If you’re attending Art Basel Paris this year, you may find it hard to leave its splendid new showcase — the revamped Grand Palais. But Paris has a copious buffet of offerings in its museums and art foundations that are definitely worth your time. Here are a few choice picks:
Gustave Caillebotte
You may or may not recognize the name, but Gustave Caillebotte was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. He painted “A Boating Party,” a close-up of a rower in a top hat, which the Musée d’Orsay recently acquired (with the support of LVMH).
You can see that and other Caillebotte masterpieces — such as “The Floor Scrapers” — in an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay marking the 130th anniversary of his death. “Caillebotte: Painting Men” features 70 works that reveal him as an artist who spent his time with other bachelors and mainly painted male figures.
He also took up philanthropy early on: At 28, he bequeathed his art collection to the French state. So at his death (18 years later), France received 38 paintings and pastels, including some of Orsay’s present-day gems such as Renoir’s “Ball at the Moulin de la Galette” and Manet’s “The Balcony.” All 38 works will be hung together in a single space of the show.
The show travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago next year.
Surrealism
A century ago, the French poet and critic André Breton established one of art history’s most lastingly significant movements with his “Surrealist Manifesto.” The Pompidou Center is celebrating the centenary with a sweeping multidisciplinary exhibition. The show opens with a circular chamber (or “drum”) containing the original manuscript of that manifesto, accompanied by readouts in an artificial intelligence-generated replica of Breton’s voice.
Expect to see major works by the usual suspects — Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró — but also by the long-overlooked women who played a significant role in the Surrealist movement, such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dora Maar and Dorothea Tanning.
The show subsequently travels to Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia.
Arte Povera
A short walk from the Pompidou, at the Bourse de Commerce (the French billionaire Francois Pinault’s private art foundation), another major 20th-century art movement is in the spotlight: “Arte Povera,” with some 250 works presented by the prominent curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
Artists of the Arte Povera movement, which originated in Italy, made art out of the ordinary: natural materials (earth, water, coal, trees) and urban leftovers (steel plates, lead ingots, rope, lightbulbs, wooden beams). The Bourse de Commerce’s circular rotunda — once the trading floor of Paris’s commodities exchange — will have a work by each of the 13 artists in the show, including the first real-life tree that the artist Giuseppe Penone turned into a sculpture, and the first igloo (made of everyday materials, not ice) produced by Mario Merz. Plenty of other works by the artists are on show in the surrounding galleries.
For a separate set of works by Arte Povera’s superstars — including Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto — head to a parallel show at the Paris branch of Italy’s Tornabuoni Art gallery, which specializes in postwar Italian art.
Martine Syms
Martine Syms was just 29 when she got a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; she was profiled in The New Yorker the same year. The Los Angeles-born artist is now getting her first retrospective at Lafayette Anticipations, the edgy contemporary-art foundation run by the Galeries Lafayette group.
Syms’s works are an exploration of society’s expectations of Black women and Black artists in particular. The show’s title — “Total” — has multiple meanings: it refers to the notion of the retrospective, to her multidisciplinary practice and to receipts from shops.
Why shops? Because that’s how the artist got her introduction to the art world: a shop called Ooga Booga in Los Angeles where she worked when she was 16, selling books but also objects made by artists.
But she prefers not to over-intellectualize things. “There’s always a level of seriousness read into a lot of things that I’m doing that I don’t necessarily connect with,” she told The New York Times in a 2022 interview.
Miu Miu exhibition
The name Miuccia Prada sends fashionistas into a state of feverish excitement. Prada is also an important international collector and patron of contemporary art, with art foundations in Milan and Venice that program scholarly but also talked-about exhibitions.
Miu Miu (Prada’s other brand) has teamed up with Art Basel Paris to present “Tales and Tellers,” a program conceived by the Polish-born artist Goshka Macuga of short films by a group of female filmmakers expressing their perspectives on what it means to be a woman, and on the concept of vanity.
The exhibition venue, the Palais d’Iéna, is where Miu Miu holds its twice-yearly Paris catwalk show — another example of the ever-increasing overlap between art and fashion.
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