After a year rich in exhibitions and artistic highlights in 2025, the museum will close from 6 October until 6 December. This will be a moment of respite, a welcome break, allowing time to prepare a brand-new exhibition of the collections, which will hold many surprises.
While drafting its new Scientific and Cultural Project, the museum took the time to reflect on what makes up its unique identity, the strengths and weaknesses of its collections, and the direction it will take in the years to come. This raised several strategic questions: what framework should be adopted for the permanent exhibition? What direction should be taken for future acquisitions and restorations? What subjects should be addressed in future exhibitions? And, above all, what role should the museum play in Arles' increasingly rich and varied cultural and artistic ecosystem?
Always favoring an experimental approach, the museum is now reinventing itself in the form of a special exhibition that reaffirms, with nearly 100 artists and 300 works, its status as the art museum of the City of Arles, sensitive to its heritage while remaining open to all forms of artistic creation.
The new layout no longer follows a chronological trajectory from ancient to contemporary art, but a thematic logic, nourished by the dialogue between eras and fully embracing the diversity of the collections, artistic genres and imaginations.
As visitors move through the rooms, five themes unfold in succession: History, Portraiture, the Body, Landscape and Image. In a constant back-and-forth movement, the ancient art collection, representative of an academic tradition that favors history as a subject, finds resonance in the photography, video and sound art collections, while the modern and contemporary art collection, composed of works by artists who challenged this academicism to promote new ways of representing and creating, re-establishes links with works from the past, which become real subjects of research for today's artists.
Regularly, a recent loan or acquisition is added to the exhibition and echoes the emblematic works in the collections, such as the nymph in love with Narcissus gazing at her reflection in the waters of the Liriope fountain, the subject of Jacques Réattu's last great painting, currently undergoing restoration and which will be unveiled to the public for the first time in over 80 years.
