Best art exhibitions of 2026 in Paris: autumn and beyond

The daughter of a writer and a musician, Eva Gonzalès grew up immersed in Paris’s literary and artistic circles. She went on to become the only formal pupil of Edouard Manet, whose influence can be seen in her bold handling of paint and interest in depicting the modern world. Although she received critical acclaim during her lifetime, and exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon between 1870 and 1883, her work fell into relative obscurity following her untimely death in her mid-30s.

The first major retrospective devoted to the painter aims to cast fresh light on her artistic practice, painterly sensibility and determination to succeed as an artist in a largely male environment. Organised chronologically, it brings together nearly 100 works, including paintings, pastels and prints, many of which depict female figures and quiet scenes of everyday life.

Among the highlights on display is Une loge aux Italiens (circa 1874), now one of her most celebrated works, and The Full-length Mirror (circa 1869-70), a picture of the artist’s sister Jeanne gazing into a mirror, which was acquired by the National Gallery in London in 2024. Shown alongside Gonzalès’s works will be compositions by her female contemporaries, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond, highlighting the intersecting trajectories of female artists in the second half of the 19th century.

Organised in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it will transfer in February 2027, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to discover an artist whose contribution to the development of modern painting has long deserved greater recognition.

This exhibition explores Andy Warhol’s love of drawing, which persisted throughout his career. He started out as a commercial illustrator, designing adverts for companies such as the American shoe manufacturer I. Miller. It’s noteworthy, too, that his first solo art exhibition — held in 1952 at the Hugo Gallery in New York — consisted only of drawings (15 works inspired by the writings of Truman Capote).

Even after embracing mechanical processes such as screenprints later in his career — and claiming in the mid-1960s that every artist ‘should be like a machine’ — Warhol kept on drawing. In the words of the curators of Andy Warhol: Line and image, the artist saw draughtsmanship as ‘a constant site of experimentation’, where ‘his distinctive visual language could evolve’. The exhibition brings together approximately 150 drawings, among them a handful of acrylic works related to his final series of paintings, The Last Supper from 1986.

The philosopher-turned-artist Simone Fattal dislikes the word ‘fragments’ when it comes to describing her work. Her small, distorted bronzes are not disjecta membra but expressions of life itself — as if hewn from the Earth. Despite the brevity of their forms, they carry an outsized weight, as if they were the last survivors of a long-lost civilisation.

Born in Damascus in 1942, Fattal studied in Paris and later the United States, moving to the San Francisco Bay Area where she ran a small literary press. Her artworks, which take the form of sculptures, paintings and texts, draw on a range of influences, from Homer’s Iliad to war-torn Syria. This major retrospective brings together six decades of work, a highlight being the ‘Standing Man’ series in which she considers the courage of the individual. ‘The form embodies everything I want to say about people, that we should be standing up to everything we can,’ she says.

The ‘Cezanne’ of this exhibition’s title needs no introduction: the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne. The ‘and Us’ refers to the myriad artists he has inspired, from the turn of the 20th century to the present day. Not for nothing is the nickname ‘the father of modern art’ sometimes applied to him.

Featuring nearly 180 works, this show explores Cezanne’s impact on the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley and Peter Doig, by displaying their art alongside his.

A key moment under consideration is Cezanne’s posthumous retrospective, held at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 (a year after his death). This had a profound effect on the young artists of Paris, particularly Picasso. Recalling the show years later, the collector Leo Stein said that ‘hitherto Cezanne had been important only for a few; now he was about to become important for everybody’.

The indigenous people of the Northwestern United States, including the Coast Salish, Chinook, Makah and Nez Perce tribes, have lived along the Pacific coast of modern-day Oregon and Washington for more than 10,000 years. The area’s extraordinary natural landscapes of cedar forests and abundant rivers have shaped their societies, giving rise to a complex visual language full of spirit animals and mythical beings — one that is still alive today in the stylised sacred forms that adorn homes, canoes and clothing.

This is the subject of the Musée Quai Branly’s new exhibition. At the show’s core is an exceptional collection of carvings, from models to masks, which transmit First Nations’ cultural beliefs, practices and power structures. In addition, the exhibition looks at the profound upheaval these communities experienced from the 18th century onwards, when colonisers arrived, bringing diseases that decimated their populations. Also explored are the efforts of indigenous peoples to maintain their unique cultural identities in modern times, as well as the influence they have exerted on international art movements, particularly Surrealism.

On 5 December 1926, Claude Monet died at his home in Giverny, aged 86. The following May, eight of his monumental Nymphéas (‘Water Lilies’) panels were installed across the walls of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. A symbol of hope, they were the culmination of a gift he offered to France the day after the Armistice in 1918. André Masson later called the cycle the ‘Sistine Chapel of Impressionism’.

Marking the centenary of the artist’s death, Monet, painting time traces the evolution of this remarkable swan song. It begins in the 1870s, when the young artist started to work outdoors, using rapid brushstrokes and bright harmonies to record the fleeting impression of a moment. The exhibition charts how Monet documented the changing of the seasons in his haystack pictures, and recorded the dawn of industrialisation and the arrival of steam trains. Finally, as a wealthy and respected artist, Monet retreated to his garden, painting the lake there more than 200 times in an effort to capture the transience of nature.

There are some 40 canvases in the exhibition, including several important loans from private collections, as well as archival documents and photographs lent by Monet’s family. In February 2027, the show travels to Tate Modern in London.

To celebrate 40 years of the Musée des Arts de la Mode within its walls, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is staging a blockbuster exhibition that offers a 360-degree view of the fashion industry — from the conception and creation of a garment to its runway debut, conservation and restoration. It also explores the evolving ways in which fashion has been collected, studied and presented as an art form over the years.

Central to the display will be 40 silhouettes, now in the museum’s collection, from four decades of exhibitions that elevated fashion to an art form. Complementing these will be related drawings, embroidery samples, patterns and archival material revealing the craftsmanship and techniques required to bring them to life. Also included will be a selection of fashion photographs that highlight the important role of runway shows, models and marketing campaigns in cementing a garment’s position in fashion history.

Highlights include a whimsical pink evening gown by Madeleine Vionnet from 1938, a red silk organza bustier dress, circa 1950-55, by Jean Dessès, and a dazzling bejewelled Chanel dress from the 1990s designed by Karl Lagerfeld. The exhibition also puts on show a dazzling array of fashion accessories, from an 18th-century corset to a pair of exquisitely embroidered Roger Vivier heels.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Mary Cassatt’s death, the Musée d’Orsay, in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is organising a major solo show dedicated to her life and art. The first major exhibition on the artist in France, it brings together some 80 paintings, pastels and prints, as well as unpublished letters from across Cassatt’s career. It will look at her art and success through the prism of her independence, in which she took great pride. It will also explore her role as an art consultant, advising her American relatives, friends and acquaintances on their Impressionist purchases, which in turn raised awareness of the movement on that side of the Atlantic.

The exhibition features rarely shown works from public and private European collections, as well as paintings and pastels from American collections seldom exhibited outside the United States. Portraits of her loved ones will be displayed alongside her celebrated portraits of society women enjoying life at home and in Paris’s public spaces. There will also be still lifes and mother-and-child paintings, a genre in which she specialised.

Central to the display of later works will be prints and pastels relating to the creation of Modern Woman, the most important commission the artist ever received. The monumental mural, which has long since disappeared, was conceived to decorate the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The show will include a film featuring a digital restoration of this gigantic artwork.

As well as being fiercely independent, Cassatt was deeply committed to women’s suffrage. The exhibition concludes with a small group of paintings that appeared in a 1915 exhibition in New York, organised by the artist with her friend Louisine Havemeyer, in support of the cause.

When photography arrived in the 19th century, it presented a radical new way of looking at the world. Suddenly, people and places could be fixed in time with a speed that painting could not match, making the formal painted portrait look distinctly old-fashioned. A camera could capture and preserve fleeting moments and, even more miraculously, could reveal things that the human eye was barely able to register, such as the precise motion of a galloping horse.

Bringing together the works of some 80 photographers — from Eugène Atget to Edward Weston, Helmut Newton to Cindy Sherman — Remember Me traces a history of the medium through society’s obsession with the passage of time. At its centre is Charles Baudelaire’s idea of photography as capable of ‘holding memory’ — keeping alive people and things long after they have disappeared.

In 17th-century Spain, painting and sculpture were closely linked. Artists in both media created religious works of striking, at times disconcerting, realism — in a bid to inspire devotion among viewers. However, while many of the painters — such as Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo — are well known to us today, sculptors such as Pedro de Mena and Gregorio Fernández are not.

So the exhibition Sculpting Colour promises to be an enlightening one, featuring as it does 23 sculptures from the splendid holdings of the Museo Nacional de Escultura in the Spanish city of Valladolid. These include the recently acquired Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, by the acclaimed female sculptor Luisa Roldán. Like the other exhibits, this was carved out of wood and then painted in polychrome — hence the show’s title.

An exhibition devoted to Zurbarán, recently transferred from London’s National Gallery, is being held at the Louvre simultaneously.

Born in the south of France in 1865, Gustave Fayet trained as an artist and designer, painting inky landscapes rooted in symbolism, and semi-abstract floral watercolours, which he turned into tapestries and rugs. His work left no real legacy to speak of, but his efforts as a collector of groundbreaking art made him famous.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton is presenting no fewer than 375 of Fayet’s works for critical reassessment, alongside 257 objects that once made up around a third of his mammoth collection, which eventually adorned the walls of the Abbaye de Fontfroide, an 11th-century Cistercian monastery he purchased in 1908. His favourite artists included Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Bonnard and Redon. He owned 311 works by these five artists alone, and the curators have managed to track down and borrow 193 of them.

They include Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses and Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear, which haven’t been seen in France for nearly 100 years. Gauguin’s Three Tahitians, Le Calvaire Breton and In the Waves have been loaned from museums in Scotland, Belgium and the United States, and are just three of the 78 works by the artist in the show. ‘Observing the list of works in your collection, I see that I am in the company of masters, and that brings me joy, but also quite a bit of timidity,’ Gauguin wrote to his patron shortly before his death in French Polynesia. ‘In the end, there are indeed people who know how to appreciate painting.’

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama sees the beauty in everyday detritus, finding a poetry in objects that are at the end of their lives. He has appropriated threadbare jute sacks, once used to transport charcoal and rice across Ghana, and rusty mesh cages used to smoke fish, weaving architectural installations that tell stories about the history of trade and commerce. ‘It is in the past that we can excavate the potential of the future,’ he says.

In 2019, Mahama was the youngest of six artists selected to represent Ghana at the Venice Biennale. The Harvest Season, a group exhibition organised by Mahama, brings together artists with whom he has collaborated in the past, including the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise — a Congolese collective — and Dorothy Akpene Amenuke. Through a series of immersive installations, the exhibition explores the ways in which collective knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.

Main image, clockwise from top left: at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Three Tahitians, 1899. Oil on canvas. 73 x 94 cm. National Galleries of Scotland collection. Presented by Sir Alexander Maitland in memory of his wife Rosalind, 1960. Photo: National Galleries of Scotland. At the Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac, frontal headdress with heraldic subjects, Tlingit culture. Photo: © Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac, Patrick Gries. At the Musée d’Orsay, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), Jeune fille au jardin, 1880-82 (detail). Oil on canvas. 92.5 x 65 cm. Collection Musée d’Orsay, Legs Antonin Personnaz, 1937. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Franck Raux. At the Grand Palais, Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Mont Sainte-Victoire (montagne rouge), circa 1927. Oil on canvas. 50.8 x 61 cm. The Vilcek Foundation Collection. Photo: © The Vilcek Foundation. At the Bourse de Commerce, Peter Hujar (1934-1987), David Wojnarowicz, 1981. Gelatin silver print. 25.4 x 20.3 cm (frameless). © The Peter Hujar Archive / Adagp, Paris, 2026. Pinault Collection