Warhol, Cézanne, Monet: the must-see Paris exhibitions of autumn 2026
This autumn, the capital’s museums and cultural institutions are offering a programme of rare richness. Paris exhibitions spanning painting, photography, cinema and even the social sciences await visitors from September 2026 through to March 2027. Here is how to navigate the season and pick out the shows that are truly worth your time.
Icons of modern art at the heart of the Paris exhibitions
It is the Fondation Louis Vuitton that perhaps sets the most ambitious tone of the season. From 9 October 2026 to 8 March 2027, the institution in the 16th arrondissement devotes a major exhibition to Gustave Fayet, a man of dual identity: enlightened collector and creator in his own right. The show brings Fayet’s canvases, some of them virtually unknown to the general public, into dialogue with works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse. An unprecedented face-to-face between a man of exceptional taste and the giants of his era.
In a similar vein, the Grand Palais turns its attention to the legacy of Paul Cézanne with the exhibition Cézanne and Us, running from 23 September 2026 to 17 January 2027. The aim is not simply to celebrate the master of colour and his Provençal landscapes or his repeated studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire. For visitors, it is a rare opportunity to understand, in concrete terms, how a single artist can transform the way a whole century sees the world.
Photography and drawing: two mediums in the spotlight
The Bourse de Commerce presents, from 7 October 2026 to 18 January 2027, a sweeping exhibition entitled Remember Me. Marking the bicentenary of photography, the institution brings together 700 works by artists as varied as Wolfgang Tillmans, Cindy Sherman, Gustave Le Gray, Dorothea Lange and Louise Lawler. Visitors are invited to wander freely among these images and trace the full history of a medium that has profoundly reshaped art. The layout is deliberately open-ended, designed so that each person can build their own reading of this visual history.
At the musée du Luxembourg, it is Andy Warhol who takes centre stage from 16 September 2026 to 10 January 2027. While the general public knows him best for his Campbell’s Soup Cans, his Marilyn Diptych or his colourful portraits of Judy Garland and Ingrid Bergman, this exhibition chooses to foreground a lesser-known side: the draughtsman. Warhol drew throughout his entire life, right up to his final days, experimenting with stencils, collages, broken lines and stamps across a vast range of subjects, from caricatures to advertising posters. These Paris exhibitions reveal whole dimensions of a body of work we thought we already knew.
Monet, Belmondo and the secrets of the Alhambra
- Monet, Painting Time at the musée de l’Orangerie (Jardin des Tuileries, 1st arrondissement): from 30 September 2025 to 25 January 2027, dozens of works tracing the painter’s lifelong pursuit of light, culminating in the Nymphéas installed according to his own wishes.
- Jean-Paul Belmondo, le magnifique at the Cinémathèque française (51, rue de Bercy, 12th arrondissement): from 7 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, a tribute to the actor who revolutionised both comedy and action cinema.
- The Secrets of the Alhambra at the Institut du monde arabe (1, rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, 5th arrondissement): from 24 November 2026 to 16 May 2027, an immersive journey into the history of this jewel of Islamic art at the height of its splendour.
- Drugs at the Musée de l’Homme (17, place du Trocadéro, 16th arrondissement): from 18 November 2026 to 6 June 2027, an unflinching examination of the substances consumed by humanity, from coffee to illicit drugs, since prehistoric times.
The musée de l’Orangerie poses a question as simple as it is fascinating: how does a painter represent the passage of time? The Monet retrospective brings together dozens of works to reveal an artist growing ever bolder in his pursuit of light. The Nymphéas, installed here according to the painter’s own wishes, stand as the natural culmination of that lifelong quest.
The Cinémathèque française, meanwhile, continues its cycle of tributes to the great figures of cinema. Following Louis de Funès, Agnès Varda, Marilyn Monroe and Romy Schneider, it is now Jean-Paul Belmondo’s turn to step into the light. The exhibition retraces the career of an actor who became the icon of a generation, equally capable of pushing boundaries in comedy and in action films.
Girls and Drugs: the Paris exhibitions that challenge the way we see the world
Among the most original offerings in this season’s Paris exhibitions, two stand out for their ambition to interrogate pressing social questions. The Grand Palais hosts, from 9 December 2026 to 21 March 2027, the exhibition Girls. Adolescence, Fashion and Rebellion. Room by room, the works restore agency to subjects too often reduced to their innocence or youth, shining a light on their artistic, social and political power. Adolescence is presented here as a pivotal period that has long fascinated and inspired artists, a unique passage between childhood and adulthood.
At the Musée de l’Homme, the exhibition Drugs places substances as varied as nicotine, cannabis, MDMA and morphine under the microscope. Each substance is analysed through multiple lenses to understand its effects on human beings and societies across the centuries. The journey stretches back to the furthest reaches of prehistory and leaves nothing out, from the morning cup of coffee to the most illicit of substances. These Paris exhibitions prove that museums know how to take editorial risks in order to shed new light on the present.
