Histoires de paysages De Monet à Hockney (1890-2026)

The Musée Marmottan Monet and the Musée de Grenoble jointly present an exceptional exhibition dedicated to landscape art, from 1890 to the present day. Entitled « Histoires de paysages (1890-2026)  », it will be presented in Paris from 24 September 2026 to 31 January 2027, then in Grenoble from 5 March to 4 July 2027.

The 20th century, which opened with a world war, re-established the link between landscape and history. It was believed there had been a separation, a triumph of the landscape becoming autonomous.

It was a new alliance: the union of two forces helping each other to confront the violence of the world. Two are not too many when faced with what stuns.

The era invented new, hybrid forms, transcending and nullifying any idea of hierarchy between genres, capable of confronting history by adding their qualities.

It is this field of forces that the present exhibition aims to make visible and intelligible, by proposing a journey in eleven stations that question, along a chrono-thematic current, the relationship between landscape and history.

Opening with Claude Monet's gesture of offering two Nymphéas to France, the day after the armistice of 11 November 1918, to celebrate victory, this peregrination testifies to the constant resistance of landscape as an agent of contemporary history.

It will deal with wars, the quest for origin, appropriation and nostalgia, interior landscapes and the interplay between nature and abstraction. It will deal with the relationship between landscape and nation.

It will deal with the relationship to time as much as to space, how landscape as an active force comes to cover history, between mourning and forgetting.

It will also deal with how landscape has asserted itself, like a witness, to express our era in its aspirations as well as its crises, its utopias as well as its anxieties. Landscape, today, is not just a matter of pictorial genre as it once was.

In photography, sculpture, video as well as painting, artists try to give form to our history: our history in the landscape.

Eleven chrono-thematic sections structure this exhibition: Nymphéas pour l’histoire, Paysages en guerre, Pays, paysage, Abstraire la nature, À l’origine, Paysages intérieurs, Passé, présent