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For much of her career, Berthe Morisot painted without a dedicated studio. The École des Beaux-Arts did not accept women until 1897. When her father had an atelier built for his daughters in the garden of the family home in 1865, it was destroyed during the siege of Paris in 1871. For the next two decades, Morisot painted in her bedroom, her drawing room, her garden, wherever light and space allowed. Claude Monet, "Le Repos, portrait de Berthe Morisot", 1870, Museum of Art, R

When Zao Wou-Ki arrived in Paris in April 1948, he spoke almost no French and knew almost no one. He settled in Montparnasse, in a small studio next door to Giacometti, and began learning the language at the Alliance Française. Archive picture, Zao Wou-ki, his wife May and their daughter. What he found in Paris, beyond the Impressionism that had drawn him there, was a circle of friendships that would sustain his work for the next sixty years. His creative process was shaped b

Before Impressionism was fashionable, one man staked his entire fortune on it. In the 1870s, the paintings we now consider untouchable masterpieces were dismissed as unfinished, vulgar, even offensive. Critics ridiculed them, the Salon refused them, and most collectors would not let them through their door. Paul Durand-Ruel saw something the rest of his world refused to see, and he acted on that conviction with a single-mindedness that would define modern dealing. Photo archi

In 1964, Harry Torczyner, a New York lawyer and close friend of René Magritte, commissioned a self-portrait. Magritte, who described the process as a 'problem of conscience', duly painted his own likeness: a man in a dark overcoat and bowler hat, standing before a low stone wall with the grey-green Atlantic behind him. Then he covered his own face entirely with a hovering green apple. Torczyner had asked for a portrait. He received something considerably stranger, and conside

The Rothko Chapel would not exist without John and Dominique de Menil. French-born and deeply shaped by European intellectual and artistic life, the couple settled in Houston, Texas, where they became the most consequential art patrons of their generation in America. Dominique, daughter of the founder of Schlumberger, brought with her a rigorous aesthetic sensibility and a lifelong commitment to social justice. Together they built one of the greatest private collections of th

What makes this book so compelling is the angle the Berest sisters chose. Gabriële Buffet was not simply Picabia's wife she was the intellectual sparring partner of the leading modernists of her time, including Marcel Duchamp and Igor Stravinsky. Frenchly Yet history had all but erased her. Anne and Claire Berest wrote Gabriële to better understand their own great-grandmother, and in doing so, they rescued one of the most fascinating women of the 20th-century avant-garde from

The Musée du Luxembourg is currently presenting the first major retrospective in France dedicated exclusively to Leonora Carrington, on view from 18 February to 19 July 2026, bringing together 126 works. It is a rare and long-overdue encounter with one of the 20th century's most singular artistic voices. Born in 1917 in Lancashire, England, Carrington built her practice through perpetual movement from Florence to Paris, from the South of France to Spain, and ultimately to Me

Claude Monet kept cooking journals. Alongside his sketchbooks and his obsessively documented garden diaries, the painter at Giverny maintained detailed records of what he ate, with whom he shared his meals, and exactly how each dish should be prepared. His culinary ambition was as precise as his eye for light. The yellow dining room at Giverny, painted the specific shade Monet chose himself, was where he entertained Renoir, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Clemencea