There are 10 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: 28 July 2026
19 May to 13 September 2026
Hand coloured photographs, in the manner of mid century Egyptian studio portraits, inside the museum of French nineteenth century art. A contrast that says a lot about how recent the idea is that photography must be faithful.
17 March to 20 September 2026
The decade when Paris discovered the arts of Africa and Oceania, and when Picasso and his circle first looked at them closely. The show reconstructs the dealers, collectors and misunderstandings of that encounter.
20 June to 20 September 2026
Urban art inside the Petit Palais, among nineteenth-century sculpture and the inner garden. The interest lies in the friction: works born on city walls placed in a building made for the 1900 World’s Fair.
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.
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 2026 to 10 January 2027
The Louvre’s Roman collection reread as a system of images: propaganda, family memory and furnishing all at once. If Rome is also on your list, this is the show that makes the rest legible.
19 June 2026 to 24 January 2027
Three Islamic empires set side by side through the Louvre’s collections, at the moment when they were watching and copying one another. The kind of show that dismantles the idea of separate national styles.
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.
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.
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.