Recommended exhibitions in Paris museums you don't want to miss

Paris is the capital of French culture and some would even say that it is also the capital of human culture. As such, it has dozens of Museums Of all kinds and species, which provide an unimaginable cultural richness. Moreover, in almost every museum in Paris, alongside the permanent exhibitions, there are also temporary exhibitions that come to visit for a few months and then disappear. Therefore, even if you have already Have you visited Paris? You've visited all the important museums dozens of times, and there's always something new and exciting to see.

In this article, which is updated every few months, you will find the most interesting exhibitions (at least in my opinion) currently taking place in Paris. Since a significant portion of the exhibitions Required To order a ticket in advance, I have also added links to the website where you can order the ticket.

And one last thing: if you bought the Paris Museum CardPlease note that in most cases this ticket will not admit you to the changing exhibitions, so even if you bought it, you will still need to buy a separate ticket for the changing exhibition.

Let's start discovering what recommended exhibitions are currently on in the various museums in Paris.

Exhibitions in Paris that you shouldn't miss

My best friends inArtrentive who specialize in Hebrew art, culture, and lifestyle tours in Paris, recommended to me a number of exhibitions that you really shouldn't miss, if you happen to be in Paris while they are taking place.

לאונורה קרינגטון

The Musée du Luxembourg in Paris is currently hosting a major retrospective of Leonora Carrington’s “Vitruvian Woman” (a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man). This vast retrospective is not just an exhibition – it is a historical re-enactment of one of the most powerful, complex and fascinating women to ever wield a paintbrush.

Leonora Carrington was not destined to be an artist, but a well-to-do British lady. She was born into a wealthy aristocratic family, but at an early age she turned her back on the establishment. After being expelled from two Catholic schools for “misfits,” Carrington arrived in London, where she met Max Ernst. From here the story becomes a Hollywood movie: she was 20, he was 46, and married. They fled to the south of France, creating and living in a bubble of creativity and passion, until the Nazis invaded and Ernst was arrested.

Left alone, Carrington suffered a severe nervous breakdown, was hospitalized in a mental institution in Spain, treated with drugs that caused her to hallucinate, and escaped with amazing resourcefulness. She married a Mexican diplomat of convenience just to get a visa, and fled to Mexico City – where she created most of her iconic works. The 126 works in the exhibition present Carrington as a Vitruvian woman: a total artist who embodies a model of harmony and innovation.

The works in the exhibition are presented in a combination of chronological and thematic approaches, examining the central themes and ideas that have driven the artist’s work over the years. One of them is the way she transformed the domestic kitchen – a space traditionally perceived as “feminine” and closed – into a focus of alchemical power. For Carrington, cooking is not an everyday chore, but an almost magical ritual: a process in which raw ingredients change, merge and become something deeper and more spiritual. She doesn’t just cook soup, she forges destinies. Another central motif in her work is the hybrid creatures that inhabit her world – characters who are half human and half animal, or unusual combinations of plants, animals and fantastical figures.

These creatures are not just a creation of visual imagination – they embody Carrington's artistic and spiritual philosophy, in which absolute boundaries between nature and man, feminine and masculine, spiritual and physical do not exist, allowing her to ask questions about identity, power, gender, and the transition between states of reality and imagination.

Carrington weaves a rich mosaic of sources and influences into her work: Celtic folklore she absorbed as a child, colorful Mexican mythology, and even surprising echoes of Jewish Kabbalah and Buddhism. The culmination of this encounter comes in the painting “The Giantess” – an enormous female figure towering over a tiny landscape and holding a small, glowing egg in her hands. The egg, a recurring symbol in Carrington’s work, represents the universe at its birth and the infinite feminine potential to create life and meaning within a vast world.

The exhibition does a good job of showing how one woman managed to balance science with mysticism, the trauma of war with breathtaking beauty, and the closed world of men with complete creative freedom. Ultimately, Leonora Carrington taught us that a woman who dares to rebel against the established order will eventually become a legend.

Luxembourg Museum, Paris | Until 19.7.26

Renoir and love

It’s time to forget everything you know about Renoir – about kitsch, about over-sentimentality, and about the reputation of the “painter of happiness” that almost cost him his place in the pantheon of modernists. In the new exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “Renoir and Love: Joyful Modernity (1865–1885),” we are invited to delve into the decades that shaped not only Auguste Renoir’s career, but the way we perceive pleasure, intimacy, and urban life to this day. This is the first retrospective of its kind in Paris in four decades, and it comes just in time to remind us that even in the midst of fast-paced, sober modernity, there is always room for grace.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was a tireless documenter of French pleasure and Impressionist euphoria. He dedicated his life to capturing the fleeting moments of light and French society in the late 19th century. While his fellow artists sometimes focused on distant landscapes or urban alienation, Renoir chose the human figure, especially women, as his central subject, combining an Impressionist technique of short brushstrokes and soft textures with a deep admiration for the French Rococo painters.

His early works feature a rich, saturated palette and a bold use of light filtering through tree foliage, elements that have become his hallmark and earned him the unofficial title of “the painter of happiness.” The current exhibition seeks to shake off the “sentimental” image that has stuck to Renoir over the years and present him as a radically modern artist. The central theme here is love, not just as romantic, but as a unifying social force that creates equality and freedom.

At the center of the celebration is the immortal masterpiece “Bal du moulin de la Galette,” which is celebrating its 150th anniversary. It is a painting full of movement, the rustle of dresses, and intersecting glances, demonstrating how Renoir used light to unite the figures and create a sense of harmonious community.

The exhibition structure guides the visitor through the scenes of modern life that Renoir loved so much: from the bohemian encounters on the banks of the Seine in “La Grenouillère,” where water and sky merge in bold splashes of color, to the wondrous couple dynamics in “Dance in the Country.” It’s not just about visual beauty; the curators emphasize how Renoir posed an alternative to the rigid bourgeois morality of his time, painting a camaraderie, relaxed physical closeness, and informality that were very daring for his time. In addition, lesser-known works are on display that reveal a different Renoir: a punctual, virtuoso of drawing (shown in a parallel exhibition of works on paper), and an artist in constant dialogue with the classical French painting tradition.

A visit to the Musée d'Orsay this summer is more than a tour of an art exhibition; it is an invitation to view the world through a filter of compassion and beauty. Renoir reminds us that modernity does not have to be cold or alienating. It can be full of light, color, and a great love for life itself.

Musée d'Orsay, Paris | Until 19.7.26

Matisse

In the heart of the renovated Grand Palais – the iconic building whose glass ceiling is a work of art in itself – the exhibition “Matisse: 1941-1954” has opened, presenting part of the Pompidou Center collection that was temporarily moved here and is given a space befitting its graphic intensity.

Henri Matisse began his career as a young lawyer in northern France and only discovered painting at the age of 21, while recovering from surgery. His mother brought him a box of paints to relieve his boredom and Matisse felt at that moment that he was “in paradise.” This late start gave him a relentless drive – he always felt he had to catch up.

Professionally, Matisse was a quiet revolutionary. In 1905, he led the group of “Fauvists” (wild animals), where he dared to use color not to depict reality, but to depict emotion. In those years, the famous rivalry between him and Pablo Picasso was the driving force of modernism. While Picasso was fire – turbulent and changeable – Matisse was water. He sought “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” (luxury, calm and pleasure), and wanted his art to be for the viewer “a comfortable armchair in which to rest after a hard day’s work.”

Matisse's life was full of contrasts. He was a man of order and discipline, always wearing tailored suits in the studio, but deep down he burned with a passion for exotic colors and distant landscapes. His sojourns in Morocco and Tahiti in the 30s changed the way he perceived light and space, and it is memories of the rhythms of the South Pacific that resurface in his later paper cutouts.

In 1941, at the age of 71, the artist underwent invasive surgery that left him confined to a wheelchair and often to his bed. For many, it might have been a turning point, but for Matisse it was a “second life”: he took the wildness of color from his younger years, the sketchy precision he had developed as an adult, and the visual memories of his world travels and replaced the brush with scissors. The hand that had trembled when drawing found new confidence in cutting directly into the paper painted with intense gouache.

The exhibition at the Grand Palais opens with small, almost intimate spaces displaying the still lifes and models from the early 40s. These are dense, obsessive works that demonstrate Matisse’s attempts to decipher the light of the Riviera while outside the studio the world is burning. Indeed, while Matisse was creating, his wife Amélie and daughter Marguerite were arrested by the Gestapo for their activities in the French underground. The extreme stillness in Matisse’s paintings from that period is not naivety; it is an act of spiritual survival.

The rest of the exhibition is dedicated to the artist’s book “Jazz,” which includes 20 images that Matisse created from paper cutouts alongside handwritten texts – a work in which he refined the technique into a new visual language of color and rhythm. Here, Icarus and the red hearts plunging into a sea of ​​ultramarine blue appear, and here the turning point in his work becomes clear: Matisse stopped describing objects and began to express rhythms.

Another fascinating section is devoted to the work on the Rosary Chapel in Vence. The Chapel in Vence is Matisse’s “life’s work”: a total project in which he designed every detail – from the architecture to the priestly vestments – as a supreme expression of his mastery of light and color reflected through stained glass windows of paper cutouts. His connection to it was personal and deep: he created it as a gesture of appreciation for the nun who cared for him with devotion after the surgery that saved his life, and transformed the white space into a place where religion and art merge and provide spiritual transcendence.

The exhibition’s finale is a celebration of scale. The enormous paper cutouts, such as “The Parrot and the Mermaid,” take over the walls of the Grand Palais and illustrate how Matisse transformed collage into architecture. Legend has it that Matisse controlled the placement of the papers on the wall, directing his assistants with a long stick from his bed. More than seventy years after his death, the paradise that Matisse discovered in that box of paints still stands wide open, feeling like a comfortable, soothing armchair for the wind in the midst of the storm called the world.

Grand Palais, Paris | The exhibition is on display until 26.7.26.

Between fries in Brighton and selfies in the Louvre – Martin Paar arrives in Paris

Just last week, the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris opened “Global Warning,” a large-scale retrospective dedicated to the photography of Martin Parr, who recently passed away at the age of 73. While other photographers sought the sublime and the romantic, Parr aimed his lens precisely where others tried to hide. He was the uncrowned anthropologist of the middle class.

But to understand Faar, it’s worth knowing where he came from. He started out in the 70s – a period when British documentary photography was characterized by somber, black-and-white photography, often dealing with difficult social struggles. Faar made a spectacular “U-turn”: he abandoned black-and-white in favor of saturated, almost violent colors. He used Agfa film, which emphasized shades of yellow and blue, which gave his photographs the look of a cheap postcard or a 50s advertisement. His breakthrough in 1986 came through a series of photographs documenting the resort town of New Brighton. Instead of showing luxury vacations, he showed families eating hot dogs next to overflowing garbage cans. It was shocking, pioneering and brilliant. In 1994 he was accepted into the world’s most prestigious photography agency, Magnum. But the incident did not go down well with some of the agency's veterans, who saw him as a "voyeur" who made fun of his subjects. Eventually, he became the agency's president—marking the final triumph of his approach.

The exhibition at the “Je des Pommes” is divided into thematic spaces, with the curator choosing to place the early works against the later ones to show the evolution of Paar. It is a visual indictment, delivered with a lot of humor. Paar warns that the world around us is becoming synthetic: plastic is everywhere – in beach chairs, in cutlery and clothes – and the intense color emphasizes the unnaturalness of the modern environment. Paar’s choice to engage with leisure culture is intended to present a uniform global culture – in Dubai or Brighton – as well as the class gaps; and the means to do this is to focus on the small details of consumption: the way we eat, buy and store objects. Paar shot in painfully saturated colors and powerful flash, revealing every drop of oil in a soggy plate of chips, every crumb in a cake that was too pink, and every drop of sweat dripping from tourists on the beach. He dealt with hackneyed British clichés and documented the selfie craze and the (sometimes ridiculous) effort put into capturing the perfect memory. All of these became simultaneously repulsive and seductive abstractions under his lens.

This is an exhibition that is much more than a tribute to the memory of a great artist; it is a polished mirror held up to our global face – funny, painful and fascinating. Paar, in his polished and nonchalant way, reminds us that true beauty lies in the unfiltered truth, and he does so without preaching for a moment, but with a small, mischievous smile at the corner of his mouth that invites us to look, to recognize ourselves and to laugh.

And a word about the hostel: If the museum’s name sounds like something to do with an ancient ball game, you’re right. The museum is located in the northwest corner of the Tuileries Gardens, in a building originally built in 1861 for the game of “Je de pomme” – the ancestor of modern tennis. For years it served as a hostel for the great Impressionist works (before they moved to their permanent home at the Musée d’Orsay), but since the 90s it has established itself as the leading international center in Paris for photography and visual media. When the exhibition is over, head out to the museum’s terrace. The view from there over classical Paris, after experiencing Paar’s cynical view of the world, will give you a whole new perspective on the concept of “beauty.”

Museum of the Poems | Until 24.5.26

Other exhibitions currently taking place in Paris

If these recommendations weren't enough for you and you are looking for more interesting exhibitions, you are welcome to take a look below and discover more exhibitions currently taking place in Paris.