A landmark exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris is showcasing nearly 400 masterworks from the Centre Pompidou's extensive graphic arts collection, offering a comprehensive look at how drawing has evolved from a preparatory medium into a standalone art form throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Titled "Dessins sans limite. Chefs-d'œuvre de la collection du Centre Pompidou" (Limitless Drawings: Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou Collection), the show features iconic artists including Matisse, Chagall, Kandinsky, and Picasso alongside contemporary figures who have pushed the boundaries of what constitutes a drawing. The exhibition, which runs from December 16, 2025, to March 15, 2026, draws from the museum's rarely seen trove of 35,000 works on paper, presenting pieces that have never been displayed publicly or have not been shown for decades. The show is organized into four thematic sections that challenge traditional definitions and demonstrate how artists have transformed line, mark, and form across different media and disciplines.
The Centre Pompidou's graphic arts collection, one of the world's largest repositories of twentieth and twenty-first century works on paper, was largely assembled through the acquisition of complete artist estates and studio collections. Curators Claudine Grammont and Anne Montfort-Tanguy explained that foundation collections from artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Oskar Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay have been instrumental in shaping the museum's holdings. These studio archives contain drawings from every stage of the creative process, from initial conceptual sketches to fully realized compositions. The most recent addition to the collection is the estate of Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, which entered the museum's graphic arts cabinet in 2020. The collection's formal establishment dates to 1974, when Pierre Georgel was tasked by founding director Pontus Hulten with creating a dedicated department for works on paper, definitively elevating drawing to the status of a major art form within the National Museum of Modern Art.
The curatorial team structured the exhibition around four conceptual approaches to drawing: "Study," "Narrate," "Trace," and "Animate," deliberately avoiding a strict chronological progression in favor of dynamic, unexpected juxtapositions. Grammont and Montfort-Tanguy noted that they were unable to include a significant portion of their surrealist drawings and their art brut collection, which was recently displayed at the Grand Palais, but this limitation prompted them to explore the collection from fresh perspectives. The exhibition consequently emphasizes recent acquisitions and works that have remained in storage for extended periods, offering visitors a rare opportunity to discover hidden gems alongside acknowledged masterpieces. The curators described their approach as a "sentimental choice" to place drawing at the center of all artistic disciplines, emphasizing its fundamental nature as an "antelanguage" that connects to universal human experience.
The "Study" section examines drawing's traditional role as a preparatory tool and foundation of artistic training, featuring works such as André Derain's watercolor and graphite piece "La Chute de Phaéton, char du soleil" from 1905-1906, and Pablo Picasso's "Femme à la tête rouge" from winter 1906-1907. These pieces demonstrate how artists used paper to experiment with form and composition before executing final works in other media. The "Narrate" portion explores drawing's capacity to chronicle both personal and collective histories, from Albert Marquet's and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's street scenes to Marc Chagall's rare views of shtetl life and Georges Rouault's brothel interiors. This section also addresses drawing as a medium for social critique and introspection, featuring works by contemporary artists such as Miriam Cahn and Marlene Dumas, whose charcoal pieces reveal deeply personal narratives.
The "Trace" section investigates mark-making as a direct physical record, presenting blind drawing experiments by Robert Morris and William Anastasi, performance documentation by choreographer Trisha Brown, and body imprints by Giuseppe Penone. It also highlights how twentieth-century artists like Olivier Debré, Henri Michaux, and Roland Barthes looked to non-Western calligraphy to revitalize their graphic vocabulary. The final "Animate" section foregrounds drawing's relationship to time and movement, showcasing Georges Braque's, Picasso's, and Juan Gris's collages as fragments of reality that compress past, present, and future. The exhibition concludes with a monumental, ephemeral wall drawing by British artist Richard Wright that transforms the architectural space itself, alongside animation works like Robert Breer's "A Man and His Dog Out for Air," where abstract lines morph into figurative forms in continuous flux.
Throughout the twentieth century, avant-garde movements fundamentally altered drawing's status and definition. The Dadaists' formal experiments, Cubists' papier collé innovations, and Surrealists' exquisite corpses demonstrated that drawing could be more than a linear representation on paper. The invention of collage at the beginning of the twentieth century expanded drawing's dimensionality, while contemporary practitioners have extended its reach into photography, cinema, and digital media. South African artist William Kentridge's 1990s animated drawings, which denounced apartheid, exemplify how the medium's apparent simplicity and spontaneity make it an effective tool for political commentary. Today, artists tear, lacerate, and manipulate paper supports, create works through tracing and decalcomania, and produce large-scale installations that challenge conventional boundaries. Despite these transformations, the curators emphasize that drawing remains accessible and universal—a practice everyone has engaged with, from childhood scribbles to sophisticated artistic expressions—in an era increasingly dominated by digital technology.
The exhibition is located at the Grand Palais, 17 avenue du Général-Eisenhower, 75008 Paris, and features over 300 drawings spanning more than a century of artistic innovation. By presenting these works without limiting definitions, the show argues that drawing has become a laboratory for infinite possibilities, a medium where artists can explore the full spectrum of formal and conceptual concerns. As Grammont and Montfort-Tanguy stated, drawing is essential precisely because it connects us to our origins and to ourselves at a moment when mechanical processes threaten to overshadow manual creation. The pencil in hand, they suggest, represents an important act of resistance and return to fundamental human creativity.
