Best art exhibitions in 2026: Paris

In the 18th century, Paris established itself as the capital of progress, luxury and cultural refinement, and the elite began commissioning lavish freestanding houses, known as hôtels particuliers, that featured grand reception rooms, enclosed gardens and, often, a courtyard for added privacy.

This spring, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is gathering more than 550 items from its own collection — including furniture, ceramics, silverware, fashion accessories, toys and jewellery — to offer visitors a glimpse of life inside such a house in the 1780s.

Each room in the exhibition is associated with a specific moment in the daily schedule of its inhabitants, from the morning toilette to dinner and bedtime. Also explored are the social rituals and fashionable practices that defined 18th-century aristocratic life, such as afternoon tea, snuffing tobacco and the playing of games. Expect to see everything from sedan chairs and grand porcelain dinner services to beautifully decorated harps and silk dressing gowns in this immersive journey through the art of French living.

The daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer, Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire in the north-west of England, and spent her childhood there. In her mid-twenties, with the Second World War raging, she fled Europe for Mexico — and stayed in that country for the rest of her life.

Featuring 125 works, this exhibition will be the first of note to focus on the interim period — years mostly spent in Italy and France. As a teen, Carrington attended Mrs Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, where she was exposed to the work of Renaissance masters. As a young adult, she settled in Paris, mixing with the likes of Picasso, and Surrealists such as Max Ernst (her lover), André Breton and Salvador Dalí, before heading south and moving into a tumbledown farmhouse in the Ardèche with Ernst.

This show will explore those intriguing formative years, in which Carrington began establishing herself as a major Surrealist talent.

Bringing together around 100 works by 27 artists from the Pinault Collection, this exhibition examines the legacy of chiaroscuro in modern and contemporary art. The technique, which refers to the use of tonal contrasts between light and dark to create dramatic tension, depth and three-dimensional volume on a flat surface, first appeared in Mannerist and Baroque paintings of the 16th century, notably in the works of Caravaggio. Since then, it has inspired artists working across a range of media, from painting and drawing to sculpture, film, installation and digital art.

Among the highlights is Pierre Huyghe’s filmic masterpiece Camata (2024), which will be installed in the Bourse de Commerce’s magnificent rotunda. Shown alongside it will be works by Germaine Richier, Sigmar Polke, Alberto Giacometti, Victor Man and Bill Viola, among others. A new series of works by Laura Lamiel, exploring colour and light, will be installed in the 24 display cases in the Passage exhibition space.

In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the Musée d’Orsay is staging a blockbuster programme of events, which includes two exhibitions honouring Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the 19th century’s greatest painters of modern life.

Organised in collaboration with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Renoir and Love: A Joyful Modernity examines the artist’s interest in capturing human relationships — romantic, familial, platonic and illicit — in paint. In these luminous scenes of conviviality, Renoir’s protagonists share tender moments of joy and happiness in public spaces such as theatres, restaurants, boulevards and gardens, revealing the increased freedom of relationships in 19th-century Paris.

The first Renoir retrospective to be held in Paris since 1985, it will feature some of the artist’s greatest masterpieces from the mid-1860s to the 1880s, including The Promenade (1870), Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881).

Complementing this is Renoir Drawings (17 March to 5 July), which highlights the importance of graphic techniques in Renoir’s artistic development, from his first exercises as a student in the 1850s and 1860s to his experiments in the 1910s. It also reveals the key role of drawing in his painterly practice from the 1880s onwards, when he often produced numerous studies in order to achieve the perfect composition.

The show features some 100 works, including previously unseen sketches and several paintings, which reveal Renoir’s easy use of a wide variety of techniques and media, from graphite and Conté crayon to pastels, watercolours and gouache. Particular attention will be paid to sanguine, or red chalk, which became the artist’s preferred medium from the 1880s onwards.

Opened in 2006, the Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac is devoted to the indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. It houses more than one million objects in its collection.

Its new exhibition combines archival documents, photographs and artworks to trace the story of how a handful of avant-garde dealers on the city’s Right Bank supplied collectors and museums with sculptures that made their way to France from Africa and Oceania between 1913 and 1923.

These totemic wooden masks and figures were initially viewed as ethnographic curiosities, but soon came to be regarded as brilliant sculptures in their own right. Bohemian artists drawn to Paris’s Montparnasse district became enamoured of them, and they helped inspire a vision for a new, modern style of European art — most famously influencing Picasso’s contributions to the Cubist movement.

Nan Goldin has been documenting her life for more than 50 years, beginning when she picked up a camera at her school in Massachusetts in the late 1960s. While studying photography in Boston in the 1970s, she hit on the novel idea of presenting her images as a slideshow. Her first major work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, captured the lives of the queer communities she hung out with in Boston and New York.

The works were originally shown at the Tin Pan Alley Bar and the Mudd Club in Manhattan. Goldin’s boyfriend started to spin records to accompany the slides, then she developed a playlist of her own, featuring Petula Clark and Dionne Warwick. Goldin has described the slideshow format as uniquely flexible, allowing her to re-edit her work continually. As she says, ‘If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to memory, a story without end.’ This is the first retrospective to consider Goldin primarily as a filmmaker rather than a photographer.

Sententious busts of the great men of Impressionism and Courbet with a black dog feature in this sprawling interrogation of how self-portraiture has evolved over the past 200 years. Rising defiantly through this conceit are, among others, Claire Tabouret, Sophie Calle, Annette Messager and Cindy Sherman — artists who discovered that to command attention in this male-dominated environment, their work had to confront their bodies, producing portraits that are unapologetic, intimate and fiercely self-aware.

This is a timely exhibition in the age of the selfie, with female artists questioning who has the right, or the power, to portray them. The exhibition brings together some 100 examples — including photographs, sculptures, paintings and graphic and decorative arts — and the responses are wild, subversive and, at times, completely unashamed.

In 1941, in his early seventies, Henri Matisse decided to reinvent himself. Confined to a wheelchair while recovering from abdominal cancer surgery, he began cutting sheets of paper coated with brightly coloured gouache into bold geometric shapes, then arranging them into lively compositions that straddled painting and sculpture. This new art form went on to dominate his final years, until his death in 1954 — a period that he called his ‘second life’.

Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which is closed for renovations until 2030, has partnered with the nearby Grand Palais to exhibit more than 230 works from this final flourishing of Matisse’s career. The show is conceived as a journey through the constant metamorphosis of the artist’s studio — or cut-out ‘garden’, as he imagined it. There are key loans coming from the Met, the Hammer Museum, Fondation Beyeler and MoMA, which mounted a blockbuster show on the same theme in 2014-15.

Born in the town of Laval in north-west France, Henri Rousseau was a self-taught artist who spent most of his working life as a customs official in Paris. It was only upon retirement, in his fifties, that he devoted himself to painting full-time. His work was received negatively by contemporary critics, on the grounds of its apparent naivety. Yet, many of his artist peers — Camille Pissarro, Odilon Redon and Picasso among them — admired his paintings for exactly the same reason.

This retrospective (transferring from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia) will include a mix of portraits, landscapes and Rousseau’s most famous paintings: scenes of wild beasts in lush jungles. It will also explore the way that the critical tide turned in his favour immediately after his death in 1910. The choice of venues for this show is no coincidence: the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Barnes Foundation own the two largest collections of Rousseau’s work in the world.

The careers of Michelangelo and Auguste Rodin are separated by nearly 400 years, and more than twice as many miles. However, they’re linked by virtuoso talents for sculpting complex and human figures. Michelangelo is seen as the supreme artist of the High Renaissance, and Rodin is generally considered the first modern sculptor.

The Louvre is mounting an exhibition that displays the work of these two masters in dialogue for the first time. Spanning marble, bronze, plaster and terracotta, as well as works on paper, it traces both men’s quest to manifest the body’s intense inner life in the round.

Michelangelo’s two most famous examples of figurative sculpture, David in Florence and the Pietà in St Peter’s, Rome, won’t be making the journey to Paris. But the Louvre does already hold two of his works in marble: Dying Slave and Rebellious Slave, which were part of an unfinished project for the funerary monument of Pope Julius II. The museum’s impressive collection of Rodin drawings is bolstered by loans of key sculptures, including The Age of Bronze, coming from the nearby Musée Rodin.

It has been 100 years since a young American mechanic named Alexander Calder — who dreamed of becoming an artist — first set foot in Paris, in 1926. A visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio inspired him to create abstract wire sculptures that pushed the frontiers of kinetic art: initially motorised, then later set in motion by the faintest breeze, they were dubbed ‘mobiles’ by Marcel Duchamp.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton is marking this centenary — as well as the 50th anniversary of Calder’s death — with a huge retrospective. It’s set to contain some 300 works, ranging from his early experiments in the 1920s to huge public commissions in the 1970s, and including his ‘static’ paintings, drawings and wooden sculptures, as well as some of his most important mobiles, which are being lent courtesy of the Calder Foundation. The artist’s concerns with light, reflection, gravity, performance and the interplay between positive and negative space will materialise on an incredible scale within Frank Gehry’s soaring glass building.

Main image, clockwise from top left: at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), Femme se promenant dans une forêt exotique (Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest), circa 1910. Oil on canvas. 100 x 81 cm. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Photo: © 2026 The Barnes Foundation. At the Louvre, Michelangelo (1475-1564), Dying Slave, 1513-15 (detail). Marble. Musée du Louvre. Photo: © 2022 Musée du Louvre, dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Hervé Lewandowski. At the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, Bill Viola (1951-2024), Fire Woman, 2005 (detail). Video/sound installation: colour high-definition video projection; four channels of sound with subwoofer (4.1). 580 x 326 cm (screen). 11 min. 12 sec. Pinault Collection. At the Musée du Luxembourg, Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Artes 110, 1944. Oil on canvas. 40.6 x 60.9 cm. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. At the Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac, a Kota reliquary guardian figure / Mbulu-ngulu, Gabon, 19th century. Ancienne Collection Paul Guillaume. Photo: © Musée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac