Histories of Landscapes — From Monet to Hockney

Location: Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Date: September 24, 2026 – January 31, 2027

Project: Histories of Landscapes. From Monet to Hockney, curated by Pierre Wat

Why it Matters: More than 130 years of landscape art, from world wars to climate anxiety, in one exhibition

Charles Pollock (1902-1988), Untitled (Post-Rome), green, 1964, Huile sur toile, 127 x 127 cm, Charles Pollock Archives, courtesy Galerie Dina Vierny, Paris © Jean-Louis Losi/Galerie Dina Vierny/Charles Pollock Archives

Eleven chapters take the exhibition from 1890 to the present, covering war, nostalgia, appropriation, and abstraction. The opening chapter, Water Lilies for History, starts from Claude Monet's decision to give two of his Water Lilies paintings to France the day after the 1918 Armistice.

Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943), Paysage, entre 1922 et 1923, Huile sur toile, 92 x 65 cm, Paris, musée de l'Orangerie, collection Walter-Guillaume © GrandPalaisRMN (musée de l'Orangerie) / Hervé Lewandowski

The chapters that follow move quickly through different eras. Landscapes at War and Land, Landscape include Walker Evans's 1935 photographs of the Arthurdale resettlement project in West Virginia, made for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. Abstracting Nature and The Origin hold Chaïm Soutine's early 1920s canvases and Charles Pollock's 1964 Untitled (Post-Rome). Later sections, among them Landscapes of the Anthropocene and Paradise Lost?, turn to contemporary artists including Caroline Bachmann, whose small 2022 painting Lune rousse reflet sits in the Frac Normandie collection, and Akseli Gallen-Kallela's 1910 Hwandoni Hills, on loan from the Gallen-Kallela Museum in Espoo.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) Nymphéas, entre 1917 et 1919, Huile sur toile, 100 x 300 cm, Paris, musée Marmottan Monet, legs Michel Monet, 1966 © musée Marmottan Monet

The Marmottan Monet holds the largest Monet collection in the world through Michel Monet's 1966 bequest, and the museum built this show around its own Water Lilies, painted between 1917 and 1919. The Musée de Grenoble brings its own history with landscape and modern painting to the second leg of the exhibition, which opens there in March 2027.

Histories of Landscapes runs through January 31, 2027, in Paris, before traveling to the Musée de Grenoble from March 5 to July 4, 2027.

More info: marmottan.fr

Curator: Pierre Wat, Professor of History and Civilization at the Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne & Director of the Centre de Recherche HiCSA