Louvre · Opens 7 October
Zurbarán: 1598–1664
A full retrospective of the Spanish Golden Age painter: monastery commissions, portraits and still lifes, hung alongside the later French avant-garde artists he influenced.
Coming up in Paris
October 2026
October in Paris is mostly openings. The Louvre opens Zurbarán, the Musée d'Orsay a Mary Cassatt retrospective, and the Bourse de Commerce fills its galleries with 200 years of photography. Fondation Louis Vuitton turns to the collector Gustave Fayet, and Cézanne and Us runs at the Grand Palais all month.
Permanent guide to October 2026 →
Editor's picks for October 2026
Musée d'Orsay · Opens 6 October
Mary Cassatt. Being Independent
Nearly 80 paintings, pastels and prints, organised with London's National Gallery and Boston's MFA for Orsay's 40th anniversary.
Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection · Opens 7 October
Remember Me
Around 700 works by more than 70 photographers, from Gustave Le Gray to today, marking photography's bicentenary. Barbara Kruger takes over the Rotunda with a new commission.
Fondation Louis Vuitton · Opens 9 October
Gustave Fayet, Collector - Designer. Icons of Modern Art
Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso from the collection of Gustave Fayet, an early buyer of all three, shown with his own designs. The loans come from 64 institutions and 71 private collections.
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain · Opens 22 October
The Harvest Season - Ibrahim Mahama
Ibrahim Mahama's first major show in France, with nine associate artists. His monumental installations, built from salvaged materials, draw on the hopes of Africa's independence era.
Grand Palais · Until 17 January
Cézanne and Us
Nearly 180 works, about 70 by Cézanne, next to Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Joan Mitchell and Peter Doig. It opened in late September and runs all of October.
Opening in October
Prix Marcel Duchamp 20262 OctCentre 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.
Vertigo: Richard Peduzzi at Orsay6 OctMusée d'Orsay
Marking the museum's 40th anniversary, this show revisits set designer Richard Peduzzi's original 1986 scenography for Orsay through his theatre and opera models, drawings and sculptures.
Mary Cassatt. Being Independent6 OctMusée 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.
Sculpting Colour: Masterpieces from the Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid7 OctLouvre
17th-century Spanish polychrome wooden religious sculptures, including a complete processional float by Gregorio Fernández with five life-size figures displayed at eye level.
Zurbarán: 1598–16647 OctLouvre
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.
Remember Me7 OctBourse 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.
Open Space #19: Mohammad Alfaraj9 OctFondation 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.
Gustave Fayet, Collector - Designer. Icons of Modern Art9 OctFondation 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.
Nicolas Flamel, alchimiste de papier13 OctMusée 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.
Fragments of Paris: Jacques Villeglé and Urban Art14 OctMusée 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.
Stan Douglas: Parallax20 OctJeu 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.
Jenny Holzer. J'ai vu20 OctMusée 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.
Louise Bourgeois: Extreme tension20 OctCentre 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.
Mungo Thomson: Monument21 OctLafayette 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.
Yu Nishimura: Towards a Sea21 OctLafayette 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.
Hélène Fauquet: Vivresse21 OctLafayette 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.
Wild Heart21 OctPalais de Tokyo
Sonia Gomes's textile-based sculptures draw on Afro-Brazilian heritage, transforming fabric and craft into vehicles of memory, care and resistance.
Valerie John: I Telman Nwe Ki I Ble (So Black It Turns Blue)21 OctPalais de Tokyo
Valerie John explores indigo blue as material, memory and artistic gesture, with assemblages of paper, textiles and objects tracing cultural ties between Martinique and West Africa.
Ali Cherri: Today Is Ok21 OctPalais de Tokyo
French-Lebanese artist Ali Cherri presents the film "La Sentinelle" and a new installation on military service and its psychological effects, following a soldier suspended between destiny and self-abandon.
Rose Lowder: The Source of the Loire and Other Films21 OctPalais de Tokyo
Filmmaker Rose Lowder's fifty-year research into visual perception through nature observation, centred on her film "La Source de la Loire" (2019-2021) alongside twenty one-minute films shot on organic farms in southern France.
You and Your Gang21 OctPalais de Tokyo
A group exhibition of individual and collective artistic practices rooted in non-urban territories across France, including Limousin, the Cevennes and Corsica.
The Harvest Season - Ibrahim Mahama22 OctFondation 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.
Closing in October
Daido Moriyama: Love Letters to Photography4 OctFondation 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.
Nuits Balneaires: Eboro4 OctFondation 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.
Raymond Hains: A Work Under Construction (Galerie Valois)4 OctFondation 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.
Photoromance4 OctPalais 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.
The Museum in Motion5 OctBourse 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.
Le Mbari Club, un espace de création transnationale au Nigeria11 OctMusée 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.
Reinventing Landscape: Highlights of the Centre Pompidou Collection18 OctCentre 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.
Raymond Hains: A Work Under Construction. From the Grand Louvre to the 3 Cartier26 OctFondation 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.
Suivez le fil! Design & Textile31 OctCentre 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.
Also on through October
Projet pour une revolution: Vasarely et l'architectureto 1 NovCentre 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.
La mer est ton miroirto 1 NovCentre 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.
Plumes from Paradiseto 8 NovMusée 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.
Nanténé Traoré — pays des merveillesto 29 NovMaison 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.
La saison américaine du musée de l'Arméeto 30 NovMusée 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.
Marie Bracquemondto 6 DecMusée d'Orsay
A display of studies for Marie Bracquemond's large slip-painted earthenware panel The Muses of the Arts, shown at the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition, drawing on major 2024 donations of her drawings and paintings.
Talismanto 7 DecMusée Gustave Moreau
To mark the bicentennial of Gustave Moreau's birth, the museum gives contemporary painter Ali Banisadr carte blanche, staging an intergenerational dialogue between his work and Moreau's Symbolist legacy.
Hosts at the Louvre: Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peytonto 14 DecLouvre
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.
La Bataille des couleursto 24 DecCentre 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.
ART SPECTRUM 2026to 27 DecPalais de Tokyo
A collaboration with Hoam Museum of Art presenting 23 artists from 10 Asian countries in a polyphonic show that lets diverse artistic practices coexist without a single overarching narrative.
- Affinities: Islamic Art Wonders in the Department of Decorative Artsto 31 Dec
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.
Florian Krewer: woven thinto 4 JanMusée 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.
Zeus, le cheval métallique au MuAMto 10 JanMusée 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.
Maurice Denis, Illustrating Christian Mysticismto 10 JanMusée d'Orsay
Around 246 recently acquired sheets trace Maurice Denis's decades-long project to illustrate "The Imitation of Christ," shown alongside his paintings and other works on Christian and spiritual subjects.
Michel Lacoste's Donation: Precious Metalwork from Pierre Mangot to Jean-Elisee Puiforcatto 11 JanLouvre
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.
- First Nationsto 16 Jan
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.
Cezanne et nous (Cezanne and Us)to 17 JanCentre 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.
Cézanne and Usto 17 JanGrand 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.
PENN & FASHIONto 17 JanMaison 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.
EVERYDAY CLOTHESto 17 JanMaison 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.
"I Spend My Life Painting"to 24 JanMusée 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.
Kerry James Marshall: The Historiesto 24 JanMusée 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.
Simone Fattal: Des villes au fond d'un lacto 24 JanMusée 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.
- Timeless Tintorettoto 24 Jan
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.
Dimanche sans fin: Maurizio Cattelan and the Centre Pompidou collectionto 25 JanCentre 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.
Monet, Painting Timeto 25 JanMusée 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.
Auguste Bartholdi. Liberty Enlightening the Worldto 31 JanMusée 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.
To Open Eyes: Regards d'artistesto 31 JanCentre 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.
Vies minusculesto 31 JanCentre 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.
- See Tahiti. Early Photographs, 1859-1870to 31 Jan
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.
A Statue for Liberty, Bartholdi's Dream, from Paris to New Yorkto 31 JanMusée 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.
Contemporary Counterpoint: Vija Celminsto 15 FebMusée de l'Orangerie
The museum's 17th Contemporary Counterpoint: Vija Celmins's precise studies of ocean, desert, sky and snow surfaces, made 1971-2000 in drawing, painting, printmaking and wood engraving, shown in the pronaos and contemporary gallery in dialogue with Monet's Water Lilies.
Echoes of the Tidesto 21 FebMusée 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.
Primeval Waters: Lessons from Mesopotamiato 15 MarLouvre
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.
Lady Liberté. De la sueur, de l'audace, du génieto 1 AugMusée 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.
Transparencyto 29 AugGrand 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.
Guillermo Kuitca, Chapelleto 31 DecMusée 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.
Opening in November 2026
Opening in December 2026
Further ahead
Family HistoriesMar 2027Musée d'Orsay
Traces how the family, regulated by the Civil Code and reshaped by first-wave feminism and shifting notions of the couple, became a key subject for 19th-century artists depicting modern society.
Vuillard, Intimate TheatersMar 2027Musée d'Orsay
The first exhibition in France devoted to Édouard Vuillard in almost 25 years, focusing on his lifelong fascination with the theater, from the early 1890s to the late 1930s.
Stay in the loop on Paris
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.