From October 31, 2026, to April 12, 2027, the Centre Pompidou-Metz is bringing together more than eighty works by Séraphine Louis, including six giant canvases from 1928-1930. This exhibition moves the painter beyond the realm of naive art and places her firmly within modernism.

She signed her work "without rival." Séraphine Louis, known as "Séraphine de Senlis," painted with Ripolin, the industrial lacquer used in construction, sometimes placing her canvases on the floor, sometimes vertically, and would return to the cracks to rework them. The Centre Pompidou-Metz opens the exhibition with six giant canvases from 1928-1930, on loan from the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Senlis, and the Maillol Museum: leaves bearing eyes, bleeding fruit, feathers transformed into petals, overflowing the frame.

Large formats were then the domain of history painting; she incorporated fruit into them. More than eighty of the hundred or so catalogued works are brought together, representing almost all that remains of her oeuvre.

These are followed by displays on botany, the palette, spirituality, and on Wilhelm Uhde, the German collector for whom she worked as a housekeeper and who, from 1912 onward, purchased her work: he provided her with the stability that made large-format paintings possible, until the 1929 stock market crash ruined him. She was interned in 1932 at Clermont-de-l’Oise and died there ten years later without ever picking up a paintbrush again.

She was relegated to the category of Naïve art, that shelf where painters without formal qualifications are placed. The museum is taking her out and placing her at the heart of modern art. In front of Fruits, two meters of Ripolin paint on canvas, the signature seems modest.

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