Musée de l'Abbaye - Exhibition: "Résonance

From Saturday 18 October 2025 to Sunday 8 March 2026 at the Musée de l'Abbaye in Saint-Claude.

The Musée de l'Abbaye in Saint-Claude invites you to discover "Résonance": an exhibition in which the works respond to, complement and echo each other from one room to the next.
Paintings, sculptures, photographs and drawings take you on an original journey where the great figures of modern art - Picasso, Braque, Goya - and some of the most exciting contemporary artists of our time, such as Djamel Tatah, Silvia Bächli and Xavier Veilhan, engage in a dialogue.

Ancient and contemporary works in resonance at Saint-Claude
From the archaeological basement to the rooms on the second floor, the visit is transformed into a series of unexpected encounters. Works from the Frac Franche-Comté slip in amongst those from the museum, opening up new perspectives on universal themes: landscape, still life, portraiture, history and heritage.
Here, periods are intertwined: a contemporary drawing illuminates an old painting, a photograph responds to a sculpture. These connections invite us to look differently, to be surprised by the emerging dialogue between the works.

Major artists at the heart of the Musée de l'Abbaye exhibition
BÄCHLI Silvia, BARDONE Guy, BARI Jean-Luc, BARNABÉ Duilio, BEAUDIN André, BERTRAND Jean-Claude, BOURGEAT Lilian, BRAQUE Georges, BRIANCHON Maurice, BUFFET Bernard, CHASTEL Roger, COGNÉE Philippe, COLLIN-THIÉBAUT Gérard, CONNOR Russel, CORAS Josette, DE GOYA Francisco, FOURNEL Jacques, GENIS René, GIRARD Stéphan, GIRAUD Michel, GRIVET Gaël, GUIRAMAND Paul, JAMMES Louis, LESIEUR Pierre, MILROY Lisa, MONINOT Bernard, MORANDI Georgio, MÜHL Roger, MUŠIČ Zoran, OUDOT Roland, PERRAY Régis, PICASSO Pablo, POITEVIN Éric, PRASSINOS Mario, RAETZ Markus, REBEYROLLE Paul, REGLI Peter, REIP Hugues, SCHLIER Daniel, ŠKODA Vladimir, SZENES Arpad, TATAH Djamel, TOREN Amikam, VEILHAN Xavier, VILLON Jacques, WEBER Christoph, YAMASHITA Junji

Josette Coras, a Jura artist worth (re)discovering
The exhibition also highlights Josette Coras (1926 - 2008), an artist from the Franche-Comté region with a powerful, poetic eye. Her engravings, drawings and paintings resonate with the landscapes and heritage that surrounded her, offering a unique interpretation of the Jura region.
To mark the occasion, the museum has chosen to devote one of its graphic arts cabinets to this artist, enabling a wider exploration of her work.
A second room is also dedicated to her, thanks to exceptional loans from the Association of Friends of the Artist, the Jura Departmental Council and her Jura family. While the majority of the works are displayed on the second floor of the museum, some have been deliberately dispersed in other areas, at strategic points along the way. This subtle staging of the works creates cross-fertilisation of meaning, weaving stories between them and making them resonate with their place of exhibition.

The echo continues until 2028
This year's renewal of the works on deposit at the Frac Franche-Comté offers a unique opportunity to bring the two collections together for the long term. Nearly thirty works are on display on the visitor trail, and around twenty will remain in the Abbey museum's permanent galleries until 2028.

The Frac Franche-Comté and the Musée de l'Abbaye
Created in 1982, the Fonds régional d'art contemporain de Franche-Comté is part of a network of 24 Fracs throughout France. Its mission is to enable contemporary art to exist and circulate in every region of France, by building up an open, living collection. Today, the Frac Franche-Comté is recognised for the richness and diversity of its acquisitions, which are among the most dynamic in Europe.
For its part, the Musée de l'Abbaye in Saint-Claude, inaugurated in 2008 and awarded the Musée de France label, is rooted in a singular history: that of a former monastery founded in the IVᵉ century, the archaeological remains of which can still be seen in the basement. Its programme focuses on questions of landscape, both natural and industrial, and highlights the great names of modern art and the Second School of Paris thanks to donations from artists Guy Bardone and René Genis.
Picasso, Braque, Rebeyrolle, Buffet, Estève, Bonnard and Vuillard are all figures who have left their mark on the history of art and continue to inspire the museum's thinking.

By bringing these two institutions together, the Résonance exhibition affirms a shared ambition: to build bridges between eras and aesthetics, to bring the public closer to artistic creation, and to foster an ongoing dialogue between heritage and contemporary art.