“Paris,” as Audrey Hepburn proclaimed in Sabrina, “is always a good idea”—and that’s especially true right now, with fine art and fine jewelry exhibitions lighting up the French capital this winter. Below, eight shows worth booking a trip for.
Rothko, revisited
The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s exquisite Rothko retrospective encompasses more than 115 works by the abstract American painter. Alongside his celebrated color-block canvases are several surprises, including the mysterious Self-Portrait (1936), for which the artist rendered his own goateed likeness in decisive brushstrokes, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses.
At the Fondation Louis Vuitton until April 2, 2024
Feminist art
Championing women has been Maria Grazia Chiuri’s fil rouge since her 2016 Dior debut, featuring a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words “We Should All Be Feminists”—a reference to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s seminal essay of the same name. It’s only fitting, then, that La Galerie Dior, the brand’s exhibition space, is now showcasing a selection of enchanting and thought-provoking works by female artists including Niki de Saint Phalle, Judy Chicago, and Claude Lalanne, among many others.
At La Galerie Dior until May 13, 2024
Stage luminaries, and the jewelry they wore
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For its first exhibition in its 18th-century headquarters at Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau, the Van Cleef Arpels-backed School of Jewelry Arts is joining forces with the legendary Comédie-Française to showcase jewelry worn onstage by talents ranging from Sarah Bernhardt—the first superstar in the world—to François-Joseph Talma, whose acting career Napoleon personally championed. Expect 120 props, works of art, documents, and more artfully displayed throughout the Constance Guisset-designed rooms when it opens later this year.
At Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau this winter
Picasso pensées
Fifty years after Picasso’s death, Paris has devoted two exhibitions to the provocative (and polarizing) Spanish master. Explore more than 2,000 never-before-seen sketches and prints from the artist’s workshops (along with pages from his personal diary) at the Centre Pompidou, then decamp to the Musée du Luxembourg for an exhibition that homes in on his relationship with American writer Gertrude Stein.
At the Centre Pompidou until January 15, 2024; at the Musée du Luxembourg until January 28, 2024
Double down on Chagall
Step inside Chagall’s canvases and stained-glass windows at Atelier des Lumières’s immersive “Chagall, Paris” before meandering down to the Centre Pompidou, where “Chagall At Work: Drawings, Ceramics and Sculptures (1945-1970)” is based around lesser-known works by the French-Russian visionary. Included in their number: preparatory sketches for the costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird and drawings commissioned for Paris’s Opéra Garnier in the early ’60s.
At 38 Rue Saint-Maur until January 7, 2024; at the Centre Pompidou until 26 February 2024
“We can only make our paintings speak”
Van Gogh spent the final months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, a period in which he painted no fewer than 70 works—approximately two canvases a day—including the famously crooked-looking The Church at Auvers. The Musée d’Orsay’s latest blockbuster exhibition gathers together many of Van Gogh’s masterpieces from his turn in the “city of Impressionists” (Cezanne and Picasso also spent time in Auvers), and highlights how urgently he felt the need to communicate through his work in the last year of his life.
At the Musée d’Orsay until February 4, 2024.