October 2026
October at a glance: 17 exhibitions opening, 9 closing, and 32 more on view across the city.

Centre Pompidou · Free
The four 2026 nominees for France's leading contemporary art prize - Joel Andrianomearisoa, Brognon Rollin, Laura Henno and Josefa Ntjam - present new work within the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris's collections. Winner announced 22 October 2026.

Musée d'Orsay
Co-organised with London's National Gallery and Boston's MFA for Orsay's 40th anniversary, this retrospective of nearly 80 paintings, pastels and prints traces Mary Cassatt's career through her guiding principle of independence.

Louvre
17th-century Spanish polychrome wooden religious sculptures, including a complete processional float by Gregorio Fernández with five life-size figures displayed at eye level.

Louvre
A major retrospective of the Spanish Golden Age painter Francisco de Zurbarán, spanning his monumental monastery commissions, portraits and still lifes alongside his influence on later French avant-garde artists.

Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection
Marking photography's bicentenary, this major group show gathers around 700 works by more than 70 artists from Gustave Le Gray to today, anchored by a Barbara Kruger commission in the Rotunda.

Fondation Louis Vuitton
Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj's first solo show in a French institution, "I'd rather be a dragonfly than a lion" brings stop-motion videos, objects, photographs and drawings drawn from the oral traditions and landscape of the Al Ahsa oasis to Gallery 8.

Fondation Louis Vuitton
Rediscovery of Gustave Fayet (1865-1925), pioneering collector of van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso and a prolific designer, drawing on loans from 64 institutions and 71 private collections.

Musée de Cluny - musée national du Moyen Âge
The real Nicolas Flamel: not the immortal alchemist of legend but a 15th-century Parisian scribe, donor and property investor, traced through his tombstone and archives held at Cluny.

Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris
A retrospective marking the centenary of Jacques Villeglé, tracing his practice of collecting torn Parisian street posters and reworking them into art that documents the city's changing urban and cultural landscape.

Centre Pompidou
The BnF and Centre Pompidou combine their Louise Bourgeois holdings for the first time - some 200 drawings, prints and artist's books - in the artist's first Paris public-institution show since 2008. At the BnF Richelieu, Galerie Mansart.

Jeu de Paume
The most significant Paris survey of Canadian artist Stan Douglas in over 30 years, spanning film, video, photography and installation that probe how history is constructed, represented and transmitted.

Musée d'Orsay
A museum-wide activation by American artist Jenny Holzer: LED installations, facade projections and carved stone benches drawing text from Orsay's 1848-1914 collection.

Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette · Free
The Californian artist presents "Snowman," a bronze sculpture inspired by cardboard tubes, and "Time Life Volume 15," a stop-motion film built from thousands of book images, subverting the idea of a monument through everyday materials and collective memory.

Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette · Free
The artist's first French institutional show, pairing sculptures shaped by shells with works exploring decoration versus conceptual art, using photography, ornamental forms and advertising-derived bubble motifs to probe nature and artifice.

Palais de Tokyo
Sonia Gomes's textile-based sculptures draw on Afro-Brazilian heritage, transforming fabric and craft into vehicles of memory, care and resistance.

Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette · Free
The Japanese painter's first major institutional solo show in France, around fifty drawings and large-scale paintings of landscapes inhabited by human and animal figures, with the sea as a recurring motif.

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama's first major French show, with nine associate artists, reactivating African independence-era utopias through monumental installations made from salvaged materials.

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.

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
Galerie Valois companion display tracing Raymond Hains's web of associations around the name Cartier, from explorer Jacques Cartier to photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Palais de Tokyo
A monographic exhibition on Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo, co-produced with Les Rencontres d'Arles, tracing his documentary and photo-novel work capturing Côte d'Ivoire's cultural transformation in the 1970s.

Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection
A transitional programme as the museum prepares "Remember Me": new photography and film works appear across the galleries, including pieces by Irving Penn (Gallery 2) and Raymond Depardon (Gallery 3), with illuminating tours of the building every 15 minutes.

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
Works, archives, publications and graphic design trace the Mbari Club as an emblematic space of Nigerian and Pan-African cultural modernity and cross-continental intellectual exchange.

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.

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
Installation reviving Raymond Hains's 1994 work, with photographs of the Grand Louvre renovation that reframe construction hoardings and public space as art.

Centre Pompidou · Free
Around 100 works from the Centre Pompidou's design collections by some 40 creators, showing how textiles underpin spaces and objects at the intersection of craftsmanship and technology. At Hotel des arts TPM, Toulon.

Centre Pompidou
Marking the 50th anniversary of the Fondation Vasarely, this show explores Victor Vasarely's architectural vision through his "Centre Architectonique" building and related projects merging art and architecture.

Centre Pompidou · Free
Maritime imagery in 20th- and 21st-century art through works by Robert Delaunay, Man Ray, Peter Doig and others, exploring the sea as an enduring source of artistic inspiration. At Abbaye Saint-Germain, Auxerre.

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.

Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP)
A MEP Studio show pairing an analogue photographic project shot in Brittany in 2025 with expired 1990s film stock, and a film made during a 2026 Albania residency, exploring memory, dissociation and disorientation tied to the artist's childhood on the Breton coast.

Musée de l'Armée (Les Invalides)
A season marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, with displays on key figures and Franco-American military ties, plus concerts, talks and film screenings.

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.

Louvre
Contemporary artists Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton present the results of their two-year Louvre residencies, offering intersecting interpretations of the museum and its collections.
Louvre
Around 50 Islamic artworks from the 9th to 17th centuries set among European decorative arts, revealing how Eastern techniques of light, colour and sculpture inspired Western craft.

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) · Free
The German painter's first solo show in France: sixteen monumental, expressionistic canvases installed within the museum's permanent collection display, including previously unseen works.

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.

Louvre
Around one hundred pieces of precious French metalwork from the 16th to 20th centuries, donated by Michel Lacoste, showcasing the technical skill and refinement of French silversmiths.
Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
Arts and culture of the Northwestern United States, exploring First Nations artistic traditions featuring mythical beings and spirit animals such as the Raven.

Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP)
A chronological retrospective of Irving Penn's fashion photography from 1947 to 2008, spanning his Parisian haute couture images of the 1950s through collaborations with Issey Miyake, John Galliano and Chanel, drawn from the MEP and Nicola Erni collections.

Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP)
A family-oriented show for young visitors, staged in dialogue with PENN & FASHION, exploring what everyday clothing — creases, stains, mends, signs of wear — reveals about the people who wore it, drawn from the MEP's collections.

Centre Pompidou
Some 180 works (70 by Cezanne) trace his profound influence on modern art from the 1880s to today, the 'father of us all' as Picasso put it. At the Grand Palais, co-produced with the Pompidou and Musee d'Orsay.

Grand Palais
Nearly 180 works tracing Cézanne's profound influence, from Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian, Joan Mitchell and Peter Doig, and the artists who claimed his legacy.

Musée d'Orsay
To mark the centennial of Claude Monet's death, a dedicated itinerary through the Impressionist Gallery (Rooms 29 to 35) celebrates his life and work.
Musée Jacquemart-André
The first comprehensive survey in France of the Venetian master Tintoretto, tracing his audacious compositions and dramatic light from the Renaissance to his influence on 19th-century French painting.

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM)
First exhibition in France devoted to American painter Kerry James Marshall, around seventy works including eight new paintings, exploring Black representation and art history.

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM)
Major retrospective of Lebanese-American artist Simone Fattal, around one hundred works over fifty years, from early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages.

Musée de l'Orangerie
Marking the centenary of Monet's death, this exhibition traces how his painting engaged with time — from the Cathedrals, Haystacks and Poplars series of the 1890s through to the Water Lilies — drawing largely on the Musée d'Orsay and Musée Marmottan Monet collections.

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
Around thirty artists from Kupka to Jumana Manna, drawn from the Centre Pompidou's collections, fill the Pantheon's nave with quiet, intimate and anonymous lives - a counterpoint to the monument's great men. Free entry, part of the Constellation programme.
Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
A rare photographic collection from French Polynesia's earliest decade of photography, featuring works by naval officers Gustave Viaud and Paul Emile Miot.

Musée d'Orsay
An exclusive virtual reality experience running alongside the Bartholdi exhibition, covering almost 700 m² in the Museum's Amont Gallery to trace the Statue of Liberty's journey from Paris to New York.

Musée d'Orsay
Marking 250 years of American independence, this exhibition and an accompanying VR experience trace how sculptor Auguste Bartholdi conceived and built the Statue of Liberty.

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.

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 des Arts et Métiers
An immersive look at how the Statue of Liberty was built in 1880s Paris, tracing the copper, iron and ingenuity, including Gustave Eiffel's internal frame, behind the Franco-American monument.

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.