The Grimaldi Forum’s bold summer exhibition Couleurs! offers a surprising and exquisitely orchestrated experience for the senses.
When Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck first exhibited their wildly coloured portraits at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, the art world recoiled in shock. Celebrated Critic Louis Vauxcelles surveyed the room of blazing canvases and declared the artists “fauves” – wild beasts – for their audacious use of pure, unmixed colour straight from the tube.
What Vauxcelles witnessed in that notorious “Cage Centrale” was something far more profound than artistic rebellion. He was seeing the moment colour broke free from its centuries-old duty to merely describe reality and declared its independence as a language of pure emotion. As Matisse himself would later reflect, “Color was not given to us in order to reproduce nature. Color was given to us so that we can express our emotions.”
More than a century later, that revolutionary spirit continues to ripple through art history, and this summer the Grimaldi Forum Monaco captures its most thrilling works in Couleurs! The exhibition, running from 8 July to 31 August 2025, represents the latest in the Forum’s tradition of mounting spectacular summer shows that rival the world’s great museums.
This year, a remarkable selection of over one hundred masterpieces on loan from the Centre Pompidou’s collection (temporarily relocated as the Paris museum undergoes extensive renovations) explores something we encounter daily but rarely truly grasp: how colour shapes not just what we see, but how we feel.
Curated by Didier Ottinger (pictured below), deputy director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne and a leading expert in twentieth-century abstraction, the lineup reads like a Who’s Who of artistic revolutionaries: 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 many others.
They come from different schools, countries, and times, but they all share one revolutionary insight: colour transcends mere representation to reveal profound emotional weight, spiritual resonance, and psychological charge.
Here Couleurs ! takes a bold step further. Rather than simply hanging paintings on a monochrome wall, the exhibition transforms the gallery into an immersive environment, “a multi-sensory journey”, in the words of its creators.
Recognising that if colour affects us so profoundly, the experience should not be limited to our eyes alone, thescenography incorporates sound and scent in unprecedented ways. Seven monochromatic rooms are filled with compositions by Roque Rivas, created in collaboration with IRCAM, the Centre Pompidou’s institute for acoustic and musical research, and ambient fragrances developed by perfumer Alexis Dadier with the historic Maison Fragonard of Grasse. The result is an experience in which colour becomes atmosphere, emotion, and memory.
Consider how the exhibition leads you through distinct chromatic environments. Your eyes adapt to the hue of each space, but light, spatial rhythm, scent, and even the resonance of sound are orchestrated to make you feel as though you are stepping inside colour itself. Within moments, blue is no longer simply something you see; it becomes something you inhabit. A mood. A state. As Picasso once famously said, “Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”
This sensory approach reflects decades of research into how colour shapes human psychology and physiology. We know that certain hues in hospital rooms can accelerate healing, that restaurants use specific shades to influence appetite, that colour can alter our pulse and breathing. Artists have long understood this intuitively. Yves Klein spent years developing his signature International Klein Blue not merely as a pigment, but as what he called “a means of touching the infinite.”
The exhibition extends this enquiry into the domestic sphere through a series of carefully conceived installations that explore how colour functions in everyday life. Iconic pieces by designers such as Ron Arad, Jean Prouvé, Ettore Sottsass, and Philippe Starck are seamlessly integrated into the exhibition narrative. Architect and designer Marion Mailaender has reimagined these objects in immersive interior settings, bridging the distance between gallery and lived experience. Here, a vivid chair or lamp does more than furnish a room: it recalibrates its emotional charge.
William Chatelain, the Grimaldi Forum’s scenographer, has conceived the exhibition flow as a journey of unfolding perception. Visitors move through spaces that echo the discoveries of twentieth-century artists, those moments whencolour ceased to serve representation and became a subject in its own right.
When Matisse created his late paper cut-outs, he said he was “drawing directly in colour”, allowing it to speak on its own terms.
When Kandinsky painted his first fully abstract work, he was following colour’s call into the unknown. The artist, who experienced synaesthesia, believed colours could produce musical tones and spiritual vibrations – a phenomenon that Couleurs ! transforms from personal neurological experience into collective reality. Through Rivas’s sound compositions and Dadier’s scent work, visitors can now experience something approaching Kandinsky’s unique perceptual world, where blue might ‘sound’ like a cello and yellow carries the ‘scent’ of brass.
The timing could hardly be more apt. As Monaco’s summer light reaches its most crystalline intensity, Couleurs !encourages visitors to reimagine what they are seeing when they look around: the sparkling azure of the Mediterranean, the sunkissed limestone façades of the Principality, the dense green of the surrounding mountains. And long after leaving the exhibition, its invitation to a dialogue with the world around us lingers on our minds.
— Salvador Dali
Couleurs!
8 July through 31 August, 2025 | open daily 10 am to 8 pm (late night on Thursday until 10 pm)
Grimaldi Forum Monaco, Hall Ravel | 10, avenue Princesse Grace – 98000 Monaco
Ticket: €14, concessions available | Info and ticket office tél. +377 99 99 3000
E-mail : ticket@grimaldiforum.com | tickets may also be purchased online
Exhibition rooms are air-conditioned
Lead image © RIVIERA BUZZ; all other images courtesy Grimaldi Forum Monaco
PHOTO CREDITS
Henri MATISSE
Grand Intérieur rouge, 1948
Oil on canvas | 146 x 97 cm | Purchase, 1950 | Attribution, 1950
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris | Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle
credit: Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Audrey Laurans/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn, In the USA and Spain only: © Succession H. Matisse. Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Audrey Laurans/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
René MAGRITTE
Les marches de l’été, 1938
Oil on canvas | 60 x 73 cm | Purchase 1991
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle
Photo credit: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
© Adagp, Paris, 2025
Salvador DALÌ
Hallucination partielle. Six images de Lénine sur un piano, 1931
Oil and varnish on canvas | 114 x 146 cm | State purchase, 1938
Attribution, 1938Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle
Photo credit: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Hélène Mauri/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali / Adagp, Paris, 2025
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