Ancient and modern painting on the programme

It's the season of good resolutions. So what better way than to promise yourself a visit to the best art exhibitions announced for 2023? Most of them are museum exhibitions and, of course, there are no works of art for sale, but there are thousands of paintings, sculptures, photographs and installations to inspire you as an artist or collector. The January issue of Beaux Arts Magazine is already a treat, announcing a first half-year "rich in highly desirable exhibitions", from the Venetian master Giovanni Bellini to the sultry actress Sarah Bernhardt, not forgetting Claude Monet's brother, the Vikings, Philippe Starck or Warhol and Basquiat, not to mention a few nuggets of contemporary art... Here is a small French selection in the painting category, especially for you.

In terms of paintings, Caravaggio enthusiasts will not want to miss the incredible collection of works of art signed by the master's emulators, such as Battistello, Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione or Bernardo Cavallino, assembled by an Italian engineer who died in 2015 and exhibited for the first time in France, at the Magnin Museum in Dijon from 29 March to 25 June and at the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence from 15 July to 29 October. One would think that all the paintings for sale, each inspired in their own way by Caravaggio's tenebrism, were for him!

To keep the Italian charm alive, head for the walls of the Louvre, from June 7 to January 8, 2024, where the jewels of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, famous for its drawings and paintings by Bellini, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Gentileschi, Masaccio, Parmigianino and Titian, will be revealed in majesty... While Giovanni Bellini (around 1430-1516), a great master of colorito, the famous technique of the Venetian painters of the Renaissance, a brilliant renovator of Venetian painting with "his fluid touch that gives lyricism and poetry to his landscapes" and one of the first to use the oil technique developed by the Flemish, will occupy the temporary exhibition rooms of the charming Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris from 3 March to 17 July.

Giovanni Bellini and workshop, Madonna and Child

In the category of clash of the pictorial titans, Manet and Degas will be reunited at the Musée d'Orsay from 28 March to 23 July. A high-flying confrontation between "the visionary painter who broke the rules of academicism and paved the way for the modernities to come, author of two of the most scandalous female nudes in the history of art, Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass", and the "spearhead of the Impressionists, a virtuoso of pastels who left his mark with his cinematic framing before its time and a vertiginous sense of movement". Although the two painters may not have been friends, visitors will nonetheless appreciate their "guest stars": Manet's Modiste, L'Enfant à l'épée and Nana will face the Ironworkers, the Naked Woman at the Tub and the disturbing couple in Degas' Intérieur.

In Paris, on the same dates or thereabouts, you can go to the Musée du Luxembourg to hear the very interesting story of Léon Monet (1836-1917), Claude's older brother and patron of many other Impressionists, including Renoir, Sisley and Pissaro. Léon was a chemist and had founded the Industrial Society of Rouen. He liked nothing better than to buy directly from the artists the paintings for sale representing the landscapes in which he and his brother had grown up in Le Havre, or those in which his professional career had flourished in Normandy. The exhibition brings together true Impressionist masterpieces as well as some very touching personal documents, such as Claude Monet's first sketchbook, which has never been shown before.

It will be a good idea to go to Giverny to admire the "children of Impressionism" from 31 March to 2 July. Whether they are well-behaved or rambunctious, whether they are represented by Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet or Camille Pissaro, these dear blonde heads populate countless canvases inspired by the families of the artists, but also by those of their friends, their art dealers or the buyers of their paintings for sale...

And on the subject of painting, you should not miss the exhibition that the Centre Pompidou-Metz will be devoting to Suzanne Valadon from 15 April to 11 September. Finally, the woman who was one of the first women admitted to the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts and who dared to paint her young lover nude will have the right to a major retrospective in the East of France, where we have already come to admire the famous Lancement de filet at the Musée des beaux-arts in Nancy. In addition to being a brilliant and unforgettable painter, Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) had a life worthy of a novel, notably with her troublemaker son Maurice Utrillo and his friend. She wanted to become a circus acrobat before posing for Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec or Puvis de Chavannes at the age of 15. We visit her flat and studio above the delightful Montmartre Museum in Paris with great emotion, and she was finally accepted by the irascible Degas as one of their own.

From 31 March to 10 September, the Montmartre museum will be exhibiting paintings, photographs, sculptures, poems and cinematographic works of surrealism by women, bringing together on its walls no less than Meret Oppenheim, Toyen, Mimi Parent, Edith Rimmington, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Lise Deharme, Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, Suzanne Van Damme, Marianne Van Hirtum...

Among the heavyweights who will be making a splash, Basquiat and Warhol will be at the Fondation Louis Vuitton from 5 April to 28 August, and David Hockney at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence from 28 January to 28 May. While the now inescapable high places of immersive art will renew their digital exhibitions into real new generation art galleries: Salvator Dali's paintings will invade the Bassins de Lumière in Bordeaux all year round to the sound of Pink Floyd from 3 February, the majestic Carrières des Lumières in Baux-de-Provence will be covered all year round with paintings by Dutch masters from Vermeer to Van Gogh from 24 February, Chagall and Paul Klee will share the Atelier des Lumières in Paris all year round from 17 February, and the undulations of Art Nouveau inspired by nature will flood the immersive Grand Palais in Paris with Alfons Mucha artworks from 14 March to 13 August.