Light as medium, architecture as partner. Verjux projects incisions of light onto the walls and floors of the Château Grimaldi — the very building where Picasso worked through the autumn of 1946. The intervention is site-specific in the fullest sense: the light reads the building, not the other way round.

Swiss photographer, art director of Elle during its golden years, collaborator of Courrèges at the height of Space Age fashion. Knapp’s images are design objects. This show at the Fondation pairs an extraordinary archive with a building that has always understood how light and form belong together.

The art school on the hill, with its labyrinthine terraces overlooking the city, hosts two shows running in parallel. Albiach’s solo — painting at the threshold of light and absence — shares the summer programme with Staring at the Sun, the graduating students’ exhibition. One of the most consistently surprising addresses in Nice, and almost no one goes.

Romanian-born surrealist (1903–1966), barely known to the general public, endlessly inventive in private. Over 160 works from an exceptional Monaco private collection — paintings, drawings, sculptures — spanning four decades of an imagination shaped by Breton, by Romanian mythology, and by an inner world that had very little to do with the visible one. The Nouveau Musée National is at its best when it reveals an artist you did not know you needed.

Chagall designed this building himself. The garden, the stained-glass windows, the proportion of the rooms — everything was conceived to hold his work. A loan of exceptional works returns some of what belongs here. The permanent collection alone earns the visit; this summer it goes further.

A 17th-century Baroque palace in the heart of Vieux-Nice, hosting a contemporary intervention that puts the people of Nice — their faces, their gestures, their street-level presence — back into rooms built for aristocratic display. The tension between the setting and the subject is the work.

Large-scale paintings, plant drawings, and shaped canvases installed across the Fondation’s modernist galleries and gardens. Kelly’s relationship to form — edge, boundary, the precise line where one colour stops and another begins — finds its ideal setting in a building designed by Josep Lluís Sert. The show that defines the Riviera art summer of 2026.

Two artists for whom colour was not decoration but architecture. The exhibition pairs works from the Matisse collection with pieces from the Fondation Pierre Bergé–YSL, tracing the unspoken conversation between a painter who dressed women in colour and a couturier who painted women in fabric. The Villa des Arènes, Cimiez, is worth the climb regardless.

The Belle Époque through its performers, socialites, and artists — a world where theatre and painting borrowed from each other constantly. The museum itself, a former private villa on the Promenade, is part of the story: this is where that world lived, entertained, and sat for portraits.