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

The exhibition devoted by the Musée d'Orsay to the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg is the artist's first retrospective outside Scandinavia, following several exhibitions in Oslo and Lillehammer in 2012, and Copenhagen in 2014. By highlighting Krohg's committed, naturalistic works, the museum offers a new perspective on Norwegian art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Thanks to an unprecedented partnership between two major collections in the Côte d'Azur region, works by Niki de Saint Phalle, Arman, Yves Klein, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse and César come face to face with the plastic innovations of Fernand Léger, one of the pioneers of the 20th-century avant-garde.
Alongside these principal representatives of New Realism, works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein or later Keith Haring, illustrate the artistic exchanges that very early on existed between European creation and the American scene.

The exhibition, featuring nearly 100 works, takes a playful and creative approach to various themes: the misappropriation of the object, the representation of the body and leisure, and the place of art in the public space.
Through powerful artistic gestures, the artists elevate elements captured in their most mundane reality to the status of works of art. They merge art and life, revealing to the viewer the poetic beauty of our everyday lives.
The artists' powerful artistic gestures elevate elements captured in their most mundane reality to the status of works of art.

The 'Art is in the Street' exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay from 18 March to 6 July 2025 examines the spectacular rise of the illustrated poster in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. Co-organised in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the exhibition is a first on this scale. In fact, in Paris, no major event has yet been devoted to this social phenomenon, bringing together so many outstanding works by the 'Masters of the poster'. Bonnard, Chéret, Grasset, Mucha, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec.