"We're constantly striving to strike a balance between work that respects academic rules of composition, established visual codes and good readability, with something more spontaneous, adventurous, playful, even naive."
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
"These paintings merge the landscape and the intimacy of windows through the framing of the car, bridging the two realms I've typically explored separately. The car becomes a meditation on transition, on existing simultaneously here and elsewhere."
At the official launch last November, the current culture minister Rachida Dati described the imperative behind the programme as not just celebrating an uncommon visionary but the "burning relevance" of his legacy: "a commitment to continuing to nurture this demanding idea of what culture is".
Eugène Atget's images of the city reminded me of when I first came across the turn-of-the-century French photographer's work in a book called 'A Vision of Paris' (1963), which paired more than a hundred of Atget's photographs with passages from Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' and I couldn't quite see them for what they were. There was something about the preciousness of juxtaposing Atget's gorgeous golden prints with Proust's gorgeous language that made me feel as if I were suffocating under all those foulards, drapes, and aesthetics.
This depicts Guernica after the battle. The figures are no longer fighting. They're in a giant pile. They're exhausted and there's a sunrise on a new day behind them. The title of the work is A Whole New World (for Who?). It's asking what's going to happen after the conflicts that we have. Who's going to be taken into that new world?
CultureClic is one of the most comprehensive French art apps available. Designed as a mobile-first discovery tool, it maps out more than 1,350 museums across France and highlights hundreds of geolocated artworks, photographs, and historical engravings. The app is particularly strong in Paris but also features content in cities like Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, and Avignon. What sets CultureClic apart is its use of augmented reality, allowing users to visualize artworks and historical documents in context.
Styling by Axelle using fashion by Nazarene Amictus, Victoria Amerson Design GmbH, Mossi, and Vintage pieces. The assistant stylist is Evan. The series explores the idea of haste and unintentional disorder in Paris, the moment when you rush downstairs, almost forgetting your trousers, because every minute counts. This sense of urgency, this I don't have time, becomes an aesthetic language. In Paris, style isn't calculated, and yet, nothing is ever left to chance.
As cultural institutions continue to proliferate worldwide in this digital era, the museum itself appears increasingly in need of redefinition. Rather than offering a single model or solution, Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums, written by architectural historian and curator Béatrice Grenier, argues for a more contextual and plural understanding of what a museum can be: an institution shaped by its environment, its public, and the specific cultural questions it seeks to address.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
In his expressive, large-format works, Proux stages humans in the field of tension between industry and nature in the context of 21st century's late capitalism. Depictions of workers in offices, factories and warehouses are juxtaposed with light-flooded scenes of people and nature.
Arles-born artist Sarah Espeute learned embroidery as a child but did not return to the practice until decades later. After studying graphic design in Paris, working in Riso printing, founding a publishing house, and painting, she took up embroidery again for a one-off exhibition. The response was immediate. She went on to found Œuvres Sensibles and relocated her studio to Marseille, where she now works from a made-to-measure atelier alongside a team of trained embroiderers and artists.
Born in Paris in 1936 to German-Jewish parents who fled the Nazis, his family survived the war in hiding in south-western France. Rosenberg first arrived at the Louvre in 1962, at the invitation of Charles de Gaulle's minister of culture, later heading up the department of paintings during the museum's dramatic relaunch in the 1980s and early 90s, symbolised by the 1989 completion of I.M. Pei's sculptural entrance, the Louvre Pyramid.
Myriam Jacob-Allard appears through a heavy door and greets us with an easy warmth, scooping us up and welcoming us into her world. We are immediately absorbed by an unexpected color-drenched stairwell. Every surface is saturated in a dense, glowing yellow that reads unmistakably as egg yolk, insulating us from the outside in as we make our ascent. We turn into a long hallway whose fragrant freshly waxed floor catches the light, reflecting it back upward so that the corridor seems to glow beneath our feet.
Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (19082004) travelled all over the world and extensively throughout Europe. After producing numerous series of photographs for magazines in Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Switzerland and France, Cartier-Bresson wanted to bring them together in a book and in 1955, he published Les Europeens (The Europeans). This book of photographs aims to show what makes each of the peoples of this geographical area unique while highlighting their similarities. This exhibition brings together some of the most important photographs from the book.
They let us shoot in places people weren't allowed to normally, like Marie Antoinette's private theater. They were like, 'This is your home.' The Versailles exhibition will screen several scenes from Coppola's film in the very rooms where they were staged, highlighting the deep connection between these storied grounds and her acclaimed creation.
Belleville has always been a little bit rowdy, whether it meant to be or not. Long before it was folded into Paris in 1860, it existed as its own working-class wine village perched on a hill, slightly removed from the city both geographically and ideologically. In recent years, as Paris's 10th and 11th arrondissements have slid fully into hipster territory, and even the gritty Barbès neighborhood feels increasingly polished, Belleville has held onto its identity with surprising resolve.
The foundation's collection is exceptionally large, encompassing more than 10,000 items-including thousands of drawings, over 400 sculptures, 100 paintings, a whole collection of decorative objets d'art, prints, everything that was in the studio, all the archives. Most of the collection has never been exhibited.
Léribault's first mission, according to Macron, will be the "appeasement" of a museum which has been badly hurt by the theft of France's crown jewels on 19 October and a string of scandals since then. He will need all his diplomatic talents to face the unions, who have led an unprecedented series of strikes, asking a rise in wages.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. For more than 50 years, the French artist Sophie Calle has worked in the space between facts and their retelling, demonstrating how the narratives we share about ourselves are always partial, constructed. Working across photography, text, film and installation, she reveals how fantasy and projection intervene in our best attempts to see and be seen.
If you've walked around any of France's cosmopolitan cities in recent years, you're sure to have come across some stunning murals. Painted onto the side of buildings, in hidden corners, and just about anywhere an artist can paint, street art is booming. We're not talking old-school graffiti here, hastily sprayed names on walls, and anti-social stuff like that. Today's street art is commissioned by city or town councils and created by prominent street artists from around the globe says Suzanne Pearson.
Influenced by the works of Hopper and Hans Hofmann, Mitchell Johnson: Personal Color (Selected Small Paintings 1988-2026) is shaped by decades of visits to Paris and Cape Cod, two places that have anchored and evolved Johnson's painting over the course of his career. Hofmann, through his teaching, transported the aesthetics and concerns of the School of Paris across the Atlantic, eventually creating a group atelier curriculum that would expand the breadth of American Modernism through his theory of push and pull.
Monia Ben Hamouda's work weaves calligraphy, material transformation and ancestral memory into sculptures and installations that oscillate between language and form. In conversation, we traced the conceptual and sensory threads of her practice, unfolding through key works that reflect on heritage, embodiment and translation. Using materials such as iron, stone and pigment, her installations become sites where history is not only referenced but physically felt.
The exhibition centers the visibility, agency, and radical joy of Black women, celebrating love as a generative force-of liberation, self-definition, and community. Through richly textured compositions and her iconic rhinestone-studded surfaces, Thomas depicts her subjects-friends, family, lovers, and cultural figures-with a confidence and sensuality that reclaims spaces where Black women have been historically overlooked or misrepresented. With this exhibition, she becomes the first African-American artist to receive a major solo presentation at the Grand Palais.
Running from March 17 to July 19, 2026, Renoir and Love will be one of the top special exhibitions of the year in Paris. Celebrating how affection, connection and human relationships shaped Renoir's work during a defining period of his career. Bringing many key works together for the first time in decades, the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on how Renoir approached love not as an abstract ideal, but as something lived and experienced within the changing social life of late-19th-century Paris.
Manet & Morisot at the Legion of Honor is a somewhat scholarly exhibition on the lives, work, and friendship of two eminent French 19th-century artists. While it sets out to rescue Berthe Morisot from a long-held assumption that she owed her art to the influence - even guidance - of Édouard Manet, the show is far from an academic or revisionist experience. Instead, after seeing their work compared and contrasted across a handful of galleries, the word that comes most immediately to mind is "pleasure."
For this exhibition, Reinecke presents variations of leisure activities in an imaginary wooded landscape and cozy warm interiors infused with sentimentality. Reinecke highlights common outdoor activities such as hiking, swimming and fishing to simple domestic pleasures such as applying nail polish to a loved ones toes upon a green shag carpet in front of a blazing fire ( Cherries in the Snow, 2025).
When a 22-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was asked how he typically began a piece, his answer was simple: "I suppose I would start with a head." That instinct-almost a reflex-sits at the core of a remarkable group of early works on paper that remained largely unseen during his lifetime. The Basquiat: Headstrong exhibition, which opens this month at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, is set to become the first comprehensive showing devoted to the artist's depictions of the human head.
The artist is known for his absurdist paintings of animals with overly long legs, contorted bodies, or myriad mutant-like heads or limbs. They're often set amid woodlands or meadows evocative of 18th- and 19th-century academic landscape paintings or depictions of formal hunts. Instead, both domesticated and wild animals graze as normally as they would without dozens of heads or udders attached in unnatural places around their bodies.
As an editor, you learn to pay attention to the nuances of language. How we phrase something can speak volumes about our perspectives. Some words are fine in one context, but in another they might be detrimental. "Victim" is an example - who wants "victimhood" to encompass their whole person? And possessives are a minefield of power relationships; for instance, a person experiencing mistreatment at the hands of a partner should be defined by neither the treatment nor the tormenter