Pompidou.

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
From the forests of New Guinea to the paintings of Northern School masters, a journey tracing five centuries of fascination with birds of paradise.

Musée d'Orsay
Hand-colored silver gelatin prints by Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil conjuring a nostalgic, borderless Mediterranean, staged for the Mediterranean Season and the Bicentennial of Photography.

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Curated by Clement Cheroux, this show traces Daido Moriyama's lifelong, almost existential obsession with the photographic medium itself, rather than offering a conventional chronological retrospective.

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Ivorian artist Eboro investigates his uncle's 1986 death in Dakar, blending fine art, fashion and research to explore how imagination can heal transgenerational wounds. Created for the Hermes Latitudes program.

Louvre
An exploration of ancient Mesopotamia's relationship with water, tracing early canals and aqueducts and the environmental consequences of humanity's first great hydraulic engineering.
Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac · Past
Photographs by Bernard Plossu from a long journey across the Sahel in 1975-1976, shown in the Boite Arts Graphiques.
Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) · Free · Past
A focused display of nine works from a recent donation spanning some sixty years of Max Wechsler's practice, from figuration to conceptual abstraction.

Crypte archéologique de l'île de la Cité · Past
Nearly 150 objects recovered from the Seine, from prehistory to today, shown amid the crypt's remains to trace Parisians' enduring relationship with their river.

Musée de l'Armée (Les Invalides) · Past
Three centuries of French scientific and military expeditions, from 18th-century voyages of discovery to maritime and space exploration, and the politics of reaching uncharted lands.

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac · Past
Two decades of African fashion, from the catwalks of Johannesburg to the global stage, celebrating its energy, creativity and influence.

Musée de Cluny - musée national du Moyen Âge · Past
A sweeping exploration of the unicorn myth across art, from medieval tapestries to 21st-century works, co-organised with the GrandPalaisRmn and Potsdam's Museum Barberini.
Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) · Past
First Parisian museum retrospective of experimental artist Brion Gysin, over 140 works across painting, poetry, performance and sound, tracing his role in the 20th-century avant-garde.

Musée d'Orsay · Past
Co-organised with London's National Gallery and Boston's MFA, this show explores Renoir's luminous scenes of modern love and leisure painted between 1865 and 1885.
Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) · Free · Past
First French museum exhibition devoted to three Estonian artists, spanning the mid-20th century to today, with the human body as a unifying theme across generations.

Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette · Free · Past
Diego Marcon's first Paris solo show turns the foundation into a hybrid cinema, screening four films made with animation and figurines that explore how cinema manufactures emotion.

Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette · Free · Past
Ladji Diaby builds an installation from reclaimed and second-hand furniture, each piece transformed to echo his mother's spiritual decoration, questioning value and arguing for collective action.

Louvre · Past
Two sculptural masters meet across the centuries, exploring how Michelangelo and Rodin made the human body the vehicle for intense inner life through marble, bronze and plaster.

Louvre · Past
A rare gathering of drawings, engravings and nearly all the known paintings of Martin Schongauer, the late-medieval Germanic master whose prints inspired European artists for generations.

Musée de l'Orangerie · Past
Retrospective co-organised with the Barnes Foundation, gathering around fifty works by Henri Rousseau, including The Sleeping Gypsy on loan from MoMA, New York.

Centre Pompidou · Past
Co-produced with the Grand Palais (the venue), this show traces Matisse's final, radically inventive years: gouache cut-outs, the Jazz album, textiles and stained glass. Part of the Pompidou's off-site programme.

Grand Palais · Past
Over 230 works from Henri Matisse's final years, centred on his revolutionary cut-out gouaches alongside paintings, drawings, illustrated books and stained glass.

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) · Past
Major retrospective of photographer Lee Miller, around 250 vintage and modern prints from her Surrealist New York work to her WWII war correspondence and the liberation of the camps.

Musée Jacquemart-André · Past
Some forty Spanish Golden Age masterpieces from New York's Hispanic Society, with works by Velázquez, El Greco and Zurbarán alongside 17th-18th-century Latin American painting.

Fondation Louis Vuitton · Past
Major retrospective marking the centenary of Alexander Calder's arrival in France, gathering nearly 300 mobiles, stabiles, wire portraits, paintings and the legendary Cirque Calder across 3,000 sq m.

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain · Past
Inaugural show of the new Palais-Royal venue: a sweeping survey of 40 years of the Fondation's collection, with 600 works by 100-plus artists across art, architecture, nature and technology.

Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris · Past
Marking the 400th anniversary of the marquise de Sévigné's birth, over 200 works and objects explore her Parisian life and her celebrated 17th century correspondence.
Musée de l'Orangerie · Past
The museum's 16th Contemporary Counterpoint: painter Alexandre Lenoir (b. 1992) unveils four new, dreamlike landscape paintings in dialogue with the collection.

Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection · Past
Around a hundred works from the Pinault Collection, including modernist pieces for the first time, trace the legacy of chiaroscuro across galleries staged in an interplay of light and shadow.
Fondation Louis Vuitton · Past
Iranian-born artist Armineh Negahdari's first solo show in a French institution presents a new body of intuitive charcoal, oil-pastel and graphite drawings in Gallery 8's Open Space program.

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac · Past
A look at the career of Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto (Almighty God), whose unusual work unites popular painting and spiritual commitment.

Musée national Picasso-Paris · Past
First French retrospective of contemporary American painter Henry Taylor, whose vivid figurative portraits engage with art history, including his own reworking of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Musée national Picasso-Paris · Past
An immersive 15-minute VR experience tracing the history of Picasso's monumental Guernica (1937), from its commission for the 1937 World's Fair to its lasting global resonance. Narrated through the voices of Juan Larrea and Dora Maar. Co-produced with VIVE Arts.

Palais de Tokyo
First French retrospective of British sculptor Cathy de Monchaux, gathering over fifty works from 1984 to today in velvet, metal and intricate detail.

Palais de Tokyo
Turner Prize winner Jesse Darling fills the great glass-roofed hall with illegible signage and a ghostly crowd of flag-topped lecterns, probing the fragility of power.

Palais de Tokyo
Drawing on hospitals and illness, Benoit Pieron builds a sparkling, strange world of shadow theater, glitter-filled lamps and abstract forms exploring intersexuality and disability.

Palais de Tokyo
A monographic show of video installations and sculpture in which Pauline Curnier Jardin probes bodily vulnerability, female representation and spirituality as departures from the straight line.

Palais de Tokyo
Joseph Grigely turns accessibility into an artistic medium, inserting an architectural prosthesis into the Palais de Tokyo and reframing disabled bodies as enabled bodies.

Palais de Tokyo
Curated by Lucie Camous and Etienne Chosson, this tribute to disabled performance artist Cheryl Marie Wade (1948-2013) pairs archival footage with artists of the Berkeley crip community.

Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris · Free
A free contemporary photography display within the permanent collections, gathering French and international artists' portraits of Parisians and their ever-changing faces.

Jeu de Paume · Free
An online commission by artist Veronique Caye, a travel journal probing French Polynesia and possible links between the 1966 nuclear tests and health issues affecting her family.

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
How African and Oceanic objects met avant-garde works in 1910s-20s Paris, reshaping the modern Western vision of art through dealers, artists and collectors.

Musée Cognacq-Jay
A six-room collaboration with the Palais Galliera tracing femininity through 18th-century fashion: court dresses, portraits and gallant scenes in dialogue with contemporary haute couture.
Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection
French artist Laura Lamiel fills the Passage display cases and the Machine Room with sensory installations of found objects and steel lit by fluorescent tubes, revealing what usually stays invisible.

Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris · Free
A free display within the permanent collections tracing two and a half centuries of Franco-American ties, from the 1776 War of Independence to the Statue of Liberty and the World Wars.

Centre Pompidou
A retrospective of 100 works spanning 1926-2016 marking the centenary of geometric abstraction pioneer François Morellet, who systematically challenged the movement he helped define. At Centre Pompidou-Metz.

Centre Pompidou
Nine themed sections trace how landscape art transformed across the 20th and 21st centuries, drawing on the Centre Pompidou's collections of painting, photography, cinema, design and new media. At West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai.

Centre Pompidou · Free
Inaugural show at Maison Pompidou (50 rue Rambuteau) on the Centre's now-iconic colour-coded palette, and the gold, blue and brown that nearly won, told through architecture documents, photos and design objects.

Musée des Arts et Métiers · Free
A monumental metallic horse sculpture from the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, installed on the museum's forecourt with free public access.

Centre Pompidou
For Centre Pompidou-Metz's 15th birthday, hundreds of collection works (Breton's studio wall, Duchamp's chess table) and pieces by Cattelan riff on the idea of 'Sunday' across 27 thematic rooms.

Centre Pompidou
At Centre Pompidou Malaga, a thematic journey through 20th- and 21st-century art from the Musee National d'Art Moderne collection, in six interconnected sections about how artists make us see differently.

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
An installation by Yo-E Ryou in the music box of the Collections Plateau, unfolding through sound, breath and duration to explore resonance between bodies, water and memory.

Grand Palais
Inaugural show of the new Palais des enfants: a playful, sensory journey where artworks and science experiments play with light to spark the curiosity and wonder of very young visitors.

Musée national Picasso-Paris
A site-specific installation by Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca in the chapel of the Hôtel Salé, where his "cubistoid" intersecting lines are painted directly onto the walls to form a new pictorial space.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.