Category: Exhibitions

This exhibition traces the history of the representation of reality in the arts and seeks to pay tribute to a little-known facet of the Museum’s collections, while shining a light on Jules and Paul Marmottan’s penchant for this pictorial genre. [...]

Over the centuries, trompe-l’oeil has been used in various media and has proven to be multifaceted. Not only does it play with the viewer’s gaze, but it is a nod to the potential traps set by our own perceptions. If certain themes of trompe l’oeil are well-known—vanities, hunting trophies, letter holders or racks, and grisailles—other aspects will be explored in this exhibition, such as the decorative variations on furniture, pottery, etc., and even the political significance of this pictorial genre from the revolutionary period up to the modern and contemporary day.

More than eighty key works ranging from the 16th to the 21st century, coming from both private and public collections in Europe and the United States (National Gallery of Art in Washington, Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, the Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, the Château de Fontainebleau, the Louvre, the Musée de l’Armée, Musée national de la Céramique in Sèvres, the Fondation Custodia, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, etc.) will be on display, allowing visitors to understand the formal evolution of the trompe l’oeil genre.

In the exhibition, SMK will juxtapose its own extensive collection of historical casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures with brand new, high-quality 3D-cast replicas. This way, you can experience the majority of Michelangelo’s sculptures in one place – something that would be impossible with the originals, which are never moved. You will also be able to see the largest selection of Michelangelo’s original drawings, letters, and sculpture models ever displayed in Denmark.

Join us as SMK unfolds Michelangelo’s life and art through close studies of his sculptures and focuses on the complex relationship between original and reproduction in the digital age.

Suzanne Valadon had not been the subject of a monograph since the one devoted to her by the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1967. Presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2023 (“Suzanne Valadon. A World of Her Own”), then at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes (2024) and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (2024), the tribute to this ostensibly modern artist, free of the conventions of her time, continues at the Centre Pompidou in 2025, enhanced by new loans and new archives.

The exhibition showcases this exceptional figure and highlights her pioneering, but often underestimated, role in the birth of artistic modernity. It reveals the great freedom of this artist, who did not really adhere to any particular movement, except perhaps her own. The exhibition of almost 200 works draws on a wealth of national collections, in particular the largest, that of the Centre Pompidou, but also from the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie.

The installation highlights picture frames as works of art in their own right, exploring their shifting forms and functions from the altar-like frames of the Renaissance to the experimental, artist-designed frames of the late 1800s. It will include 13 frames from the Johnson Collection, which, together, express the craftsmanship and variety of European frames through the centuries.

For the first time, the Musée du Louvre is dedicating an exhibition to Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century. The exhibition is the product of two ‘Cimabue-centric’ events of great importance for the museum: the restoration of the Maestà and the acquisition of a heretofore-unseen Cimabue panel, rediscovered in France in 2019 and listed as a French National Treasure: Christ Mocked.

These two paintings, whose restoration was completed in 2024, provide the starting point for this exhibition, which, by bringing together some forty works, aims to illuminate the extraordinary richness and undeniable innovation of Cimabue’s art. Cimabue was one of the first to open Western painting to naturalism, seeking to represent the world, objects and bodies as they truly existed. With him, the conventions of representation inherited from Eastern art, so highly valued until this period, gave way to an inventive art of painting seeking to evoke a three-dimensional space, bodies in volume shaped by subtle shading, articulated limbs, natural postures and human emotions.

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores the intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in late 19th-century France. Beginning with the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris and the resultant food crisis and continuing through the 1890s, Farm to Table showcases the work of artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, who captured the nation’s unique relationship with food, from production to preparation and consumption.

Featuring approximately 50 paintings and sculptures, the exhibition’s portrayals of farmers in fields and gardens, bustling urban markets, and chefs and diners in the age of grand banquets and a burgeoning café scene underscores connections between urban and rural life while capturing changing notions of gender, labor, and class.

Explore the opulence and glamour of the Edwardian age – the period between the Victorian era and the First World War.

Visitors will learn about the lives and tastes of two of Britain’s most fashionable royal couples – King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and King George V and Queen Mary – from their family lives and personal collecting to their glittering social circles and spectacular royal events.

More than 300 objects from the Royal Collection will be on display – almost half for the first time – including works by the most renowned contemporary artists of the period, including Carl Fabergé, Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Laurits Tuxen, John Singer Sargent and William Morris.

In order to mark the 400-year anniversary of the birth of Carlo Maratti (Camerano 1625 – Rome 1713) and the release of a critical catalogue of his works, the exhibition “Carlo Maratti and Portraiture: Popes and Princes of the Roman Baroque” by Simonetta Prosperi, Valenti Rodinò and Yuri Primarosa, showcases a little-known feature of this Marche artist’s production: his portraiture of the Roman nobility.

Although today he is mainly known for his paintings of religious subjects and his decoration of Roman churches, Maratti was famous throughout Europe for his portraiture. His studio rose to prominence also thanks to his drawn and painted effigies, securing Maratti’s place as a trendsetter of taste on the Roman art scene for over half a century.

Organised by the future Lusail Museum in collaboration with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme features nearly 400 works, drawing extensively from the future Lusail Museum’s unparalleled collection of Orientalist art, including European depictions of the MENASA region spanning the 16th through 19th centuries. It also includes significant loans from Qatar Museums’ General Collections and prestigious institutions worldwide such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia. New works commissioned from artists including Babi Badalov (b. 1959, Azerbaijan) and Nadia Kaabi-Linke (b. 1978, Tunisia) will reinterpret Gérôme for the 21st century.

One of the most famous and commercially successful European artists of the 19th century, Gérôme was heralded in his own time as a history painter and a visual storyteller, bringing the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome to life. Yet it was as a chronicler of the modern cultures and peoples of North Africa and the Middle East that he made his greatest impact. Travelling repeatedly to Egypt and Turkey and making many other stops in the region between 1855 and 1880, Gérôme created some of Orientalism’s most enduring images and themes. His depictions, at once fancifully imaginative and faithfully naturalistic, played a major role in defining the MENA world for Europe, America and Britain. Since 1978, his work has been the subject of critical scrutiny by art historians including Linda Nochlin, who famously read his paintings as part of a larger and more disturbing colonial plan. Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme presents new and more wide-ranging interpretations of the artist, without ignoring the contributions of these scholars, or of Edward Said’s groundbreaking book, Orientalism.

In recent years, renewed interest in the artist has led to a fresh look at the multiple in the painter's studio. While the contemporary view of artistic creation most often leads to a pyramidal vision centered on an original and copies, the reality is very different. Reni's main biographer, Malvasia, reports that the painter's studio could gather up to 60 or even 200 people from all over Europe. The exhibition in Orléans presents the workings of the studio in all its richness and multiplicity, with several paintings studied in a new light thanks to reflections on the painter's production and restorations. An important section of the presentation will be devoted to David Contemplating the Head of Goliath by Reni and his collaborators, exploring the birth, development and legacy of a composition that was one of the most influential in 17th-century Western European art .

Approximately ten years separate the two paintings, which are two different interpretations of the so-called "Madonna of the Milk", a highly successful iconography that was created to tangibly visualise Mary's role as the mother of Christ. 

Gentileschi's painting bears witness to the novelty of Caravaggio's revolution and of painting "from nature", which transforms the sacred theme into an intimate, everyday moment. [...]

Van Dyck, on the other hand, following in the footsteps of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, reinterprets the theme with a strong symbolic density, placing it in the context of the Nativity. [...]

The exhibition seeks to show how the dynamic interrelationship between art and life not only inspired Velázquez’s dazzling and enigmatic portrait of Mariana but also shaped the worldview of the queen as she fashioned her new political role. Exhibited on the West Coast for the very first time, Velázquez’s monumental image will be installed alongside an international group of artists whose works were collected by the Habsburg court. Paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Guido Reni and Peter Paul Rubens, all highlights of the Norton Simon Museum’s collections, evoke Mariana’s quotidian access to remarkable works of art, and they invite comparisons between Velázquez and artists he knew and admired. Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen will be displayed in proximity to the Museum’s paintings by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán, offering a rare opportunity to experience this essential quartet of 17th-century Spanish painters under one roof.

Recognized for her sophisticated approach to color, composition, and technique, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet (1865–1947) was part of a successful network of artists in Giverny, Rouen, and Paris during the first half of the twentieth century, although she is most often recognized for her relation to Claude Monet, her stepfather and one of France’s most famous painters. Having come of age at the center of the Impressionist movement, Hoschedé-Monet grew up surrounded by the modern masterpieces in the collection of her father, Ernest Hoschedé, who was a patron of such renowned artists as Édouard Manet, Monet, and Auguste Renoir. Her family’s move to Giverny in 1883 prompted her to take up painting in earnest. With Monet as her mentor, she developed a distinct style that favored carefully framed points of view and landscapes painted en plein air. As the first monographic exhibition of her work in the United States, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light brings together over forty paintings which attest to Hoschedé-Monet’s unique vision and ambitions as an artist in her own right. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue, with contributions by Nicolas Bondenet, Nancy Mowll Mathews, Galina Olmsted, Haley Pierce, and Philippe Piguet, constitute a definitive account of Hoschedé-Monet’s life and art.

The Wadsworth Atheneum’s rich collection of European drawings, watercolors, and pastels is little-known and rarely seen. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the museum has acquired by purchase and gift a diverse group of nearly 1,250 European drawings of impressive quality. Paper, Color, Line showcases about sixty to seventy highlights on view for the first time in decades. This long overdue exhibition provides a unique survey of artists engaging with the medium over a span of more than five hundred years.

The museum’s holdings are particularly strong in works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Renowned drawings by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec will be included in this exhibition, as well as highlights by Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. The collection is additionally noted for its theatrical designs, particularly its material linked with the Ballets Russes, which encompasses sheets by Pablo Picasso, Léon Bakst, and Natalia Gontcharova. Significant drawings from the Renaissance to the Rococo by artists such as Giorgio Vasari, Carlo Maratti, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze emphasize the timeless appeal of the medium and will complement the overview.