Venue: Galerie des musées - Palais de l’Europe

In Menton, the Villa and Gardens of Les Colombières, designed by Ferdinand Bac, are closely connected to the poetic universe of Jean Cocteau, who was introduced to drawing by his friend. Drawing on the Séverin Wunderman collection from the Jean Cocteau Museum, the exhibition explores the central role of vegetation in the artist’s imagination. In Cocteau’s visual works as well as in his films, nature is never a mere backdrop: it becomes a strange, animated presence, revealing the mystery of the living world and the porous boundary between human beings and their environment.

This dreamlike dimension finds its fullest expression in Beauty and the Beast (1946), where the Beast’s domain is transformed into an enchanted garden inhabited by vegetal and organic forms in perpetual metamorphosis. In his drawings, Cocteau also populates nature with fantastical creatures and mythological figures, giving rise to a personal mythology that is poetic and sometimes tinged with humour. The exhibition unfolds across four thematic sections: floral and friendly correspondences, revisited myths, dreamlike bestiaries, and Southern gardens, where the Mediterranean becomes a figure of the living world.

The Belgian sculptor Arne Quinze invites Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos to join him in creating an extraordinary body of work, exploring the poetic, the surreal and the unexpected.

In the spirit of Jean Cocteau — whose legacy is deeply rooted in Villefranche-sur-Mer — the exhibition encourages visitors to rediscover surrealism and dreamlike thinking as essential lenses through which to reflect on the growing distance between contemporary culture and nature. A loss and a form of alienation that Quinze views as profoundly harmful.

Spreading throughout the Citadel, the exhibition unfolds through monumental outdoor installations alongside more intimate indoor environments. It offers Quinze and Vasconcelos a unique space for expression, allowing them to shape a singular and immersive narrative.

This exhibition retraces the deep, intense friendship between English painter Francis Bacon and American photographer Peter Beard over more than twenty years. It reveals a fruitful artistic dialogue in which the two men were both subjects and fertile sources of inspiration, constantly influencing one another, and explores their shared interests, especially in African wildlife.

Monstre Pente is a solo exhibition by artist Camille Llobet, presented at La Station as part of Automne de l’Image. This annual event at Le 109 brings together several festivals devoted to still and moving images, including the OVNi biennial, an international video art festival.

Through video and sound installations, Camille Llobet captures invisible effort, suspended movement and the body’s memory, from a musician’s gesture to the footsteps of a high-mountain guide. Monstre Pente will feature the artist’s most recent video works alongside her ongoing research.

The exhibition highlights a striking 20th century ballet, La Création du monde, created in 1923 by the Ballets Suédois, with the dancer Jean Börlin, the poet Blaise Cendrars, the composer Darius Milhaud and the painter Fernand Léger for the sets and costumes. Emblematic of Léger’s relationship to modernity in the 1920s, ballet is conceived as a synthesis of the arts inextricably linking painting, music, dance and poetry.

A leading figure of international Surrealism, Victor Brauner (1903–1966) occupies a singular place in art history, and his remarkable work is yet to be fully discovered. For the first time, the exhibition presents an outstanding private collection that covers the artist’s entire production from the 1920s to the 1960s, embracing painting, drawing, and sculpture.

In contrast, ten non-Western objets d’art, collected by Victor Brauner and loaned by the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etienne, are on display.

Venue: Villa Paloma, 56 boulevard du Jardin Exotique, Monaco