CITY GUIDE
What to do in Paris?

The Dior Gallery, which bears witness to the bold vision of Christian Dior and his six successors: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri.

One of the most eagerly awaited cultural events of the autumn, Art Basel Paris transforms the Grand Palais into a temple of modern and contemporary art. With over 200 international galleries, divided into the Galleries, Emergence and Premise sectors, this fair has an impact on the entire capital. A rich, free public program also takes place in emblematic venues such as the Jardin des Tuileries and the Petit Palais, with debates, installations and artistic surprises in store. And for a touch of whimsy, don't miss the Oh La La! initiative, where works are hung in a creative and playful way.

Disney100: The Exhibition is an invitation to explore a century of stories and creation. Featuring nine immersive galleries, this unique experience lifts the veil on some of Disney's most beloved stories - from classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Peter Pan (1953) to more recent titles such as Ratatouille (2007) and Encanto, The Fantastic Madrigal Family (2021). Fans will also be able to celebrate their favorite stories from the Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel universes.

For almost 55 years, Walt Disney Archives has been carefully preserving some of The Walt Disney Company's most treasured objects. In Paris, over 250 pieces will be on display, including artworks, sculptures used in animation, and costumes and props. These include the Carousel Horse from Mary Poppins (1964), used by Disney Legend Julie Andrews, and the red dress from Cruella (2021), worn by Emma Stone.

Built at the height of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall embodies the division between capitalism and communism, an ideological confrontation that has plunged the world into a constant nuclear threat.

Through over 200 authentic artifacts, this unique exhibition traces its history and highlights the importance of defending human rights, freedom and democracy. The collection of over 200 original objects comes from more than 20 international institutions, including the Berlin Wall Foundation, the Allied Museum and the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Among the most remarkable items are fragments of the Wall and personal objects that Berliners used for smuggling or communicating across the Wall, bearing witness to the direct consequences of the two opposing systems. Visitors can also discover objects reflecting the global dimension of the conflict, such as those used for propaganda, espionage and nuclear warfare. These pieces retrace the social movements and events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

The exhibition presents more than 350 photographs chosen for a stroll through the complex work of an artist so often simplified, which here takes on its full poetic and profoundly human dimension. From the 1930s to the 1980s, Robert Doisneau photographed his childhood, his Parisian suburbs, the studios of painters and sculptors, the work of Maillol, post-war fashion and luxury, all the while taking stock of a world without indulgence, a world in which he always felt a sense of solidarity.

The exhibition offers a genuine encounter with the photographer in his rich universe of work. Personal objects and documents, as well as interactives and audiovisuals, are revealed along the way. You'll also discover his advertising work, which is often funny and little-known.

This retrospective offers a fresh look at the rare work of one of the greatest French painters of the 17th century. Despite the scarcity of surviving originals (only some forty authentic works by the painter are known today), the art of Georges de La Tour has left a profound mark on the history of art. Through his subtle naturalism, the formal purity of his compositions and their spiritual intensity, he created a pictorial language of great emotional power.

Bringing together some thirty paintings and graphic works on loan from French and foreign public and private collections, the exhibition adopts a thematic approach designed to pinpoint the originality of Georges de La Tour (1593-1652). The exhibition explores his favorite subjects - genre scenes, figures of penitent saints, artificial light effects - while placing his life and work in the broader context of European Caravaggism, particularly the influence of French, Lorraine and Dutch Caravaggists.

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Mythical couple, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 - 2002) and Jean Tinguely (1925 - 1991) are united by an artistic bond and a shared vision of creation as an act of rebellion against established norms. The exhibition retraces the itinerary of these two artists through the figure of Pontus Hulten (1924 - 2006), first director of the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, who shares their conception of a disruptive, multidisciplinary and participative art.

Through the prism of Pontus Hulten, the first director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou from 1977 to 1981, the exhibition revisits the creations of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely in a historical and playful journey that intertwines art, love, friendship and commitment. Pontus Hulten's radical and innovative approach to the museum gave the pair unconditional support. He shared their anarchist vision of art for all, multi-disciplinary and participatory, moving the boundaries.

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The exhibition traverses the work of Rick Owens, from his beginnings in Los Angeles to his most recent collections. Artistic director of the exhibition, the fashion designer has teamed up with the Palais Galliera to create an itinerary that extends across the museum's facade and garden, reflecting on love, beauty and difference through a monumental mise-en-scène.

Featuring over 100 silhouettes, the retrospective is complemented by the designer's personal archives, videos and never-before-seen installations. Works by Gustave Moreau, Joseph Beuys and Steven Parrino revisit the designer's sources of inspiration and show his work in a new light. The exhibition also highlights the importance of his wife Michèle Lamy, whose presence is felt throughout.

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A journey through the writer's work and how it resonates with our contemporary questions. Her writing, placed in its historical and social context, will be central, as will the question of the interplay between fiction and self-writing. The exhibition is organized into five main thematic sections, crossing the dual chronology of Colette's publications and her life. Each section highlights the experience of reading Colette's work, while at the same time examining the close relationship between writing and life.

With more than 300 items on display, the exhibition explores the worlds of an independent woman who created a bold, sometimes transgressive body of work that remains astonishingly relevant today. Manuscripts, paintings, photographs, prints and a number of emblematic objects shed light on the themes running through Colette's work and life - the feminine, identity, emancipation, nature, desire - as well as the constant interplay of mirrors between the author and her characters.

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To mark the bicentenary of the death of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the Musée du Louvre, which holds the world's most important collection of the artist's paintings and drawings, offers a new vision of a personality and oeuvre of exceptional richness and diversity. The exhibition highlights the inventive force and expressive power of the painting of an artist who created images that still haunt our collective imagination today.

The last major monograph devoted to David was organized at the Louvre and the Château de Versailles, in 1989, to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution. This new exhibition, which embraces the long career of an artist who lived through six political regimes and played an active part in the Revolution, brings together some one hundred loans, including the imposing fragment of Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (on loan from the Musée du Louvre at the Château de Versailles) and the original version of the famous Marat assassiné (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels).

Orson Welles (1915-1985) directed 12 completed feature films, including his most famous, Citizen Kane (1941), made when he was just 25. An immense creator of cinematic forms, brilliantly renewing the use of the sequence shot, depth of field and rapid editing, Welles never ceased to surprise through the protean aspect of his work. This exhibition is intended as an introduction to this extraordinary body of work.

The exhibition pays tribute to Orson Welles' eventful career through a scenographic journey that combines chronology and exploration of the major themes of his films. Over the course of the exhibition's five sections, 400 works illustrate the singularity and creative process of Orson Welles: photographs (by Xavier Lambours, Alexandre Trauner, Nicolas Tikhomiroff, Roger Corbeau, Irving Penn and Cecil Beaton), archives, drawings, audiovisual loops and installations. In addition to generous extracts from his films, the exhibition brings together some forty works by Orson Welles as a draughtsman and sculptor.

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The Musée de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris and the Centre Pompidou join forces to present nearly 200 works and objects, revealing the fundamental role that music played for Kandinsky in his daily life, in his vocation as an artist and in the evolution of his practice towards abstraction. In addition to some one hundred works and drawings, the exhibition features an imaginary cabinet illustrating Kandinsky's love of music. The scores he acquired, the music books and leaflets he collected, the photographs of his musical friendships and his record collection are essential objects in his artistic culture.

Kandinsky's pictorial output is inextricably linked to his thoughts and experiments on the synthesis of the arts. The exhibition places paintings and drawings in dialogue with his various projects for the stage, his poems exploring the "pure sound" of words, or the Almanach du Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), all of which operate the fundamental unity of the visual and sound arts. Finally, because music is also, in Kandinsky's eyes, an art of
performance, the exhibition features the recreation of several synesthetic works, such as the Music Salon he designed for the Berlin Architecture Exhibition in 1931.

Conceived in partnership with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition will bring together over 90 works by the celebrated American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), some of which have never before been shown in France. It traces the meteoric rise of the young artist, who arrived in France in 1874. It was in Paris that the painter trained, developed his style and his network of artists, and enjoyed his first successes. The exhibition covers his career up to the mid-1880s, when he moved to London following the scandal caused by his Salon portrait of Madame Gautreau(Madame X).

The exhibition looks back at the Parisian years of American artist John Singer Sargent and the enduring links the painter maintained with his formative city. Until the mid-1880s, Sargent forged both his style and his personality in the crucible of the dizzying Parisian art world, marked by the proliferation of exhibitions, the development of naturalism and impressionism, and the rise of Paris as the art capital of the world.

Pierre Soulages' work on paper, which is rarely exhibited in its own right, is an essential part of his artistic career. As early as 1946, he explored this avenue with walnut-stain paintings featuring broad, assertive marks, immediately marking his singularity within the abstract approaches of the time.

Thanks to exceptional loans from the Musée Soulages, the exhibition brings together 130 works created between the 1940s and the early 2000s, including 25 never-before-seen pieces. You'll discover a group of paintings on paper, long kept in the artist's studio, which testify to the constancy and freedom with which Soulages approaches this medium.

Pierre Soulages favored walnut stain in the early years, but often returned to this material, prized by cabinetmakers for its qualities of transparency, opacity and luminosity, in contrast to the white of the paper. He would also use ink and gouache for works whose limited formats in no way compromised their formal power and diversity.

By highlighting this set of paintings on paper, the exhibition invites you to rediscover Pierre Soulages in a practice that is both intimate and decisive, at the heart of his plastic language.