Yasmina Comair

The Petit Palais is devoting its first major retrospective to Eva Gonzalès, running from September 15 through January 24, bringing together nearly one hundred paintings, pastels, and prints. The only official pupil of Édouard Manet, and a contemporary of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt without ever truly belonging to the Impressionist group, she was above all a woman who forged her own path in a 19th century that offered few such opportunities to artists of her sex. Exceptionally well curated, the exhibition is also moving: behind the pupil, the model, the wife, and the mother, it reveals, work by work, a painter claiming her freedom.

Some evenings quietly fade into memory. Others simply wait for someone willing to bring them back to life. In 1967, under the High Patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco, the Order of Malta Ball was held in Paris, embodying the understated elegance that has long distinguished great charitable endeavors, where refinement finds its true purpose only in the cause it serves. Then the years passed, and this prestigious gathering gradually disappeared from the Parisian social calendar. Nearly six decades later, the Ball has returned in the exceptional setting of the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée. Under the High Patronage of Her Royal Highness Princess Caroline of Hanover, this new edition represents far more than the revival of a distinguished social event. It rekindles a shared memory, restores a bond between generations, and reminds us that there are still places where beauty can become a language of solidarity.

After more than twenty years spent at the heart of the great houses of high jewelry and international luxury, from Cartier to Hermès, from De Beers to LVMH, between Paris, London and New York, Marie Berthelon could have continued along a perfectly mapped trajectory at the summit of the system. Instead, she chose to step away from it to revive Rouvenat, a nineteenth-century Maison that had disappeared and that she is now reactivating as a living territory, at the crossroads of heritage and the avant-garde. At the head of a small, deeply committed structure, she defends a singular vision of high jewelry: a luxury of circularity and memory, where recycled gold, antique stones rediscovered in forgotten safes, and raw or polished materials do not seek perfection, but light. A jewelry that does not add itself to the world, but awakens it, transforming what already existed into a contemporary presence.

At the Grand Palais, a rare exhibition of exceptional scope, bringing together more than three hundred works from international collections, explores until 26 July the final thirteen years of Henri Matisse. Far from an epilogue, it reveals a moment of intensity in which, constrained by illness, the artist entirely reinvents his language. Paintings, drawings, books, textiles, stained glass and cut gouaches compose a journey conceived as a living studio: that of a man who, at the edge of the end, chooses to open himself still further. There are exhibitions that open like doors, and then there are those that impose themselves more slowly, almost quietly, until they displace something older than the gaze itself: a manner of holding time, a dense and profound way of standing upright before it, in its slowness as in its light.

From 18 February to 5 July 2026, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs presents "A Day in the Eighteenth Century, Chronicle of a Hôtel Particulier" — an immersive journey through an aristocratic Parisian residence of the 1780s, on the eve of the French Revolution. From rising to retiring, everything here follows the rhythm of the clock. This exhibition lets itself be breathed in like a long-vanished perfume, a small miracle of that Enlightenment art de vivre in which each of the 550 objects scattered along the route tells one and the same story: that of a vanished time whose refined aesthetics elevated Paris to the rank of European capital of fashion and the arts… a title seldom contested to this day.

At the heart of the City of Light, amidst archives, sculptures, bolts of fabric and thimbles, there vibrates a house where the fragrance of May roses seizes the olfactory memory of its visitors. A house where past and present hold dialogue. Since the fertile shadow cast by John Galliano and the arrival of Jonathan Anderson, a new reading of the Dior legacy seems to be emerging: more conceptual, more artistic, yet profoundly faithful to the spirit of the house founded in 1946. A Study in Form It was at the Musée Rodin, that marvel of Auguste's sculptures, that this new chapter revealed itself. Following the haute couture show during the last week of January 2026, the installation Grammaire des Formes opened to the public beneath the ephemeral marquee where the collection had first been presented to the world. Fifteen silhouettes by Anderson held conversation there with nine historic creations by Monsieur Dior and several ceramics by Kenyan sculptor Magdalene Odundo.

Eyes circled in black, pure, stormy, contrasting. Beautiful enough to drown in. Dominic Harrison, alias Yungblud, rushes onto the stage and screams his fauvism at the top of his lungs. A life of rage, grandeur, and self-confidence acquired and now alchemizing. Each of his gestures is a flash; each of his movements, a fire. He doesn't just perform his songs. He lets them explode with fire. The pit ignites as soon as he appears. The bass rumbles like thunder. My daughter and her friend are a little further away, I'm in the back. Every vibration in the air passes through us. Then he emerges. Body sculpted under the spotlights, animal presence, blue eyes made up like a storm. Yungblud bursts onto the stage, he is a wild fire. A cigarette between his fingers, which he will light later, and already the heat is unbearable.