Cezanne et nous — Grand Palais, Paris

From 23 September 2026 the Grand Palais gives its nave over to Cezanne et nous, an exhibition that asks not what Paul Cézanne painted but what everyone since has done with it. Around 180 works are brought together, of which roughly seventy are by Cézanne himself; the rest are the evidence. The organisers describe the subject as his “exceptional influence on more than a century of artistic creation”.

It is a co-production of three institutions that rarely share a wall: the GrandPalaisRmn, the Centre Pompidou, and the public establishment of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie – Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Between them they hold much of what the argument needs, which is why the exhibition can afford to spend two thirds of its space on other painters.

Practical details

• When: 23 September 2026 – 17 January 2027
• Where: Grand Palais, Paris
• Co-produced by: GrandPalaisRmn, Centre Pompidou, and the Établissement public du musée d’Orsay et du musée de l’Orangerie – Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
• Scale: around 180 works, about 70 of them by Cézanne
• Information and tickets: grandpalais.fr

The building is part of the argument

The Grand Palais is not a neutral container for this. It was raised for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, at the moment Cézanne was working in near-isolation at Aix and the Paris art world was busy with something else entirely — the iron, glass and stone exuberance that the same fair made famous. Its twin across the avenue, the Petit Palais, went up for the same exhibition and now holds the city’s fine art collections. Both belong to the Paris our archive follows in Belle Époque, Art Nouveau and Modernism: a city that within twenty years built the Métro entrances of Hector Guimard and then hung the paintings that would make their curves look old.

The two co-producing museums are in the archive as well — the Musée d’Orsay, a railway station of 1900 turned into the museum of the nineteenth century, and the Centre Pompidou, which turned its own services inside out and put them on the facade. Three buildings, three answers to the question of how a century should look: the exhibition they are staging together is about exactly that kind of disagreement.