August Exhibitions

August Exhibitions

August is generally a very quiet month in Paris.  French people take their vacation seriously and most Parisians are away for the good part of the month of August, so you will find the city more relaxed. Because of that, a lot fo the museum no longer have exhibitions on and some restaurants are also closed.

We have gathered a few art and photo exhibitions that are still happening as well as a few shows.

A call to Action by Mr. curated by Pharrell Williams
From July 10 to September 23
Musée Guimet

Japanese artist Mr has a new exhibition called “A Call To Action” in the fourth floor rotunda of the Guimet Museum, curated by Pharrell Williams.

Back side – Dos à la modeBack side – Dos à la mode
Musée Bourdelle
From July 5 to November 17

For this beautiful presentation devoted to backs in fashion the museum unveils over 100 silhouettes and accessories from the 18th century to nowadays for an ode to sensuality!

Budhha The Golden Legend
Musée Guimet
From June 19 to November 4

For the first time in France an exhibition event is dedicated to the life of the Buddha and the spread of Buddhism in Asia. The exhibition highlights the wealth of iconographic and stylistic traditions relating to the representation of the exemplary and edifying life of the founder of Buddhism.

Calder Picasso
Musée Picasso
From February 19 to August 25

The exhibition will comprise approximately 120 works that explore how these two artists, each in his own very different ways, engaged with the void and all that it implies about a world where mass is unsettled by the absence of mass and where, at the center of anything and everything, what we discover is a vacuum.

The collection of the Fondation A vision for painting
Fondation Louis Vuitton
From February 20 to August 26

The Fondation Louis Vuitton displays a new selection of 70 works from the collection and gathers 23 international artists from the 1960s to the present day around one main theme : painting. This takes many forms: figurative or abstract, expressive or distanced. Relief pieces are contrasted with each other. Rooms devoted to Joan Mitchell, Alex Katz, Gerhard Richter, Ettore Spalletti, Yayoi Kusama and Jesús Rafael Soto alternate with thematic collections on abstraction, space and colour. The hanging shows the ways in which painting never ceases to reinvent itself and transgress its own rules, drawing on current techniques for reproduction.

Les drôles de  Petites Bêtes d’Anton Krings
Musée des Arts Décoratifs
From April 11 to September 8

MAD presents an exhibition dedicated to the series Les Drôles de Petites Bêtes created by Antoon Krings, a major artist-illustrator of children’s literature. It will bring together over 500 paintings, art objects, drawings and prints originating from both the museum’s collections and the artist’s personal collection, as well as loans from private individuals and cultural institutions.

The exhibition will be organized around five central themes: flora and fauna, the garden, the Arts & Crafts Movement, animals in literature and the audio-visual adaptation of the world of Les Drôles de Petites Bêtes.

Fil Noir
Musée Européenne de la Photographie
From June 5 to August 25

In parallel with the Henry Wessel exhibition, “Fil Noir” suggests a dialogue between major works by photographers including Diane Arbus and Helmut Newton selected from the MEP collection inspired by the film noir genre.

Henry Wessel 
Musée Européenne de la Photographie
From June 5 to August 25

A celebrated photographer for five decades, Henry Wessel was never tired of returning to his archive of contact sheets, revisiting his work, and giving new perspectives to photographs taken decades apart. For Wessel, an avid fan of film noir and detective fiction, the real or imagined visual associations that he saw in his work suggested endless starting points for potential narratives, intensifying elements of the uncanny often already present in his scenes of everyday life.

Bernard Frize – Without Remorse
Centre Georges Pompidou
From May 29 to August 26

With some sixty artworks presenting the multiple facets of his work, from his beginnings in 1977 up until his most recent creations, the «Bernard Frize. Without remorse» exhibition proposes a themed itinerary to be taken as the visitor wishes, without directions or hierarchy, breaking with the serial approach for which the artist is known: With unreason, without effort, with system, without system, with mastery, without stopping.

Ernest Mancoba
Centre Georges Pompidou
From June 26 to September 23

An artist, writer and thinker, Ernest Mancoba lived through the whole of the 20th century. For the first time in France, this exhibition showcases this path erased by racism. Both thematic and chronological, the exhibition retraces Mancoba's deepest concerns; the importance of appealing to the subconscious and formulating the unsaid; the need to return to the spiritual root of society and a faith in the materialistic, Marxist-like transformation of society.

 

Takesada Matsutani
Centre Georges Pompidou
From June 26 to September 23

Sixty years in the career of Takesada Matsutani (born in Osaka, Japan in 1937, installed in Paris since 1966), from the late 1950s to the present day.
Constantly experimenting with organic matter and its links to the spiritual, Matsutani has never ceased to seek out his "internal image".

 

Sally Mann
Jeu de Paume
From June 18 to September 22

For more than forty years, Sally Mann (born 1951) has been taking hauntingly beautiful experimental photographs that explore the essential themes of existence: memory, desire, mortality, family, and nature's overwhelming indifference towards mankind. What gives unity to this vast corpus of portraits, still lifes, landscapes and miscellaneous studies is that it is the product of one place, the southern United States.

 

Berthe Morisot
Musée d’Orsay
Fom June 18 to September 22

A leading Impressionist figure, Berthe Morisot remains to this day less well-known than her friends Monet, Degas and Renoir. Yet she was immediately recognised as one of the group’s most innovative artists.
The exhibition traces the exceptional career of a painter who, at odds with the practices on her time and her circle, became a key figure of the Parisian avant-garde movement in the late 1860s up until her untimely death in 1895.

 

Wright Morris
Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson
From June 18 to september 29

The American Wright Morris (1910-1998) adopted an experimental approach to photography, seeking very early to “capture the essence of what is visible”. For the first time in France, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is offering a chance to share his vision both photographic and literary of America.

 

Nous les arbres
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain
From July 12 to November 10

Bringing together a community of artists, botanists, and philosophers, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain echoes the latest scientific research that sheds new light on trees. Organized around several large ensembles of works, the exhibition Trees gives voice to numerous figures who, through their aesthetic or scientific journey, have developed a strong, intimate link with trees, thereby revealing the beauty and biological wealth of these great protagonists of the living world, threatened today with large-scale deforestation.

 

Paris Romantique 1815-1848
Petit Palais
From May 22 to September 15

This large-scale exhibition plunges us into the effervescence of Paris in the romantic era. After Paris 1900: La Ville Spectacle, the Petit Palais is presenting Romantic Paris, a further episode in its overview of the great periods that have shaped the city’s identity. This is both an exhibition and a cultural event : a sweeping panorama of the French capital during the Romantic years from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the revolution of 1848.

Ocean
Grande Galerie de l’Evolution
From April 3rd to January 5

The Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle devotes an exhibition to Oceans and especially the uncommon biodiversities we can find there, far from the shore and the human presence. 
 

Van Gogh Starry Night
Atelier des Lumières
From February 22 to December 31

The new digital exhibition in the Atelier des Lumières immerses visitors in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), a genius who was not recognized during his lifetime and who transformed painting. Projected on all the surface of the Atelier, this new visual and musical production retraces the intense life of the artist, who, during the last ten years of his life, painted more than 2,000 pictures, which are now in collections around the world.

Tuntakhamun : Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh
Grande Halle de la Villette
From March 23 to September 22

Fifty years after “the exhibition of the century” – which had gathered more than 1.2 million visitors in 1967 in Paris – it is a unique opportunity to rediscover the history of the most famous of the Pharaohs before the permanent installation of the artifacts within the new Egyptian Grand Museum currently under construction. Presented by the Ministry of Egyptian Antiquities at the Grande Halle de la Villette, this immersive exhibition will unveil more than 150 original objects from the tomb. More than 50 pieces from this collection will travel for the first and last time out of Egypt. Come discover many personal belongings of the young sovereign who accompanied him in the two worlds that are life and death.

 

Architect’s Furniture 1960 à 2020
Cité de l’Architecture
From May 29 to September 30

Through the furniture creations of the greatest names in architecture of the past sixty years, this exhibition sets out to discover how architects fit into the decorative arts with the design of furniture, objects and luminaires.

Felix Fénéon and non western arts
Musée du Quai Branly
From May 28 to September 28

tribute to Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), an important figure in the artistic world in the late 19th and early 20th century. Anarchist, art critic, editor, gallery director and collector, Fénéon espoused an open-minded vision of creation at a time when art was on the verge of the shift to modernity and strove for the recognition of non-western arts.

The Night at les Invalides
Hotel Nationale des Invalides
From July 12th to August 30th
Come travel across 3000 years of stories in this timeless place. From the Gallic people to Louis XIV, from Napoléon to the military leaders, meet those who have shaped Paris.  A technological and artistic achievement : 45 minutes of computer graphics splashed across recently restored stone frontage of Hôtel national des Invalides, exceptionally high- quality images thanks to 4K laser projectors newest generation. A huge multimedia sound and light show that makes the story come to life!

Visit the Church of the Dome 
Take the time to extend the experience, during a night-time promenade lit by 1000 candles, an amazing and unique experience leading to encounters with Vauban, Lyautey and Foch, l’Aiglon and many others around the tomb of Napoleon.