The shows to see in Paris during Art Basel

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Philip Guston, ‘The Irony of History’

Musée national Picasso-Paris, to March 1

Defiant, feverish, absurd — Philip Guston’s late paintings rank among the most searing artworks of the 20th century. By the end of the 1960s he had abandoned abstraction for an unsettling figuration, confronting the ills of postwar America with a tragi-comic register that fused comic-strip imagery with painterly expression. His hooded Klansmen, at once chilling and cartoonish, delivered scathing critiques of racism and violence in the US, but Guston also turned to drawing as an outlet for his fury. The Musée Picasso presents his Nixon cartoon series inspired by Philip Roth’s political satire Our Gang, alongside his biting final canvases.

museepicassoparis.fr

1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco

Musée des Arts Décoratifs, October 22 to April 26

In the spring of 1925, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts took over the banks of the Seine in Paris. Geometric forms, luxury materials and bold colours embodied the speed and extravagance of the Roaring Twenties — a style later dubbed Art Deco. A century on, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is marking the milestone with a major show. Among the highlights are André Groult’s shagreen chiffonnier, first shown in the exhibition’s French Embassy pavilion, and pieces by Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, whose lavish Hôtel du Collectionneur — a full-scale house with salons, library and dining room — was the triumph of the 1925 event.

madparis.fr

Luc Delahaye, ‘The Echo of the World’

Jeu de Paume, to January 4

A wave of suited journalists surge over a conference table, their frenetic action counterpointed by a row of economists seated calmly in front of them. The photography of Luc Delahaye captures both the chaos and solemnity of world events. A former photojournalist and Magnum agency member, he rose to prominence in the 1990s covering conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Middle East. From the turn of the millennium he moved from reportage to creating monumental colour photographs, 40 of which are now on view at Jeu de Paume. Spanning the last 25 years, the exhibition presents scenes in Iraq, Ukraine, Haiti and Libya, as well as geopolitical summits such as COP. Some are captured in a single shot, while others are composed of fragments, created using a computer over several months. Situated between art and documentation, Delahaye’s work is a timely reminder of photography’s complex relationship with reality and representation.

jeudepaume.org

‘Sargent: Dazzling Paris’

Musée d’Orsay, to January 11

In 1874, an 18-year-old John Singer Sargent arrived in Paris. There he studied with the fashionable portraitist Carolus-Duran, befriended Monet, and produced early masterpieces such as “Dr Pozzi at Home” (1881). But when his “Portrait of Madame X” provoked uproar at the Salon of 1884 — its sitter, Virginie Gautreau, was depicted in a scandalously low-cut dress — he decamped to London. Though celebrated in Britain and the US, he remains little known in the country that shaped him. The Musée d’Orsay aims to redress that with Sargent’s first major French retrospective, assembling more than 90 works from his Paris years, with major loans from Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

musee-orsay.fr

Sheila Hicks and Monique Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Travelling Thread’

Musée du quai Branly, to March 8

Textile art takes centre stage at a show at the Quai Branly, which weaves a tale of friendship and creative dialogue between two women devoted to the study of traditional fabric techniques. The artist Sheila Hicks and art historian Monique Lévi-Strauss first met in Paris in 1968 and went on to publish Hicks’s first monograph Le Fil Voyageur (“The Travelling Thread”), reissued for this exhibition. On display are Hicks’s small, delicate “Minimes” series, shown alongside works from the museum’s collection, including ikats and looms and ancient Peruvian tapestries, foregrounding the influence of Andean cultures on the artist’s practice.

quaibranly.fr

Meriem Bennani, ‘Sole Crushing’

Lafayette Anticipations, October 22 to February 8

Ever wondered what an orchestra of flip-flops might sound like? Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani’s sound installation, titled “Sole Crushing”, harnesses the rhythm of this humble footwear, filling the Lafayette Anticipations space with a composition performed by 200 of them striking various surfaces. The resulting chorus transforms a banal object into a pulsating force, evoking a stadium chant, a protest or a dakka marrakchia — the percussive musical tradition often performed at Moroccan ceremonies.

lafayetteanticipations.com

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