The Petit Palais: Three Major Exhibitions to See in Paris This Summer

Three major exhibitions reveal the many faces of Paris’s Petit Palais, from self-portraits and Hungarian modernism to contemporary street art in all its forms

This summer, the Petit Palais is not showing one but three faces. Behind its colonnade on Avenue Winston Churchill, the Beaux-Arts palace built for the 1900 World’s Fair is playing host to exhibitions on portraits, a Hungarian revelation and a very colourful street art takeover. Petit it may be, but grand are its ambitions.

In the rotunda, the museum is presenting a unique exhibition devoted to artists’ portraits and self-portraits, a theme that has shaped the Petit Palais’ collections since its founding in the early 20th century. ‘Artists’ Faces, From Gustave Courbet to Annette Messager’ gathers around 100 works (paintings, photographs, prints, decorative objects and sculptures). Icons like Courbet’s Self-Portrait with a Black Dog are paired with rarer pieces pulled from storage especially, including Paul Paulin’s busts of the Impressionists. From the intimacy of self-portraiture to group portraits, the show brings together old masters and contemporary names. In fact, Sophie Calle, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Annette Messager and others, bring a female perspective to a genre that has, until now, been overwhelmingly masculine. Fitting, since this exhibition inaugurates a year-long focus on women artists at the Petit Palais, continuing this autumn with the museum’s first monographic show on painter Eva Gonzalès and a carte blanche for artist Prune Nourry.

A few galleries away, a face far less familiar to French visitors awaits. Károly Ferenczy (1862–1917) is a towering figure in his native Hungary, yet almost unknown in France – a gap which this retrospective, mounted in collaboration with the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Gallery, sets out to close. Impossible to pin to a single art movement, Ferenczy made his name through plein-air painting in which the bright sunshine plays a starring role. Presenting nearly 140 wide-ranging works, from landscapes and portraits to nudes and caricatures, the exhibition follows his path from early travels through Italy and studies in Paris, to a Symbolist Munich period, to full maturity at the Nagybánya artists’ colony he helped found. It closes with The Red Wall IV (1910), a small, intensely coloured yet contemplative canvas that lingers as the show’s final nod to this major figure of Central European modernism.

Then there is the face the Petit Palais wears loudest: street art, back for round two. Following ‘WE ARE HERE’, which drew more than 600,000 visitors in 2024, ‘WE ARE [still] HERE’ continues the museum’s dialogue between contemporary creation and heritage, curated by Mehdi Ben Cheikh for an entirely free exhibition. This time, 75 French and international artists occupy the museum’s spaces across more than 200 works, with new pieces by D*Face, Invader, eL Seed and others woven directly into the permanent collections, building on the Seth and Inti works integrated there since 2024, before opening onto a large-scale hanging installation in the Salle Concorde.

Echoing the 19th-century salons that once launched avant-garde artists, this show follows in those footsteps by letting art write its own story. French artists take particular prominence this year, including Miss Van, Fafi, Jace and L’Atlas, alongside international figures such as Shepard Fairey, Swoon and Vhils. With such a diverse and vivid programme, the Petit Palais isn’t choosing a face this season. It’s wearing all of them at once.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Artists’ Faces, From Gustave Courbet to Annette Messager –ticketed, until July 19

Károly Ferenczy: Hungarian Modernity – ticketed, until September 6

WE ARE [still] HERE – free, until September 20

For more information, visit www.petitpalais.paris.fr