Following its presentation at the Centre Pompidou in 2023–2024, the exceptional donation made by Marc Chagall’s granddaughters, Meret and Bella Meyer — entered into the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne in 2022-2023 — is exhibited at the Musée national Marc Chagall in 2026.

The 141 donated works bear witness to the richness and diversity of Marc Chagall’s creative output. The ensemble brings together, on the one hand, forty-one sketches and maquettes produced for the ceiling of the Opéra de Paris, inaugurated in 1964. On the other hand, it includes sixty-four sketches for stage curtains and costumes designed for the ballet The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, revived by the Ballet Theatre of New York in 1945 with choreography by Adolph Bolm. Finally, twelve ceramics and sculptures, along with twenty-four collages, reveal the artist’s constant curiosity for new techniques and materials, particularly evident between the 1950s and the 1970s.

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.

As part of La Station's 30th anniversary celebrations, this exhibition brings together those who have made – and continue to make – La Station's history, around an ambivalent, elusive figure: the trickster. Mischievous, cunning or disruptive, he/she blurs boundaries, twists narratives and bends the rules.

A collective portrait of a mischievous, free, and ever-changing Station, the works of 30 artists pay tribute to joyful subversion.

The Matisse Museum and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum dedicate a major exhibition to two leading creative figures who constantly reimagined the 20th century, exploring its sources and challenging its conventions in order to break down the boundaries between the ‘fine arts’ and the ‘applied arts’. The artistic resonance between Henri Matisse and Yves Saint Laurent is striking: a shared system of references, explorations of the body, matter, colour, light and pattern, and an approach to drawing as a source of exploration.

Bringing together 160 works – haute couture garments, traditional folk costumes, paintings, drawings, textiles, accessories, and archival documents – the exhibition highlights the unity of the bonds that the couturier forged with the work of Henri Matisse.

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.