For the bicentenary of his birth, the Gustave Moreau Museum is opening its home to a living artist and launching a carte blanche exhibition that will be repeated annually. Ali Banisadr, a painter born in Tehran who understands colors, is exhibiting paintings, pastels, and bronzes there until December 7.

This autumn, Gustave Moreau is hosting. In the private mansion where the painter spent forty years amassing sketches, tracings, and unfinished paintings of a world that exists nowhere, the museum is launching an annual carte blanche exhibition for a living artist.

Someone was needed who could stand up to this accumulation of visions. That person will be Ali Banisadr, who understands colors. A synesthete, he associates sounds with shapes and hues, and his canvases teem with tiny crowds, barely formed creatures caught in whirlpools that evoke both battles by Uccello and Persian illuminations: precisely the fever that Moreau cultivated here.

He grew up in Tehran under the bombs, arrived in California at twelve, and painted graffiti in San Francisco before New York. For this occasion, he produced paintings, pastels, and four bronzes, including Gilgamesh and Cyclopes, hung in the apartments as well as in the large studio. Dialogue, he says, interests him more than influence.

One must consider what this implies. Moreau not only bequeathed his house, he transformed it into a museum during his lifetime: in 1895, he commissioned the architect Albert Lafon to renovate the first-floor apartments and convert the two upper levels into studios, connected by a spiral staircase. His will followed in 1897, with one express condition: that the collection remain a single entity. The museum opened in 1903: twenty-five thousand works displayed side by side without chronological order, four thousand drawings in pivoting panels that popped out of the wall. The arrangement has remained unchanged ever since.

Around this, the bicentennial celebrations unfold with an unusual program: a drag performance by Élysée Moon, a solitary Macbeth, and six readings in a closed museum setting that blend Moreau with Breton's Nadja. In a house where nothing has changed for 123 years, that's quite something.

Find our other favorites in our list of the top new exhibitions in Paris.

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GUSTAVE MOREAU NATIONAL MUSEUM
From September 9 to December 7, 2026
14 rue de La Rochefoucauld, 75009 - Metro: Trinité (Line 12)
Open daily except Tuesdays, 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Admission: €8 - Reduced rate: €6 - Free on the first Sunday of the month
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