Our miniseries rounding up the best summer exhibitions along the French Riviera continues in Monaco where luxury has a rendezvous with intellectualism.
While the 2025 summer exhibitions in Nice punctuate the Year of the Ocean as flamboyant exclamation marks, Monaco displays its curated culture with characteristic sophistication, putting the accent on lasting values. At their core this year: priceless modern art, classic fashion, and iconic Hollywood glamour. But the environmentally-forward nation also leads the way when it comes to the planet’s sustainability, and that is reflected in several of its exhibitions. Nowhere in the world will you find such a breadth and quality of topics as in the Principality of just 2 square kilometers (0.8 sq.miles). The main venues are neatly bundled within walking distance, and some even set in a veritable oasis of peace and calm, as a reminder that for all its high-rise buildings, Monaco is never more than a mile from nature.
Of the many exhibitions, here are our unmissable highlights:
Grace #1 | Palais Princier | Through 14 September, 2025
The Prince’s Palace holds many fascinating exhibitions, permanent and visiting. And naturally, the late and much-adored Grace Kelly is a recurring theme, revisited from many different angles. In this show, the Oscar-winning Hollywood star turned HSH Princess Gracia Patricia of Monaco becomes Grace again. Her flawless, porcelain face on magazine covers and her regal poise in public appearances hid a very simple, down-to-earth girl, wife, and mother who pressed flowers, captured her children’s laughter on film, and collected mementos like precious stones. Her hat and her glasses sit nonchalantly beside her beloved Kelly bag. Her favourite rose fragrance fills the room, mingling with birdsong. We glimpse the barefoot girl from Jamaican beaches who chose love over spotlights, and the doting mother who diligently did her duty as the Principality’s First Lady but always put her children first.
This is a luminous, intimate, and tender Grace behind the scenes, revealed through the treasures she touched and the lens through which she saw the world. As a bonus, your ticket to the exhibition grants you access to the Palace’s other exhibitions.
Coco Chanel’s Roaring Twenties | Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Paloma | Through 5 October, 2025
Charismatic women are forever en vogue in Monaco, and Coco Chanel was definitely one of them. The Villa Paloma exhibition Les Années Folles tells the story of how her choice of substance over sparkle changed fashion forever, and how she empowered women to liberate themselves by refusing to dress for the male gaze.
In 1919, after a tough breakup, the Paris-based fashion designer fled to Monaco to mend her broken heart. She had already opened a boutique there in 1914, and now set out to transform her coastal refuge into a fashion revolution. While women in post-WWI Europe were dripping with pearls and frippery, Coco perfected a different kind of glamour with jersey sportswear and understated elegance which would ultimately influence avant-garde artists.
This show is a time machine where Picasso’s canvases flirt with Chanel’s revolutionary little black dress and Jean Cocteau’s creations complement her stylistic simplicity. Man Ray’s photographs capture the wild parties where Russian ballet dancers and French seamstresses redefined what it meant to be chic. With contemporary artist Chloé Royer’s sculptures serving as modern mirrors to Chanel’s century-old vision, you will understand why the Riviera became the birthplace of effortless luxury and boundary-transcending art.
Cactus | Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Sauber | Through 11 January, 2026
The art-meets-nature exhibition at the New National Museum takes on a prickly subject, examining cacti as objects that challenge our ideas of nature, art and cultivation. Native to the world’s ‘torrid zone’, cacti shaped nineteenth-century horticulture and inspired architects, designers and filmmakers who embraced their extravagant, sometimes unsettling presence.
Over 200 works, from David Hockney’s digital drawings to Eisenstein’s film excerpts and a Gufram coat rack, reveal how these plants have intrigued and fascinated artists with their convention-defying shapes and histories. The show extends beyond museum walls to Villa Sauber’s gardens, transformed into a theatrical landscape by Monaco’s Jardin Exotique.
Monaco and the Napoleon(s), intertwined destinies | Grimaldi Forum | Through 31 August, 2025
This Grimaldi Forum exhibition explores how Monaco’s rulers turned their principality into a crucial player in the Napoleon saga. While the self-declared emperor was busy conquering Europe in the early 1800s and most European rulers bent the knee or fled into exile, the Grimaldi family played diplomatic chess on their Rock, hosting Napoleon’s family and forging alliances that outlasted his battles.
Under the high patronage of HSH Prince Albert II, visitors can marvel at a remarkable array of rare artworks, historical documents and prized artefacts, notably those of renowned Monaco based collectors David and Mikhail Yakobachvili. Their collection provides the backbone, but the real story belongs to Monaco’s princes who mastered imperial diplomacy. Princess Stéphanie’s son Louis Ducruet serves as the exhibition’s ambassador, bridging past and present in this story of how Monaco wrote itself into the footnotes of history and somehow ended up owning the whole page.
Couleurs ! | Grimaldi Forum Monaco | Through 31 August, 2025
Over 100 treasures from the Centre Pompidou have found their way to Monaco, making the Grimaldi Forum explode with colour. This exhibition is an intriguing expedition through the emotional landscape of colour that would make the Fauves themselves smile with delight.
While your eyes feast on the works of Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Fernand Léger, Tamara de Lempicka, Andy Warhol, René Magritte, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Yves Klein, Robert Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Bonnard, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Georg Baselitz and other luminaries, your ears and nose are also treated to a cornucopia of delightful impressions. Music and perfume are skillfully orchestrated in harmony with the paintings, transforming the simple act of seeing color into a multisensory experience. By the time you step back into Monaco’s golden summer light, the whole world seems to shimmer with a few extra nuances.
Méditerranée 2050 | Musée Océanographique | Through 1 January, 2030
But wait – Monaco is not just glitz and glam. It is also a world-renowned pioneer of ocean conservation, with Prince Albert II at the helm and the Musée Océanographique as its nucleus. Every year, the museum mounts impressive art exhibitions and installations with the goal of educating and sensitising. Fittingly for the Year of the Ocean which is currently themed all over the French Riviera, the museum’s flagship exhibition Méditerranée 2050 is an immersive journey through four distinct worlds that each tell part of the Mediterranean’s story. Oceanomania brings the sea’s ancient glory to life around a towering sperm whale sculpture, while Oceano Monaco celebrates the principality’s century of marine pioneering through an interactive game where you manage underwater ecosystems. Oceano Odyssey then plunges you into a dazzling future vision of the vast Pelagos Sanctuary, before My Oceano Med invites you to join the growing tally of conservation pledges. It’s a clever way to showcase how a sea covering less than 1% of the world’s oceans harbors 17,000 species while warming 20% faster than anywhere else, leaving you surprisingly hopeful about what collective action might still accomplish.
The smallest cosmopolitan metropolis on Earth proves that scale is no measure of significance. Whole universes unfold behind every corner, effortlessly blending seeming opposing concepts like business, luxury, art, and sustainability. Along the same lines, exhibitions do not compete but rather complement each other. Each one is distinctly different and retains its own rhythm and revelation, and is yet a piece of the holistic, vibrant Monegasque art scene. What emerges is a portrait of a city that understands curation as an act of authorship which testifies to Monaco’s unique ability to make the grand feel personal and the personal feel universal. When the world often mistakes noise for significance, Monaco’s cultural summer offers something rarer: the confidence to let art speak for itself.
“Even if you are a small country, as we are, that doesn’t prevent you from having big aspirations.”
— Albert II, Prince of Monaco
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All images as credited; lead image © RIVIERA BUZZ