Between the Grand Palais, the Musée d’Orsay, the Petit Palais and a clutch of Marais galleries doing genuinely electric things on far smaller budgets, this rentrée culturelle might be the richest we’ve seen in years.
Here’s the problem: there’s simply too much of it, and several of these shows close within the same three-week window. So we did the legwork: opening dates, ticket prices, curatorial details, all checked against the museums’ own listings. Consider this your September museum diary, sorted, with everything linked so you can book on the spot.
Eva Gonzalès, Parcours d’une artiste libre
Petit Palais, 8th arrondissement
15 September 2026 – 24 January 2027 · €14, €12 concessions
Quick history lesson, because it matters: Eva Gonzalès trained under Édouard Manet, exhibited alongside the Impressionists without ever technically joining their group shows, and died in 1883 at just thirty six. For well over a century she was filed away as a footnote to someone else’s story. Not anymore. The Petit Palais has finally given her the full monograph treatment, developed with support from the Musée d’Orsay, which is lending her striking La Loge aux Italiens for the occasion. What you get is a genuinely overdue correction, a painter with her own eye and her own quiet confidence, finally allowed to be the main event. Don’t rush this one.
See the exhibition →
Kerry James Marshall, The Histories
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 16th
18 September 2026 – 24 January 2027 · €17, €15 concessions, free under 18
Come on, it’s Kerry James Marshall’s first ever major show on French soil. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955, in the thick of segregation, Marshall has spent four decades painting Black figures at monumental scale into the Western canon that so rarely made room for them. This show, developed with the Royal Academy in London and the Kunsthaus Zurich, brings around seventy works to Paris, eight of them brand new. Expect scenes of slavery and civil rights sitting alongside barbershops and Sunday afternoons, rendered with the weight of old master painting and the warmth of an American greeting card. Thursday evenings, the museum stays open until 9.30pm. That’s exactly when you should go.
See the exhibition →
Sungi Mlengeya, Earth and Sky
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, 3rd
5 September – 24 October 2026 · Free
Tucked into the gallery-dense stretch of the Marais, this is Tanzanian painter Sungi Mlengeya’s first ever solo show in France. Self-taught, born in Dar es Salaam in 1991, she paints Black women whose bodies dissolve into vast fields of white canvas, the negative space standing in for freedom rather than absence. This particular body of work is rooted in grief, her mother, the person who first encouraged her to pursue art, died in spring 2025. What emerges instead of sorrow is something closer to lightness. Free, small, and it will genuinely stop you in your tracks.
See the exhibition →
Leonora Carrington, L’art des transmutations
Almine Rech, 64 rue de Turenne, 3rd
8 September – 10 October 2026
Fresh off her sold-out museum retrospective at the Luxembourg earlier this year, Carrington gets a second, more intimate outing at Almine Rech, developed with the Consejo Leonora Carrington and bringing together drawings, paintings, sculpture, tapestry and writing across every medium she ever touched. Carrington spent her career refusing to be anyone’s muse, building instead a private mythology of shape-shifting women and hybrid creatures that still feels genuinely strange nearly a century on. Don’t go expecting easy answers. Go expecting to leave slightly rearranged.
Read the gallery announcement →
Andy Warhol, La ligne et l’image
Musée du Luxembourg, 6th
16 September 2026 – 10 January 2027 · €14, €10 concessions
Everyone knows Warhol the screen printer. Almost nobody knows Warhol the draughtsman, and that’s precisely the gap this show closes. Around 150 drawings, paintings, silkscreens, photographs and archive material trace a side of his practice buried under the soup cans, from his first self-portrait in 1942 to his drawings for the Last Supper in 1986. Genuinely one for anyone who thought they’d already seen everything Warhol had to offer. You haven’t.
See the exhibition →
Rafael Pavarotti, photographe
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1st
23 September 2026 – 7 February 2027 · €15
If you’ve spent any time with a fashion magazine cover this decade, you already know Rafael Pavarotti’s work, even if you didn’t clock the name. This is his first French museum show, over 200 prints put directly into conversation with the museum’s own photographic archives. Expect the portraits that made his name (Rihanna, Harry Styles, Beyoncé, rendered with an almost sculptural richness) alongside campaigns for Dior, Balmain and Maison Margiela. Book ahead, it pairs beautifully with the fashion retrospective one floor up.
See the exhibition →
Cézanne et nous
Grand Palais, 8th
23 September 2026 – 17 January 2027 · €19, €16 concessions
We’ll be the ones to say it: this is the intellectual heavyweight of the season. Around 180 works, seventy of them by Cézanne himself, trace not just his career but his afterlife, tracking how Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley and Peter Doig all found in him the permission to reinvent painting on their own terms. Picasso once called him father to us all. Dense, yes. Also completely absorbing if you give it the time it deserves.
See the exhibition →
Monet, peindre le temps
Musée de l’Orangerie, 1st
30 September 2026 – 25 January 2027 · €12.50, €10 concessions
Marking the centenary of Monet’s death, this show gathers nearly forty paintings, the Meules, the Peupliers, the Rouen Cathedral series, to examine how he tried to hold time still on canvas: the instant versus the accumulated hour, the season against the decade. It all builds to the Nymphéas rooms, already one of the most quietly overwhelming spaces in Paris, now followed by a new immersive VR piece. Go on a weekday morning if you can. You’ll want the quiet.
See the exhibition →
Éternel Tintoret
Musée Jacquemart-André, 8th
11 September 2026 – 24 January 2027 · €19
An unprecedented exhibition, and we don’t use that word loosely: this is the first show in France to survey Tintoretto’s entire career. Around forty paintings and drawings trace a painter who worked at extraordinary speed, known for his prestezza, that famously fast, bold brushwork, and whose influence rippled through French painting for centuries after him. The Jacquemart-André’s intimate galleries suit this kind of show beautifully. It never feels like a lecture.
See the exhibition →
Auguste Bartholdi, La Liberté éclairant le monde
Musée d’Orsay, 7th
15 September 2026 – 31 January 2027 · €16, €13 concessions
Ask most people who made the Statue of Liberty and you’ll get a shrug. Timed to the 250th anniversary of American independence, this show puts sculptor Auguste Bartholdi properly back in the frame, tracing the drawings, maquettes and engineering problem-solving behind what was, at the time, the tallest statue on earth (46 metres, 93 with its pedestal). A companion VR experience follows the statue’s journey from Paris to New York. Bring the history buff in your life.
See the exhibition →
Look ! 40 ans de mode au musée
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1st
30 September 2026 – 4 April 2027 · €15
To mark forty years of its fashion department, the Arts Décoratifs has pulled together forty iconic silhouettes spanning four decades of its own landmark exhibitions, tracing a garment’s whole life, from sketch to catwalk to conservation and restoration. It’s the kind of show that rewards slow looking, and it sits one floor from the Pavarotti photography exhibition, if you want to make a full fashion afternoon of it. You should.
See the exhibition →
U2: An Irish Story
Centre culturel irlandais, 5th
23 September – 18 December 2026 · Free
Not everything on this list needs a pre-booked slot. U2 formed in a Dublin kitchen on 25 September 1976, and this free show marks the exact half-century with archive material, photography and memorabilia tracing the band’s evolution from scrappy teenagers to global stadium act. Won’t take more than forty minutes. Consider it the palate cleanser between the heavier hitters on this list.
Read more →
That’s the season, sorted. Bring good walking shoes, book the popular ones early, and don’t try to do more than two in a day.
