1927: The Year That Changed the Way We See

In March 2027, the Musée de l'Orangerie will mark an anniversary that coincides with its very reason for being: the centenary of the installation of Claude Monet's Water Lilies. Rather than simply commemorating that moment, however, the museum broadens its perspective. Created in close collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, 1927. Le temps retrouvé (1927. Time Regained) uses the year in which Monet's monumental paintings found their permanent home as a starting point to explore a wider cultural landscape shaped by contradictions, rapid change and new artistic imaginaries. The exhibition brings together more than 150 works - paintings, photographs, sculptures, films, architectural projects, design objects, books and archival documents - all created or published in 1927. Instead of following a chronological narrative, it reconstructs the atmosphere of a year in which modernity took many different forms. While the Water Lilies were being inaugurated at the Orangerie, Paris resonated with the jazz of Josephine Baker, Charles Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget after the first solo transatlantic flight, Marcel Proust's Time Regained was published posthumously, La Coupole opened its doors in Montparnasse, and debates surrounding colonialism and profound social change intensified. Rather than presenting an exclusively art-historical survey, the exhibition uses cinema as its narrative thread. Six films released in 1927 introduce six thematic sections, connecting artistic languages that might otherwise seem unrelated. Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman is placed in dialogue with René Magritte's Surrealism; Fritz Lang's Metropolis explores both the fascination with and anxiety about machines through photography, painting and design; Abel Gance's Napoléon, with its pioneering three-screen projection system, becomes a reflection on new ways of experiencing visual space; while The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talking picture, opens a discussion on African American culture, mass entertainment and the racial stereotypes embedded in the society of the late 1920s. One of the exhibition's most compelling aspects is precisely this constant movement between artistic production and historical context. The year 1927 emerges as a moment in which the avant-garde and Art Deco, cosmopolitanism and colonialism, technological innovation and political tensions coexisted. Works by Tamara de Lempicka, René Magritte, Eileen Gray, František Kupka, August Sander, André Kertész, Alexander Calder and many others are presented not as isolated masterpieces but as interconnected elements within a broader network of cultural exchanges. More than a celebration of a symbolic anniversary, 1927. Le temps retrouvé reconstructs the atmosphere of a year in which art, cinema, literature, music and society seemed to evolve simultaneously along intersecting paths. The centenary of Monet's Water Lilies thus becomes an opportunity to revisit a pivotal moment in which the cultural landscape of the twentieth century took definitive shape.