Couleurs ! Chefs-d'oeuvre du centre Pompidou

Exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 8 July – 31 August 2025

Adorned with the colours of the rainbow, modern art proclaims its vocation to break down norms and constraints. However, artists are not stingy with theoretical elaborations and scholarly treatises that seek to demonstrate that each colour is associated with a unique meaning, a symbolic purpose, a poetic universe, a specific therapeutic virtue, and so on.

Offering a unique interpretation of seven colours that are essential to the history of 20th-century modernism through major 20th-century masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou collection, this exhibition catalogue brings together essays that shed light on the iconographic, symbolic and cultural reasons behind modern and contemporary chromaticism. More than a hundred works are brought together, including paintings by some thirty major artists, from Sonia Delaunay to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse and Vassily Kandinsky, as well as design pieces by Ron Arad, Jean Prouvé, Ettore Sottsass and Philippe Starck.