No need to paint a picture for yourself: in January, morale is often as gloomy as a Pierre Soulages painting. The pot (of paint) that we have is that this new year 2025 also brings a host of good exhibitions capable of putting a little neon in our hearts. Among them, the painting retrospectives particularly shine with, in single file: a contemporary English master, a French pioneer, the celebration of “degenerate Art” and a focus on artistic blur. Get your brushes!
David Hockney
Next year, the Louis Vuitton Foundation will have a swimming pool! Eight years (already) after the resounding success of the exhibition at the Center Pompidou, it is the turn of the institution located in the Bois de Boulogne to celebrate in length and breadth the work of the English artist David Hockney with an exhibition which we can confirm will be held from Wednesday April 9 to Monday September 1, 2025. Regarding the content, according to Beaux-Arts Magazinethe retrospective should focus on the last twenty-five years of Hockney’s creation. The exhibition should therefore present both paintings and digital creations, with a particular emphasis on Normandy – where he has resided since 2019 – but also works evoking the Grand Canyon or Yorkshire. And for cult and chlorine aficionados, know that the canvases A Bigger Splash et Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)painted in 1967 and 1972 respectively, will both be present. Happy diving!
When ? From Wednesday April 9 to Monday September 1, 2025.
Or ? Louis Vuitton Foundation, 8 avenue du Mahatma-Gandhi, Paris 16th.
Suzanne Valadon
Suzanne Valadon back in the center – of Paris and museum attention. Although her studio-apartment was opened to the public in 2014 in the Montmartre museum, it has been more than fifty years – it was in 1967 – since Suzanne Valadon’s work had been the subject of a major exhibition. . An incongruity erased by the Center Pompidou which returns from January 15 to May 26, 2025 on its journey in the artistic sphere of the – approximately – first half of the 20th century. Through 200 works – paintings and drawings – some of which have been little or not shown, Beaubourg will tell how Valadon became a key figure in the empowerment of women artists, between her obstinacy in wanting to represent reality at all costs during the era of Cubism and beginner abstract art, and its representation (pioneering by a woman) of the male nude in large format. An exhibition which will talk about Parisian Bohemia – Valadon was an emblem of the Montmartre musette – and in which photos and manuscripts as well as paintings by contemporary women artists will be presented.
When ? from January 15 to May 26, 2025
Or ? Center Pompidou, rue Saint-Martin, Paris 4th.
In the blur, another vision of art from 1945 to the present day
For the first time, the Orangerie takes stock of the blur. Starting from his aesthetic roots (Monet, his eye disease and his Water lilies nebulous), this thematic exhibition brings together pictorial works, videos, photographs and installations to show the importance of the vague, the confused, the uncertain in contemporary creation. By creating a welcome distance from reality, vagueness allows reinterpretations of a world where certainties are eroding.
When ? from April 30 to August 18, 2025
Or ? Orangery Museum, Tuileries Garden, Paris 1st.
“Degenerate” Art: the trial of modern art under Nazism
From 1930, the Nazi party attacked modern art. Considering that this avant-garde undermined their fantasy of a superior, triumphant and martial German nation, the Nazis had Jewish and/or communist artists banned and their “impure” works seized. The list of the persecuted includes the greatest names of the 20th century: Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and of course Pablo Picasso. Some 700 confiscated works are infamously presented in an exhibition entitled Degenerate art in Germany from 1937 to 1941, where they were compared to drawings of mentally ill people. The Picasso Museum places this far-right propaganda against modern art in context for the first time. To prevent the story from stuttering?
When ? from February 18 to May 25, 2025
Or ? Picasso museum, 5 Rue de Thorigny, Paris 3rd.
