Monet's Water Lilies have long been viewed by artists and studied by historians as the paragon of abstract painting, a sensitive forerunner of the great immersive installations to come. However, the blurry, out-of-focus effect that characterises the wide stretches of water in Monet's imposing canvases has been left largely unexamined. It did not escape his contemporaries, but they put it down to deterioration in his vision caused by an eye disease. These days, it seems more pertinent and fruitful to explore this aspect of Monet's later work as an actual aesthetic choice, one that has been left to posterity to uncover.

This exhibition deliberately makes such blurriness a key that opens another interpretation of a whole area of modern and contemporary visual creation. Initially
defined as "loss of distinctness", blurriness has shown itself to be the favourite means of expression in a world where instability reigns and visibility is clouded.
It was on the ruins left by the Second Word War that this out-of-focus aesthetic took root and began to deploy its inevitably political dimension. The Cartesian principle of discernment, which had prevailed in art for so long, now appeared altogether inoperative. With the erosion of visible certainties and in the face of the range of possibilities available to them as a result, artists came up with new approaches, shaping their works out of the transitory, disorder, movement, incompleteness and doubt.

Curatorship:

• Claire Bernardi, Director, Musée de l'Orangerie

• Emilia Philippot, Head Curator, Deputy Director of Studies, National Heritage Institute (INP)
  In collaboration with Juliette Degennes, Curator, Musée de l'Orangerie

While Khmer art is known around the world for its stone monuments, recent excavations have provided dramatic breakthroughs regarding our knowledge about its significant bronze statues. 

The Musée Guimet's exhibition Royal Bronzes of Angkor, an art of the divine focuses on bronze. The highlight of the exhibition is the reclining Vishnu statue from the Western Mebon - an 11th-century sanctuary to the west of Angkor - discovered in 1936 and originally measuring over five metres in length. This Cambodian national treasure will be exhibited for the first time with its long-separated fragments, after having benefited in 2024 from a campaign of scientific analysis and restoration in France, with the patronage of ALIPH (Alliance internationale pour la protection du patrimoine). It will be accompanied by over 200 works, including 126 exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, whose presence will enable visitors to follow a chronological trail of bronze art in Cambodia, from the 9th century to the present day, through a journey that takes them to the major sites of Khmer heritage.

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire which dominated part of mainland Southeast Asia for over five centuries, has preserved monumental remains of incomparable scale and beauty from its past glory. But if the architecture of the temples of the Khmer Empire (9th-14th/15th centuries) and the stone statues housed within them have been celebrated many times over, who remembers that these Buddhist and Brahmanic sanctuaries once housed a whole population of divinities and cult objects cast in precious metal: gold, silver, gilded bronze?

Exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, granted by the Royal Government within the specific framework of cooperation between the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the C2RMF (Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France), the EFEO (École française d'Extrême-Orient) and the Musée Guimet, are bringing together for the first time in this exceptional exhibition masterpieces (statuary, objets d'art or elements of architectural decoration) as well as photographs, casts and graphic documents to place these works of art in their cultural context, as well as in an archaeological and historical perspective.

Curated by:

• Pierre Baptiste, Director of Conservation and Collections, Musée Guimet, General Curator, Southeast Asia Section

• Brice Vincent, Senior Lecturer, Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO)

• David Bourgarit, research engineer, Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF)

• Thierry Zéphir, research engineer in charge of the Himalayan World collections at the Musée Guimet

The Musée du Louvre marks a European first with a major exhibition on the Mamluk sultanate (1250-1517), aiming to address this golden age of the Islamic Near East in all its scope and richness by examining it from a transregional perspective.

For almost 25 years, Karina Bisch (b. 1974) has been reinventing modernist motifs, not in order to quote them, but to circulate and mutate them in a contemporary context. His work, situated at the intersection of art, architecture and design, questions form as a dynamic structure capable of transcending time while renewing its symbolic charge.

The exhibition presents a varied body of work - a series of small-scale paintings, a monumental work, a tapestry and textile creations - as part of an immersive mural designed specifically for the museum's exhibition spaces. Works by Fernand Léger (drawings, tapestries, etc.), selected by Karina Bisch herself, punctuate the exhibition. The link with Fernand Léger is built around the power and plasticity of the forms. Like Léger, Karina Bisch explores the potential of the decorative not just as ornament but as an autonomous language, capable of generating meaning and reshaping space.

This exhibition is not simply a juxtaposition of works, it is a theoretical space where forms, through their circulation and reactivation, produce a dialogue between different temporalities. Here, the decorative becomes a vehicle for critical thinking about the way in which forms shape our perception of time and space.

Curator:

Anne Dopffer, Director of the Musée national du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes

Julie Guttierez, Chief Curator at the Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot Karina Bisch. The head in the decor