There are 71 exhibitions on in Paris worth the trip. I checked the dates, the venues and the opening hours one by one, on the museums’ own pages.
Last checked: 17 October 2026
13 May to 20 October 2026
Photographs and films from almost fifty years of digs by the French archaeological mission in Libya, from prehistory to the Middle Ages: Saharan rock art, Roman forts, Leptis Magna, the city of Septimius Severus, and the ancient villages of Cyrenaica.
4 June to 31 October 2026
The largest French retrospective on Versace since 1986: nearly 450 pieces of clothing, accessories, drawings and archive material. Fashion treated as art history, which is more or less how Versace looked at antiquity.
13 May to 1 November 2026
More than a hundred garments and accessories from the Thai royal collection, with the eight traditional costume designs devised by Queen Sirikit and the dresses Paris houses such as Balmain made for her. For 340 years of relations with France.
2 April to 1 November 2026
Video game music from 8-bit to today’s symphonic scores, curated by the musicologist Fanny Rebillard and the journalist Jean Zeid. The Philharmonie’s show is in the Musée de la musique, at La Villette.
19 September to 1 November 2026
In the IMA library, newly named after Leïla Shahid, the photographs Joss Dray took in Palestine between 1987 and 2001, many never shown: the refugee camps, the markets of Gaza, the children of the first Intifada, the walls after Oslo.
24 June to 1 November 2026
A single painting, on loan from Düsseldorf: the canvas Chagall painted in Vitebsk in 1914, just back from Paris, tied to the feast of Tabernacles. Seven voices, historians, philosophers and a rabbi among them, read it in as many audio tracks.
3 July to 8 November 2026
Ingres painted fabric with a tailor’s precision, and that precision has been argued over for two centuries. Here his portraits are read from the side of the clothes, which in the nineteenth century said as much about a sitter as the face.
12 May to 8 November 2026
The journey of bird-of-paradise plumes, from the forests of New Guinea to European hats, by way of painting. A history of trade, fashion and slaughter told through a single animal.
11 June to 22 November 2026
Victor Hugo and architecture, from the Notre-Dame novel of 1831 to the drawings of cathedrals and castles made while travelling, down to his fantastic ink cities. In the second-floor apartment, recent photographs of his house on Guernsey.
10 February to 29 November 2026
Simone Veil before the stateswoman: letters, photographs and interviews tell her story with her sisters Milou and Denise, from a childhood in Nice to deportation in 1944. There are also photographs by her brother Jean, deported with their father.
24 June to 6 December 2026
About fifty objects from the Islamic Art department leave their galleries and spread through the Decorative Arts rooms. The route shows how techniques and ornament born in Islamic lands inspired European decorative arts.
9 September to 7 December 2026
For the bicentenary of Gustave Moreau’s birth, his house and studio open a carte blanche for a living artist: the painter Ali Banisadr brings his visionary canvases among Moreau’s. The same ticket gets you into the Musée Henner within 72 hours.
8 September to 13 December 2026
Sixty years after Matsutani Takesada settled in France, the museum receives three of his works as a gift and hangs them in the Painting room. Hashigakari is the bridgeway of nō theatre, the one that brings characters onto the stage.
22 January to 13 December 2026
More than five thousand ink drawings in which Chaïm Kaliski, a hidden child in occupied Brussels, spent eighteen years telling his war and his father’s arrest in 1944. He began at sixty, and the childlike line makes the scenes harder to look at.
24 September to 14 December 2026
For two years Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton had a studio inside the Louvre. In the Salle de la Chapelle they show what came of it: Attia’s film and installation about the act of looking, and Peyton’s portraits made beside the collections.
18 February to 20 December 2026
More than sixty vintage press prints by Robert Capa beside magazines, books and personal objects, a hundred and sixty pieces in all, with the collaboration of Magnum. The show reconsiders the man who invented the figure of the war photographer.
10 May to 31 December 2026
Ninety-eight photographs, found in 2020, of the first mass round-up of Jews in France on 14 May 1941, taken by a German propaganda photographer and then censored. The show retraces the inquiry that put a name to him: Harry Croner.
10 September 2026 to 3 January 2027
Some twenty works and installations by four designers, Nina Fradet, Tony Jouanneau, Felipe Ribon and Marion Vidal, made after their residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto and placed inside the museum’s permanent galleries.
20 May 2026 to 3 January 2027
What happens to monuments in war, and how they are defended: the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine follows heritage struck, destroyed and saved in recent conflicts, from Timbuktu in Mali to Odesa in Ukraine. It closes on 3 January.
8 April 2026 to 3 January 2027
What does ageing mean, for the human species and for each of us? The show comes from a meeting between Samuel Pavard, the Muséum’s biodemographer who studies ageing, and the photographer Nikos Aliagas, who portrayed the faces of old age.
22 October 2025 to 3 January 2027
Gouaches and painted ceramics made by patients of the Blida psychiatric hospital in Algeria in the late sixties, in workshops born from the method of Frantz Fanon, once its head doctor. They reached the IMA museum as a donation in 2021.
16 September 2026 to 4 January 2027
In the late eighteenth century the Korean king Jeongjo, with no time to read, had his library painted on a trompe-l’œil screen. That began a genre, born of Chinese curiosity cabinets and Jesuit perspective, which the show follows into the twentieth century.
16 September 2026 to 4 January 2027
A focused display of the portraits Jean-Jacques Henner painted of his family all his life: his mother, his sister, his brothers, his nephews and nieces. They were his first sitters and his last, and painting them was how he learned the genre.
16 September 2026 to 10 January 2027
Nearly four hundred and fifty photographs by Irving Penn from the Pinault Collection, from the forties to the early 2000s, hung as one great mosaic rather than in order: portraits, fashion, wilted flowers and cigarette butts.
16 September 2026 to 10 January 2027
Warhol seen through drawing, which stayed with him throughout his career: about a hundred and fifty drawings, a dozen paintings, screenprints, photographs and archive material, from advertising illustration to gay iconography and death.
1 July 2026 to 10 January 2027
Over 120 works from the Al Thani Collection, many never seen in Paris, on real and imaginary animals from four continents: a Greek votive horse of the eighth century BC, a Chinese tiger-shaped belt buckle, a Fabergé cane handle.
25 June 2026 to 10 January 2027
In the Panthéon crypt, photographs, objects, books and documents lent by the Archives nationales and his descendants tell the story of Marc Bloch, the Annales historian shot by the Nazis in 1944. It is included in the monument ticket.
26 June 2026 to 11 January 2027
A hundred pieces of French silver given to the Louvre by Michel Lacoste in 2025, shown together in room 605 of the Decorative Arts department beside the museum’s own silver. They bring in goldsmiths the Louvre did not yet have.
23 September 2026 to 17 January 2027
Not a retrospective but the story of a legacy: nearly a hundred and eighty works set Cézanne beside the artists who took him as a model, from Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley and Peter Doig. Co-produced with the Centre Pompidou and the Orsay.
29 September 2026 to 17 January 2027
The arts of the Indigenous peoples of the North-West coast of America: around forty distinct groups spread along eighteen hundred kilometres of shoreline, told through their objects. It is the Quai Branly’s major autumn exhibition.
30 September 2026 to 17 January 2027
The MEP reopens on 30 September with Irving Penn and fashion in the main galleries, «Vêtement du quotidien» in the Petite Galerie and Nanténé Traoré in the Studio. With «Le monde selon Penn» at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris has two Penns this autumn.
17 October 2026 to 17 January 2027
Nineteenth-century French painters did not only draw: they collected their colleagues’ drawings and lived among them. It is the show with which the Fondation Custodia reopens after its renovation, in its town house on rue de Lille.
7 October 2026 to 18 January 2027
For two hundred years of photography, some seven hundred works by more than seventy artists from the Pinault Collection, in no chronological order, from Atget and Julia Margaret Cameron to Cartier-Bresson and Avedon. Barbara Kruger fills the Rotunda.
15 September 2026 to 24 January 2027
The first major Eva Gonzalès retrospective since the posthumous show of 1885: about a hundred paintings, pastels and prints, in chronological order. She is remembered as Manet’s only pupil, and the show, made with the Van Gogh Museum, looks for the painter herself.
18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027
The first exhibition in France on Kerry James Marshall: seventy works, eight painted for the show, in twelve groups from 1980 to today. In his large canvases the everyday life of Black people enters the models of art history it had been shut out of.
18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027
The first show in a Paris museum for Simone Fattal, born in Damascus in 1942: painting in Beirut, the move to California with Etel Adnan, then from the nineties the archaic ceramic figures drawn from Mediterranean myth.
23 September 2026 to 24 January 2027
Antoine Bourdelle’s clothes resurfaced in 2020, and from them comes a show on how artists dress to stage themselves: garments worn by Klimt, Rosa Bonheur, Foujita and Sonia Delaunay, beside paintings, sculptures and photographs.
11 September 2026 to 24 January 2027
For the first time in France, Tintoretto’s whole career in some forty paintings and drawings, and his legacy in nineteenth-century French painting. It includes the Saint Catherine of Alexandria and an Angel known as the David Bowie Tintoretto.
13 October 2026 to 24 January 2027
It starts from Nicolas Flamel’s tombstone, which the museum owns, to separate the man from the legend: a 14th-century Paris scribe, donor and property investor who only became an alchemist after his death. About fifty manuscripts, documents and objects.
7 October 2026 to 25 January 2027
The major Zurbarán retrospective is organised with the National Gallery in London and the Art Institute of Chicago. Beside the monumental canvases painted for Andalusian monasteries hang portraits, still lifes and works by his son Juan, and it ends with Manet, Picasso and Gris.
7 October 2026 to 25 January 2027
Seventeenth-century Spanish religious sculpture in polychrome wood, from the national museum in Valladolid, in the same space as the Zurbarán exhibition. The two shows face each other and explain the world Zurbarán, Velázquez and Murillo came from.
30 September 2026 to 25 January 2027
For the centenary of Monet’s death, nearly forty of his paintings, mostly from the Orsay and the Marmottan, show how time became his subject, from Impressionism to the Water Lilies, which are at home in the Orangerie.
7 October 2026 to 25 January 2027
Barbara Kruger covers Tadao Ando’s Rotunda with giant quotations from Orwell’s 1984 and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier, and fills the 24 display cases of the passage. The same ticket also opens Remember Me, the show on two hundred years of photography.
15 September 2026 to 31 January 2027
In room 69 the show tells the story of the Alsatian sculptor and his Statue of Liberty, which grew out of an unbuilt project for the Suez Canal and was engineered with Viollet-le-Duc and Eiffel. It is the Orsay’s tribute to 250 years of American independence.
6 October 2026 to 31 January 2027
For the centenary of her death, the Orsay gives Mary Cassatt her first major exhibition in France devoted entirely to her: about eighty paintings, pastels and prints. Beside the Impressionist painter stands the campaigner who supported votes for women.
29 September 2026 to 31 January 2027
The very first photographs of Polynesia, taken within a single decade by two photographers who saw it differently. A small show that lets you see Tahiti before it became the postcard image we know.
29 September 2026 to 31 January 2027
About fifteen documents on Nadar the inventor: in 1861 he patented electric light for photography and in 1862 took it into the Catacombs, which few could visit. In 1868 he made the first photographs of Paris from the air. It stands at the start of the visit.
24 September 2026 to 31 January 2027
With the Centre Pompidou closed, some thirty artists from its collections, from Kupka to Jumana Manna by way of Christian Boltanski, fill the nave of the Panthéon with stories of anonymous lives. The title comes from Pierre Michon’s 1984 book.
24 September 2026 to 31 January 2027
With the Grenoble museum, the Marmottan follows landscape from Monet to today: the twentieth century seemed to have set it aside, yet the genre held out and changed all the way to Hockney. The show then travels to Grenoble.
7 October 2026 to 31 January 2027
Jean-Paul Belmondo, from his breakthrough in Breathless in 1960 to the famous stunts that reshaped the action film: ninety films, up to eight in a single year. Visits are booked by time slot, and a full retrospective runs in the cinemas alongside.
30 September 2026 to 31 January 2027
About 300 items from the BnF collections, 250 prints, mostly black and white, and some fifty rare books, covering eighty years of Japanese photography and around a hundred photographers. A combined ticket with the BnF museum costs 18 euros.
2 October 2026 to 7 February 2027
The four finalists of France’s leading art prize, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Brognon Rollin, Laura Henno and Josèfa Ntjam, show their work in the collection galleries. The winner is announced on 22 October. Admission is free.
6 October 2026 to 7 February 2027
More than three hundred works and documents on Kurt Schwitters, painter, poet, typographer and inventor of Merz, art made from what gets thrown away. At the centre is the Merzbau, the structure he built inside his house in Hanover.
6 June 2026 to 8 February 2027
Seulgi Lee’s installation takes over the museum facade and rotunda: wooden semicircles outside, coloured ribbons and bronze bells inside. It grows out of a Korean belief about crossing bridges under a full moon.
14 October 2026 to 14 February 2027
For the centenary of his birth, the museum of Paris history tells the story of Jacques Villeglé, who for half a century peeled torn posters off the walls, noting the street and date of each. Many documents are shown for the first time.
26 September 2026 to 14 February 2027
Nearly five hundred works on nineteenth-century women who borrowed the male wardrobe, from trousers to the tailored suit and the tie. For the first time Rosa Bonheur’s wardrobe is shown in full, beside 150 unpublished amateur photographs.
16 October 2026 to 14 February 2027
For almost a century the circus was the heart of Montmartre: the Fernando, later the Medrano, inspired painters from Degas to Picasso. Paintings, sculptures and drawings sit beside costumes, posters and objects from a circus that really existed.
13 October 2026 to 14 February 2027
Nearly three hundred pieces, manuscripts, photographs, paintings and objects held by the National Library, on Georges Perec: one of the great French writers of the twentieth century and the hidden child who lost his mother at Auschwitz, the legend and the man.
30 September 2026 to 15 February 2027
Drawings, paintings and woodcuts by Vija Celmins from 1971 to 2000: ocean, desert, sky and snow, surfaces she calls impossible images. They hang next to Monet’s Water Lilies, and the museum ticket covers this show too.
15 October 2026 to 21 February 2027
Lionel Sabatté, shortlisted for the 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp, takes over the whole museum with mostly new works made of dust, rust, wool and nail clippings. The collection’s deer, wolves and boars come back transformed, starting with a large bronze stag.
22 September 2026 to 28 February 2027
The mint’s historic photographic holdings, fewer than eight hundred items between 1890 and 1990 and almost all unpublished: the wooden clogs of the 1900s workers, the workshops’ steam engine, the brand-new Pessac factory in 1975.
29 September 2026 to 28 February 2027
Marriage in the Maghreb through some forty nineteenth-century bridal costumes and jewels from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, never shown in France before, set against the work of twenty-seven contemporary artists from the Maghreb and its diasporas.
23 September 2026 to 7 March 2027
For the Muséum’s four hundredth year, over three hundred works from its art collections: from the drawings brought back by scientific expeditions to contemporary artists working on natural history. The ticket also covers the Grande Galerie.
9 October 2026 to 8 March 2027
Gustave Fayet was among the first to collect Van Gogh, Gauguin and Redon. The Fondation reunites his scattered collection, ten Van Goghs, 78 Gauguins, 88 Redons, and his own designs. The Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is back in France for the first time since 1937.
15 October 2026 to 14 March 2027
A retrospective of the Bohemian painter Georges Kars, one of the names of the École de Paris: more than 150 paintings, drawings and documents lent by some fifteen Czech institutions, organised with the National Gallery Prague. Open until 9pm on Wednesdays.
20 May 2026 to 15 March 2027
Water as Mesopotamia understood it: origin of the world, resource to be administered, and threat. An archaeological show about irrigation and drought that reads as a comment on the present without ever saying so.
30 September 2026 to 4 April 2027
Forty years after the fashion museum was founded, forty silhouettes follow the two lives of a garment: from sketch, embroidery and pattern to the catwalk, and then into storage, where conservators prepare it for exhibition.
14 October 2026 to 4 April 2027
Nearly 280 works on the human urge to go below the surface, from Antiquity to the submarine: art, literature, science and engineering together. It is the Paris leg, and the largest, of a cycle the Marine museum runs across all its sites.
12 September 2026 to 18 April 2027
The museum has bought and restored two studies of stallions, a chestnut and a golden chestnut, shown here for the first time. From them the display follows Delacroix’s horses, lions and tigers, including those he saw in Morocco in 1832.
2 October 2026 to 2 May 2027
The first exhibition in France of the Brazilian photographer Rafael Pavarotti, born in 1993 in the state of Pará: more than two hundred prints, from fashion covers to portraits of Rihanna, Harry Styles and Beyoncé, beside the museum’s photographs.
22 September 2026 to 1 August 2027
The building of the Statue of Liberty, born in Paris in Bartholdi’s studio and the Gaget workshops, told with projections, 3D reconstructions and real sets: from the enlargement techniques to the shipment to New York. For the 250th of the United States.
20 exhibitions that have not opened yet, but whose dates are already announced.
20 October 2026 to 24 January 2027
Women make up only 4 per cent of the artists in the Petit Palais. Prune Nourry worked for a year with three historians to make eighteen busts of forgotten late nineteenth-century women sculptors, scattered through the whole museum, from the forecourt to the garden.
20 October 2026 to 10 January 2027
The largest monograph on Stan Douglas in France in more than thirty years: some forty films, photographic series and video installations from the eighties to today, on how images build and bend the way history is told.
20 October 2026 to 21 February 2027
Louise Bourgeois’s drawings and prints, brought together for the first time from the National Library and the Centre Pompidou. It is also the first show devoted to the artist by a public institution in Paris since 2008.
21 October 2026 to 14 February 2027
The group show that opens the Palais de Tokyo’s season brings together more than twenty artists and collectives working far from the big cities, in Brittany, the Cévennes, Corsica, Guadeloupe and the Basque Country. Many works were made for it.
21 October 2026 to 7 March 2027
Susan Meiselas’s photographs of the 1978-1979 Nicaraguan revolution and her later returns to the country, which follow how those images were reprinted and reused. More than a hundred works, documents and film excerpts.
21 October 2026 to 7 March 2027
Mostly unpublished photographs by Martine Franck of 1970s feminism, nearly all taken in Paris: marches, the women’s press and, from the 1980s, her series on women and work.
22 October 2026 to 28 February 2027
The Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s first major exhibition in Paris, with nine invited artists and collectives. It includes his Parliament of Ghosts, made of wooden Ashanti stools, and a Ghanaian cocoa plantation building rebuilt by Courage Dzidula Kpodo.
30 October 2026 to 21 March 2027
French cinema since the 1960s seen through those who made it, directors and actors of Maghrebi background from Mehdi Charef to Hafsia Herzi: film excerpts, posters, storyboards and a few Césars. Visitors under 26 get in free.
4 November 2026 to 3 May 2027
More than three hundred photographs with the Louvre as their subject: the galleries, the works, the Tuileries gardens, famous and anonymous visitors, the backstage. They run from the first photographers to those invited today, through the Commune and both world wars.
10 November 2026 to 4 April 2027
The artist Roméo Mivekannin looks at the history of colonial exhibitions, and the museum asks itself an awkward question: how to show those images without repeating their violence. A show that is also about the place that holds it.
10 November 2026 to 25 April 2027
For the first time in France, fin-de-siècle Brussels brought together across all the arts: Léon Frédéric’s triptychs, Victor Horta’s furniture and models, Wolfers’s jewellery, Ensor and Khnopff. Without leaving out Leopold II’s Congo.
13 November 2026 to 10 January 2027
For the centenary of the Fragonard perfume house, founded in Grasse in 1926, its three 18th-century collections are shown together for the first time: objets d’art and bottles, rare costumes and paintings, including works by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
18 November 2026 to 6 June 2027
The Musée de l’Homme’s big winter show takes a subject that never leaves the news and treats it as an anthropology museum would: the substances, the ways people use them and the prejudices around them, with the stated aim of taking those apart.
20 November 2026 to 4 April 2027
The world of the yangban, the scholarly elite that shaped the art of Joseon Korea, who reached office through examinations and birth. Paintings, costumes, ceramics, screens and furniture rebuild their homes, for 140 years of relations between France and Korea.
21 November 2026 to 20 June 2027
The Army Museum at Les Invalides tells the story of Charles de Gaulle before 18 June 1940: his military career and the books he wrote as an officer, when no one could picture the man of the appeal from London.
24 November 2026 to 16 May 2027
The Alhambra as it was under Sultan Muhammad V in the fourteenth century, very unlike today’s fortress: an immersive route with works of art, arms and a copy of the Fountain of the Lions, around which the theories on its original form are laid out.
26 November 2026 to 6 April 2027
More than eighty works and objects, paintings, prints, posters, winemaking tools and tableware, on what Balzac thought about wine: food, health risk, business and art of living, without ever moralising.
9 December 2026 to 21 March 2027
Female adolescence told through clothes, photographs, film clips and everyday objects in five sections, with names such as Louise Bourgeois, Sofia Coppola and Martin Margiela. It comes from MoMu in Antwerp, adapted for the Grand Palais.
12 December 2026 to 17 October 2027
The second display on the crafts of fashion follows a garment from flat fabric to volume: measurements, pattern, prototype, pleating, wooden forms for hats and shoes. It also looks at how museums rebuild the missing body.
16 December 2026 to 21 March 2027
The first European show of Japanese photographer Mika Ninagawa, with her collective EiM: photographs, videos and large installations built around shadows. The entrance is the Rotonde Clarence Dillon, not the Grand Palais main door.
It is always these 60, and I check them one by one. When a venue has nothing on I say so, with the date I checked: it is something you would otherwise have to look up museum by museum.
Dates and prices change, and this page may not reflect the latest updates: before you travel, always check the museum’s own page, linked under each exhibition, which is the most reliable source.