Paris Art Digest #07: What Paris Is Showing Right Now

Large-scale paintings of everyday Black American life — not scenes, portraits. Figures seen whole, with the unhurried attention of someone who has been looking for a very long time. Taylor’s first major retrospective in France arrives at the right moment: the Marais in August, when the museum breathes, is the right place to spend time with canvases that ask for exactly that.

Les Beaux-Arts de Paris gives its newly graduated artists the shop windows of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. No ticket. No opening hours. A walk through one of the most beautiful quarters of Paris, emptied of its usual crowd, with a different kind of art show in every window. The street is the exhibition space.

The inaugural exhibition of the Fondation Cartier’s new home — 600 works, over 100 artists, four decades of a collection. Jean Nouvel has rethought 6,500 m² inside the historic Palais-Royal. It closes August 23. Go for the art. Go for the architecture. Go before it becomes impossible to say you were there for the beginning.

Jean Nouvel designed the Fondation Cartier’s original building on Boulevard Raspail in 1994. He has now redesigned 6,500 m² inside the Palais-Royal — a 17th-century palace turned into one of the most architecturally ambitious contemporary art spaces in Paris. A self-guided trail runs through the Machines d’architecture section: Kingelez’s utopian city for Kinshasa, Mendini’s Petite cathédrale, Ishigami’s chapel. Architectural tour in English: August 23.

Paris built its covered arcades between 1800 and 1850 — iron frameworks, glass roofs, mosaic floors, shop-fronts unchanged since the July Monarchy. Mid-August is the only time of year when you can walk the full length of the Galerie Vivienne without breaking your stride. The architecture is extraordinary. Almost no one is there.

The former Vincennes railway line converted into an elevated park running from Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes. New York’s High Line was designed by its architects. Below, the Viaduc des Arts houses workshops: luthiers, embroiderers, cabinet-makers, bookbinders. One of the quietest walks in Paris. In August, it belongs to you.

Four new canvases by a contemporary painter placed in direct dialogue with Monet’s Nymphéas. The Orangerie’s contrepoint contemporain format gives one living artist the room — and the responsibility — of responding to the permanent collection. Lenoir’s work and the Nymphéas in the same light: one of the most quietly rewarding combinations currently available in Paris. Closes August 24.

From Caravaggio to Pierre Huyghe — 100 works tracing how darkness has shaped the Western imagination. Two weeks left.

Before Kandinsky, before Mondrian. The visionary canvases made in secret for a temple that was never built. Three weeks left.

A Haussmann facade you can climb. A room where the ceiling is someone else’s floor. Erlich’s large-scale illusions are among the most quietly unsettling works in Paris this summer.