The top exhibitions to catch in France in 2025

From 25 September 2024 to 20 January 2025

From Homer to Marc Chagall, via Jacques-Louis David, Victor Hugo and Gustave Courbet, the question of exile - in all its forms - has inspired artists from the earliest days of art history right up to the present day. Through 200 works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs and literary works, this autumn's exhibition at the Musée du Louvre-Lens explores the close links between the various stages of exile (departure, uprooting, displacement, welcoming, etc.) and artistic creation, including contemporary art.

Visit the Musée du Louvre-Lens, in Hauts-de-France 

From 4 October 2024 to 9 March 2025

This autumn, the Centre de création contemporaine Olivier Debré invites visitors to immerse themselves in the world of Ana Vidigal, a leading figure in contemporary Portuguese painting. Recent and previously unpublished works reveal the artist's favourite themes: her own childhood, the recent history of Portugal and its democratic aspirations, individual and collective memory...

Visit the Centre de création contemporaine Olivier Debré in Tours, in the Loire Valley. 

From 18 October 2024 to 17 February 2025

This autumn, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille is offering an exhibition enhanced by digital devices, rediscovering 40 drawings by the painter Raphael. It's a chance to immerse yourself in the work of the genius of the Italian Renaissance. Digital devices allow visitors to admire the monumental frescoes in the Signatura Chamber in the Vatican Palace.

Visit the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, Hauts-de-France 

From 25 October 2024 to 23 February 2025

Genuine giants of the seas, ocean liners fascinated the imagination of painters, photographers, poster artists and film-makers in the first half of the 20th century. Between uprooting, hopes for a better life and unusual encounters, the exhibition at the Musée d'Arts de Nantes looks at the passengers on these floating monuments through a selection of works by avant-garde artists.

Visit the Musée d'arts de Nantes, in the Pays de la Loire region of France

From 16 November 2024 to 16 February 2025

Courbet, Delacroix, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Cross... the greatest Impressionist painters are in the limelight this autumn at the André Malraux Museum of Modern Art in Le Havre. Over 200 works bequeathed just 20 years ago by Hélène Senn-Foulds, granddaughter of the famous art patron Olivier Senn, are on show.

Visit the André Malraux Museum of Modern Art in Le Havre, Normandy

From 4 December 2024 to 12 May 2025 

In 2025, Marseille's Mucem is offering an immersion into the world of the fairground arts. Clowns, clowns, acrobats, the director Macha Makeïeff imagines a ring where Russian ballets and an acrobat by Niki de Saint Phalle rub shoulders with works by Miquel Barceló, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Claude Cahun, Marc Chagall, Charlie Chaplin, Colette... The exhibition includes exceptional loans from the Musée d'Orsay, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée Picasso.

Visit the Mucem in Marseille, Provence

From 31 January 2025 to 4 January 2026

The celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism continue in 2025 in the heart of Provence with the immersive exhibition ‘Monet: Impression, rising sun’ devoted to one of the masters of this pictorial movement. From Paris train stations to the Normandy coast, by way of the banks of the Seine and his garden at Giverny, the landscapes that inspired Claude Monet flash across the walls of the Carrières des Lumières, the digital art centre in Les Baux-de-Provence. With its monumental projections, you can rediscover some of the artist's greatest masterpieces and the incredible transcription of light in all its variations.

The second digital creation - ‘Le douanier Rousseau, au pays des rêves’ - projected at the Carrières de Lumières is a tribute to the painter Henri Rousseau, a major figure in naive art in France.

Visit the Carrières de Lumières in Les Baux-de-Provence 

From 21 February 2025

In 2025, Les Bassins des Lumières offers a colourful plunge into the heart of ancient Egypt. The temples of Luxor and Abu Simbel, the tombs of Tutankhamen and Nefertari in the Valley of the Kings and Queens, the monumental sculptures of the pharaohs, the pyramids... The façades of the digital art centre in Bordeaux reveal the sumptuous landscapes and architectural treasures of Egyptian civilisation in this new immersive exhibition.

A second immersive exhibition takes visitors on a colourful journey in the footsteps of nineteenth-century Orientalist painters, starting with the works of Delacroix before moving on to the studios of Ingres, Gérôme and Constant. A stroll through narrow streets, patios, souks of Oriental cities, deserts and encounters with wild animals. Art lovers will then enter the harems imagined by Orientalist artists, complete with bathing girls. The visit culminates in a projection of La Grande Odalisque, Ingres' masterpiece.

Visit the Bassins des Lumières in Bordeaux

From 28 June to 12 October 2025

As part of the ‘Cézanne 2025’ event organised by several museums in Aix-en-Provence, the Musée Granet is staging a major international exhibition dedicated to the painter Paul Cézanne, a native of the region and considered to be the father of modernism. A number of works on loan from major national and international museums, including The Card Players, invite visitors to (re)discover a selection of paintings and drawings produced by Cézanne between 1860 and 1899 in the bastide town of Jas de Bouffan.

Visit the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence 

Suzanne Valadon at the Centre Pompidou, Pablo Picasso at the Atelier des Lumières, Niki de Saint Phalle at the Grand Palais, Pierre Bonnard at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and David Hockney at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Discover our selection of not-to-be-missed exhibitions in Paris museums and digital art centres.