Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou’s collection
December 16, 2025
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March 15, 2026
With over 35,000 drawings, the Centre Pompidou’s graphic art collection is one of the world’s largest collections. For the first time, nearly 300 works by 120 artists including Dubuffet, Basquiat, Delaunay, Kentridge and many others reveal, at the Grand Palais, a constantly reinvented art of drawing.
With over 35,000 drawings, the Centre Pompidou’s graphic art collection is one of the world’s largest collections of works on paper from the 20th and 21st centuries. Exceptionally rich and diverse, this collection has never before been the subject of a major exhibition devoted exclusively to it. Dessins sans limite offers a unique opportunity to unveil these priceless treasures for the first time and to understand how this medium was completely reinvented over the course of the 20th century.
Many artists have embraced this original and cathartic form of expression to push the boundaries of art, transforming drawing today into a laboratory of infinite possibilities. Beyond the sheet of paper or the traditional sketchbook, drawing now extends to other surfaces—up to the wall and the installation space—and opens itself to other practices, whether photographic, cinematic, or digital.
The renewed interest shown by younger generations of artists bears witness to the remarkable vitality of this elemental and accessible medium. The exhibition highlights major works from the collection rarely shown to the public, including pieces by Balthus, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Sonia Delaunay, Jean Dubuffet, George Grosz, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Amadeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Karel Appel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roland Barthes, Robert Breer, Trisha Brown, Marlène Dumas, William Kentridge, Robert Longo, Giuseppe Penone, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Antoni Tàpies.
With nearly 300 works by 120 artists, the exhibition offers a sensitive and subjective exploration of the Graphic Arts Cabinet’s collection, structured around four themes—studying, telling, tracing, and animating—without chronological constraints, and through never-before-seen dialogues between the works.
