This event exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in ancient Japan, discovering the Heian period (794-1185) and its court art. This period of freedom for women, with particularly rich artistic production, notably saw the emergence of a unique women's literature in Japanese history. They took up waka style poems which they wrote using a cursive writing system derived from Chinese and adapted to the Japanese language of the time. Freed from the Chinese model, they produced works mixing waka and prose, in the form of journals or told stories.

This exhibition is organized in partnership with the Franco-Japanese Sasakawa Foundation, which with this event celebrates thirty years of action for the development of cultural relations and friendship between France and Japan. The foundation is recognized as being of public utility.

Curator: Aurélie Samuel, heritage curator

From the Belle Époque to the Roaring Twenties, Paris continued, more than ever before, to attract artists from all around the world. This cosmopolitan city was both a capital where innovation thrived and a place of tremendous cultural influence. It brings together almost four hundred works by Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, Tamara de Lempicka, Amedeo Modigliani, Chana Orloff, Pablo Picasso, Marie Vassilieff, and many others. It also features clothing designs by Paul Poiret and Jeanne Lanvin, jewellery by Cartier, a plane from Le Bourget Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, and even a car on loan from the Musée national de l'Automobile in Mulhouse. Through fashion, cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as dance, design, architecture, and industry, this exhibition showcases the rich creativity of the period 1905-1925.

The exhibition, organized both chronologically and thematically, draws its originality from the geographical perimeter on which it mainly focuses, i.e., the Champs Élysées. This district was a veritable cradle and hub of Modernity. At the time, the Grand Palais hosted the latest in artistic creation at the Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants every year, where the public could discover works by Douanier Rousseau, Henri Matisse, and Kees van Dongen amongst others.

At the core of his work, a rich corpus of drawings illustrates his penchant for the comedy of the Comédie Italienne (Italian companies performing in France), with its pantomimes, acrobatics and cross-dressing figures. A costume and set designer for the Paris Opera starting in 1712, Gillot was also a sought-after decorator, notably collaborating with Claude Audran III on private interiors, and reinventing arabesque painting in the process.

ORGANISED BY:

Hélène Meyer and Xavier Salmon, Musée du Louvre

Notre-Dame's treasury, entirely reassembled after the French Revolution, is famous today for the prestigious relics it houses, particularly those of the Crown of Thorns and the Wood of the Cross, transferred from the former treasury of Sainte-Chapelle and, during the reign of Napoleon I, given new reliquaries in Notre-Dame.

The treasury is also renowned for the splendour of the masterpieces of French precious metalwork assembled there in the 19th century, especially those designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, providing extraordinary testimony to the history of Notre-Dame and of France itself.

The exhibition provides an unprecedented retrospective, exploring for the first time the history of the treasury prior to the French Revolution. Inventories, historic accounts, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, prints and other illustrated documents, along with several surviving pieces, will retrace the long story, starting in the Merovingian era, of Notre-Dame's treasury.