Geste, Vitesse, Mouvement: a Georges Mathieu retrospective at the Monnaie de Paris, with the Centre Pompidou

From 11 April to 7 September 2025, the Monnaie de Paris presents “Georges Mathieu. Geste, Vitesse, Mouvement” (gesture, speed, movement), a retrospective co-produced with the Centre Pompidou. Chronological and thematic, the exhibition retraces the artist’s career from the 1940s, when his search for new forms led him to create Lyrical Abstraction and to champion an international Abstract Expressionism, to the 1990s, drawing extensively on the Mathieu collection of the Musée national d’art moderne and on the collection of the Georges Mathieu Committee.

The venue itself is a tribute: more than fifty years after the Dix-huit moments de la conscience occidentale (Eighteen Moments of Western Consciousness) shown at the Hôtel de la Monnaie in 1971, Mathieu returns to the Quai de Conti. Les Nymphes de Diane, a monumental composition conceived for the grand staircase, is reinstalled in the very spot for which it was painted. The exhibition also sets the paintings alongside the artist’s creations for the monetary institution, most emblematically the 10-franc coin struck in 1974. Visitors who bring one along are granted reduced admission.

Among the emblematic pieces of the exhibition, the first room opens with three monumental works: Les Capétiens partout ! (1954), La Bataille de Bouvines (1954) and La Victoire de Denain (1963), which entered the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne on the occasion of the exhibition. Other large formats follow, including Hommage au Maréchal de Turenne (1952), the artist’s first large-format painting, and Hommage à Monsieur de Vauban (1969), hung facing each other, as well as La Libération d’Orléans par Jeanne d’Arc (1982), a rare abstracto-figurative work.

The exhibition is curated by Christian Briend, chief heritage curator and head of the modern collections department at the Centre Pompidou, Éric de Chassey, director general of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art¹1Éric de Chassey has since been appointed director of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, taking office on 1 July 2025., and Béatrice Coullaré, head of conservation and collections at the Monnaie de Paris. Alongside it, included in the same ticket, “Graffiti x Georges Mathieu” invites six graffiti artists from several generations (JonOne, Lek & Sowat, Nassyo, Camille Gendron, Matt Zerfa) to work in situ around drawings by Mathieu that they selected themselves.

See the exhibition presentation and that of “Graffiti x Georges Mathieu” on the Monnaie de Paris website.