Photo : Musée Marmottan Monet
Landscape Stories: From Monet to Hockney (1890-2026)
Art meets history in this profound exhibition that maps out the changing face of our world through more than a century of landscapes. Far from mere scenery, these works pulse with the memories of wars, utopias, and climate crises that have shaped our shared timeline. It is an essential journey for those who see in every painting, sculpture, and video a direct reflection of our own human struggle.
Musée Marmottan Monet (Paris 16th)
About
Histoires de paysages (1890-2026) at the Musée Marmottan Monet invites you to explore the intersection between landscape art and historical events over the past century. Through eleven thematic stations, this exhibition demonstrates how artists have utilized various media, from painting to video, to capture the anxieties and transformations of our world. Starting with Claude Monet’s Nymphéas, the journey traces the evolution of the genre as a witness to human experience. Tickets range from 0 to 14 euros, and the museum offers extended opening hours until 21:00 on Thursdays to help you plan your visit.
The 20th century, opening with a world war, renewed the bond between landscape and history. Many had believed in a separation, in the triumph of a landscape that had become autonomous. It was, in fact, a new alliance: the union of two forces helping each other to confront the world's violence. Two forces are not too many when facing what stuns us.
The era invented new, hybrid forms, surpassing and canceling any notion of hierarchy between genres, capable of confronting history by combining their qualities. This exhibition aspires to give visible and intelligible form to this field of forces, proposing a journey through eleven stations that examine the relationship between landscape and history along a chrono-thematic path. Beginning with Claude Monet’s gesture of gifting two Water Lilies to France the day after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, to celebrate the victory, this pilgrimage testifies to the constant resistance of landscape as an agent of contemporary history. It will address wars, the quest for origins, appropriation and nostalgia, interior landscapes, and the interplay between nature and abstraction. It will explore the relationship between landscape and nation. It will discuss the relationship to time as much as to space, and how landscape as an active force comes to cover history, between mourning and oblivion. It will also examine how the landscape has imposed itself as a witness to describe our era, in its aspirations as well as its crises, its utopias as well as its anxieties. Today, the landscape is not just a matter of pictorial genre as it once was. In photography, sculpture, video, and painting, artists are attempting to give form to our history: our history in the landscape.
Eleven chrono-thematic sections structure this exhibition: Water Lilies for History, Landscapes at War, Country/Landscape, Abstracting Nature, At the Origin, Interior Landscapes, Past-Present-Future, Local-Global-Total, After History the Landscape, Landscapes of the Anthropocene, Lost Paradises? These are the stages of a journey, the chapters of a history of our century, whose memory rests in the landscape.
Our take on this event
Hosted at the Musée Marmottan Monet, the exhibition Histoires de paysages examines the enduring relationship between landscape and history. From 1890 to 2026, the selection showcases how landscape has functioned as an active force in documenting wars, internal shifts, and environmental crises. Moving away from traditional genres, the featured artworks in sculpture, photography, and film reflect on the collective memory embedded within our surroundings.
The display is organized into eleven chronological stations, including topics such as War Landscapes, Abstracting Nature, and Anthropocene Landscapes. This structure guides visitors through a profound inquiry into how our era is represented, moving from the post-1918 period to contemporary utopian and dystopian visions.
The exhibition runs from October 2, 2026, to January 31, 2027. The museum is open on Thursdays from 10:00 to 21:00, and from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00. Entry prices are between 0 and 14 euros. To complement your experience, an audioguide is available for 4 euros in both English and French.
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