Over 500 feminine works from the past one hundred years offer their cultural perspective.

Key figures such as Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Mitchell and Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva rub shoulders with today's great female creators some of whom, including Sophie Calle, Annette Messager and Louise Bourgeois have been featured recently in monographic exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou.
The exhibition cuts across disciplines to take a deeper look at the place occupied by women in the culture of the last century, from literature to history of thought, from dance to cinema.

The first large retrospective exhibition dedicated to Yves Saint-Laurent, the fashion designer is set to take place from 11 March to 29 August at the Petit Palais.

“I’ve always had the highest of respect for this profession, which isn’t an art form per se, but which needs an artist in order for it to exist” - Yves Saint-Laurent.

The Foundation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent and the Petit Palais (City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts) are showcasing the first Yves Saint-Laurent retrospective exhibition since the fashion designer passed away. A total of 307 haute couture and prêt-à-porter models are on show, ranging from the designer’s beginnings at Dior in 1958, with the famous “Trapeze” collection, to the splendor of the evening dresses from 2002.

Numerous photographs and films shed light on the historical background, the development of the Yves Saint-Laurent style and the aspects underpinning his creations.

In 40 years of creating, Yves Saint-Laurent revolutionized women’s wardrobes, by drawing on aspects of the male evening suit, trouser suit and safari suit to dress women, thereby passing attributes of power from one gender to the other.

The designer took inspiration from the streets (1971 scandale collection), his dreamlike journeys (Russia, China, India, Spain, Japan, Africa and Morocco) and interaction with art (Modrian, Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh).

Vanitas, vanitatum…all is vanity, says the Bible. We often forget that this well-known sentence on the emptiness of human activity gave birth to an artistic theme which has never ceased to inspire artists: the Vanities, and particularly their principal emblem, the figure of a death’s head seen both in the mosaics of Pompeii and on the bikers’ jackets of the Hell’s Angels!
This is the subject of a courageous exhibition in the Maillol Museum: to follow these macabre symbols via painting, sculpture, photography, record sleeves, jewellery and a wide range of objects. But this is by no means a trip for the lovers of the morbid. By using this grim icon, artists have tried to push back the limits of life, to outmanoeuvre bad luck, to defy the grim harvester by a rush of creativity. There are close to 160 works of art on this theme, including the famous diamond skull by Damien Hirst created in 2007, the starting point for this journey into the past.
On your journey back through time you will discover Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Picasso, Braque, Cézanne, Géricault, Caravaggio and the macabre dances and memento mori of the Middle Ages.
Exhibited for the first time in France are several works by the jeweller Codognato de Venise whose vanity-jewellery was worn by Diaghilev, Visconti, Cocteau and even Manet.

Lucian Freud, today aged 88, stands among the most important living artists in the world and he hasn't been exhibited in France since the last retrospective exhibition presented by the Centre Pompidou in 1987. This exhibition presents an exceptional overview of his masterpieces and pays an unprecedented tribute to one of the greatest contemporary painters.

Composed of around fifty large-sized paintings, accompanied by a selection of graphic works and photographs of the artist's London studio from special collections (for the majority of them), the exhibition is organised around the theme of the artist's studio, a place behind closed doors which paved the foundations for Lucian Freud's painting and activity. Within a space of just over 900m2, the exhibition brings together the painter's main full-size compositions, known as Large Interiors, as well as his variations on former masters, his series of self-portraits and the recent and imposing portraits of Leigh Bowery or Big Sue, the painter's masterpieces.

The uniqueness of Lucian Freud's work lies in his meticulous and almost obsessional treatment of the portrait and the nude, based on an absolute approach to the art of painting. "I want the painting to be flesh (…)". The model is observed in the closed world of the studio, the painter's laboratory.

The theme of the artist's studio bears the metaphor of painting: the one-to-one between the painter and his model (from Rembrandt, to Courbet and Picasso), the space of painting – representation of the real, the process of creation -, the figure of the artist – self-portraits and rereading the masters.

Late night opening Thursdays until 11 pm, ticket office closes at 10 pm.

Fifty masterpieces and more than twenty-five great masters, brought together through the sure and discerning taste of a great collector, present a remarkable overview of creative art in Spain over the last four hundred years.

For the first time ever, the Musée Jacquemart-André presents a group of paintings never before exhibited in France. The exhibition brings together works from different periods and various artistic movements. It offers a fascinating aesthetic and artistic journey. Displaying these works side by side reveals the continuities and breaks with tradition that have marked the evolution of Spanish art.

Alongside great names such as Picasso, Goya, Miró, Greco or Dali, you can also admire the colourist talents of Joaquin Sorolla, the romantic inspiration of Manuel Barrón and Carrillo or the style of Murillo, with Flemish influences. Some rare pieces add to the quality of this exhibition: one of the only miniatures of devotion by Greco and one of the first female portraits by Goya, that of Maria Teresa de Vallabriga.

The Marmottan Monet museum presents from April 15th to June 6th 2010, an exposition dedicated to women. For this occasion, the ground floor of this former mansion on rue Lois Boilly in the upscale16th, lends itself to a reenactment of the bright and cozy atmosphere of salons in 1900.

"Women artists and salons at the time of Proust, from Madeline Lemaire to Berthe Morisot", includes more than one hundred testimonies dating from 1875 to 1910.
Amongst the paintings, watercolors, letters, jewelry, manuscripts, objects and musical scores, discover the vibrant and spiritual soul of the time period through these works, many of which have never been revealed to the public.

“Edvard Munch or the Anti-Scream” is a retrospective of the work of Edvard Munch, the pioneering Expressionist painter best known for his celebrated painting “The Scream” that symbolises modern man swept along in a crisis of existential angst. The exhibition displays around one hundred works (paintings and sketches) covering the artist’s rich and singular work.

The Pinacothèque de Paris is providing a new approach to Edvard Munch’s work, one of the most mythical, but equally one of the most mysterious, artists of the late 19th century and early 20th century.

It is amazing to note, so early in art history, an artist who broke away from all the conventions to which earlier artists and movements had accustomed us. It is fascinating to note that in the early 1880s, Munch attacked layers of color, he literally plowed the pictorial surfaces or else left the works outdoors under rain and snow, transferred photographs and silent films onto canvases and graphic works. Another surprise is the transgression with which he abolished all the boundaries between supports and techniques, in his engravings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages, photographs and films. He belongs to the tradition of William Turner and Gustave Courbet. He is the missing link between such artists as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock in the history of Modernism. As an authentic innovator in the field of kineticism in art, this exhibition reveals a model in Avant-Garde terms and a breakthrough from all earlier artforms.

It was through those limitless excesses in his times, and above all through his attachment to the material qualities of paint and its supports, that Munch provided a powerful exploration of the deepest human feelings of life’s most fundamental experiments, even as the artistic world of that time was rather more absorbed by its relationships with nature and the social representations of the world. He has left an overwhelming œuvre of incomparable strength.

Les Arts Décoratifs is organising the first exhibition retracing the history of contemporary fashion, in two parts.

The project began last autumn with the publication of ‘An Ideal History of Contemporary Fashion’, and is continuing in a different dimension with two consecutive exhibitions. The first of this “two-volume” historic and selective retrospective of fashion will cover the 70s and 80s, the second the 90s and 2000s.

Russian Art from the Beginnings to Peter the Great As part of France's "Year of Russia" celebrations, the Louvre is hosting a major exhibition devoted to the history of Christian Russia, from the 9th to the 18th century.

The exhibition begins with the appearance of "Russians" in the historical record and the rivalries and power struggles between Latins, Vikings and Byzantines. There followed the early conversions in the Kievan Rus', culminating in the famed "baptism" of Vladimir the Great in 988. Rus' then became definitively Christian, borrowing its ecclesiastical model from Constantinople. Christian art flourished in Kiev, Chernigov, Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir, Suzdal and elsewhere, wavering stylistically between Byzantium and the temptation of the Latin West.

After a hiatus during the 13th century with the invasion and subsequent domination of the region by the Mongols, Christian art returned in all its splendor in the major Russian centers, notable figures being the painters Theophanes, Rublev and Dionysius. This renaissance was accompanied by an unprecedented proliferation of monasteries and the gradual ascendancy of Moscow.

In 16th century Moscow - the self-proclaimed "Third Rome" and "New Jerusalem" - the reigns of Grand Princes Basil III and Ivan IV the Terrible ushered in a new artistic golden age which reached its high point with the crowning of Ivan as Tsar (1547) and the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate (1589).

After the "Time of Troubles" interregnum came a 17th century of conflict and revival—the rise of the Romanovs, the religious reforms of Patriarch Nikon —then the sweeping political and aesthetic changes imposed by Peter the Great.

Discover the wealth of works by one of the masters of perspective through period casts, drawings and engravings.

Grand Palais places beautiful masterpieces by Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt and Titian next to some of Turner’s most significant works. (More than 100 paintings and drawings from British and American collections, as well as loans from the Louvre, the Prado and English museums).

At first Turner faithfully applied the methods of the budding English watercolour tradition. When he turned to oil painting, he took inspiration from the Dutch landscape painters in the Rembrandt tradition, using a narrow, sombre colour range. The stimulating and already classical example of his great predecessor Richard Wilson led him, towards the turn of the century, to tackle classical landscapes of broader scope and brighter colours. At the same time he studied the art of the great landscape painters working in Italy in the 17th century: Salvatore Rosa (1615-1673) and Nicolas Poussin (1596-1665). Far from producing pastiches of these great models, Turner let powerful, turbulent energy upset the perfection of their harmonious compositions and came close to launching the masterly British tradition of fantastic landscapes with The Deluge (1805, Tate) directly inspired by the painting of the same name by Nicolas Poussin (1664, Louvre).

“Turner and the Masters” is an illustrated demonstration of the way Turner constructed his remarkable vision throughout his long career. It brings together a hundred paintings and graphic works (studies, engravings) from major British and American collections, the Louvre, the Prado and the Tate Britain.

The “Crime and Punishment, from Goya to Picasso” exhibition examines the aesthetic of violence and the representation of violent crime and the death penalty in the visual arts through a selection of striking works by major artists.

The death penalty, crime and punishment and Man’s desire to defy an all-powerful God and the supremacy of the King to mete out his own justice – these are all strong themes that have inspired generations of painters. Goya, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne and Degas among others were fascinated by images of crime and capital punishment.

The works on display are pictorial representations of the guillotine, crimes of passion, male and female criminals, prison conditions and the last days of condemned prisoners.

The last few works on display depict the use of the criminal theme in the visual arts.

A trip back to the 19th century Romantic atmosphere to learn of how the genius of the greatest writer in French literature spread.

Be thrilled at the apparent simplicity of the sculptures combined with an unbelievable poetical strength.