ART BASEL PARIS

Art Basel Paris is an art fair under the glass roof of the Grand Palais, on the Avenue Winston Churchill, in late October: two hundred and eleven galleries in 2026, in the nave and on the balconies around it, with invitation days from the Tuesday, a ticketed vernissage on the Thursday afternoon and three public days to the Sunday. It is the Paris fair of Art Basel, which began in Switzerland in 1970, and around it the city keeps an art week of smaller fairs and free shows in the streets.

It took the October place of the FIAC, the French fair, which had been modelled in 1974 on the young fair at Basel.

The FIAC

The FIAC, the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, was started by the dealer Daniel Gervis with the artist Bengt Olson, and first held from 26 January to 3 February 1974 in the old Bastille railway station, with eighty galleries. The Grand Palais does not ordinarily take commercial events, and in 1975 the dealers had to persuade the minister of culture, Michel Guy, to let the fair in. It stayed until 1998, went to the Porte de Versailles in 1999, and came back to the Grand Palais, with the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, in 2006. In 2014 Paul McCarthy’s inflatable Tree, eighty metres of it, was put up in the Place Vendôme, deflated by vandals and not raised again. In 2021, at the Élysée, President Macron thanked its director, Jennifer Flay, for making the fair the “nerve center of the art world.”

In January 2022 the Grand Palais announced that Art Basel’s parent company would hold a fair there in October, the slot the FIAC had held “for close to half a century”. A Paris gallery director, Philippe Boutté, called it “sad and violent”, and the FIAC’s organiser said it “strongly regrets this decision taken abruptly by the public institution”. The new fair was named Paris+ par Art Basel, in part because its seven-year contract kept it from being called Art Basel, Paris; the name, pronounced “paree ploos”, was widely derided as awkward. It ran in 2022 and 2023 in a temporary hall on the Champ-de-Mars, near the Eiffel Tower, and drew forty thousand visitors the first year. Jennifer Flay joined it in 2023 as president of its advisory board. American collectors, Art Basel noted, “preferred the Paris in the fall over a mid-sized Swiss city in the summer”.

The Grand Palais was built for the Universal Exposition of 1900 and opened on 1 May that year, “a monument dedicated by the Republic to the glory of French art”, as its pediment reads. The nave is about two hundred metres long, the roof thirty-five metres high and forty-five under the cupola, with some fourteen thousand square metres of glass. A horse show was held in it every year from 1901 to 1957; it was a military hospital in the First World War, and in August 1944 a fire in a circus’s hay, set off by a German tank attack, badly damaged it. Le Corbusier wanted it pulled down in the 1960s.

It closed in March 2021 for an overhaul of four years and €466 million, its glass roof included, and reopened for the fencing and taekwondo of the 2024 Olympics. That autumn the fair took the Basel name in full and moved in. Art Basel now holds fairs in Basel, Miami Beach, Hong Kong, Paris and, from February 2026, Qatar.

The Nave

The Avant-Première, on the Tuesday, is for the galleries and their principal clients. The VIP days follow by invitation, the Wednesday and the Thursday morning. The Vernissage, on the Thursday from two to eight, is the first session open to a ticket, and the public days run from the Friday to the Sunday, eleven to seven.

The main sector, Galeries, holds the modern and contemporary galleries. Emergence has sixteen solo booths on the balconies around the nave; Premise gives twelve galleries room for singular proposals, which may include work made before 1900; and there is a sector for magazines. On the Friday and Saturday, under the title Oh La La!, galleries rehang their booths with new work. Outside, a free public programme fills nine places in the city; in 2024 Carsten Höller’s Giant Triple Mushroom stood in the Place Vendôme. The fair anchors Paris Art Week, with satellite fairs such as Paris Internationale and Asia Now.

The selling begins before the public arrives. At the Avant-Première in 2025 Hauser & Wirth sold Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild of 1987 for twenty-three million dollars, and White Cube a Julie Mehretu of 2007 for eleven and a half million; more than seventy-three thousand people came over the week.

The 2026 fair, the fifth, is the first under Karim Crippa, director since November 2025. It has two hundred and eleven exhibitors from forty-one countries and territories, nearly thirty of them new to it and more than sixty with spaces in France, and a record twelve booths shared between galleries. The Avant-Première is on 20 October, the Vernissage on 22 October, and the public days from 23 to 25 October. Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, the actress, art-directs Oh La La! on the theme of Myths and Legends; the Conversations move into the Grand Palais Auditorium for the first time; and Keita Miyazaki shows A Symbiotic Form, an installation of recycled car parts and Japanese paper, with Rosenfeld.

What to Know

It runs in the second half of October, from a Tuesday by invitation to the Sunday; in 2026 the public days are 23 to 25 October. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

A day ticket costs €47 and admits once; an evening ticket for the Friday, from five to seven, €40. The Vernissage ticket, €120, comes with a glass of champagne. A permanent ticket for the three public days is €130, and with the Vernissage €220. The Premium Pass, €650, gives the Collectors Lounge, a VIP entrance and a concierge; the Premium Connection Pass, €1,400, adds such things as a private tour of the fair at midnight and a visit to the studio of Jean-Michel Othoniel.

A lounge suit. Nothing is published, and the Vernissage and the VIP days set the register.

The Métro stops at Champs-Élysées-Clemenceau and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The fair’s partner hotels include Le Royal Monceau, the Shangri-La and the Hôtel Castille.

The mistake is to step out for lunch on a day ticket. It admits once, and, in the fair’s words, “exit is final”.

The Court

Art Basel Paris is not the Court’s own. Places at the VIP days and the Vernissage are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Paris, and the table afterward. Frieze London and Frieze Masters come the week before.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.