If you are in Paris, you can catch exhibitions devoted to the famous painters Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh. Read on to know details about these artists, and what to expect from the two art shows held in tribute to them.

“Degas at the Opera”

A large number of people are taking a Museum Orsay tour to see the conventional exhibition, “Degas at the Opera”. This show at the Musée d’Orsay celebrates the artist who made opera musicians, spectators and dangers central to the creative work. Paris Opera was founded way back in 1669, and this exhibition also marks its 350th anniversary. At the age of 36, Edgar Degas enjoyed the first success through his painting, “The Orchestra of the Opera”. Degas and other artists including Claude Monet, CamillePissarro, Paul Cezanne, and Alfred Sisley formed an artistic society to display their works beyond the conventional Salon.

From 1874 to 1886, Edgar Degas exhibited 7 times together with Impressionist artists, and he was a contemporary of Vincent van Gogh. He preferred to paint indoors, particularly at the Peletier Opera. Even when this opera house was destroyed in an 1873 fire and the Palais Garnier was constructed two years later, Degas depicted its adobes on canvas. He exhibited just one successful sculpture in clay, plaster and wax, in his lifetime. After he died in 1917, 150 sculptures were found in his atelier, and many of these were subsequently cast in the bronze material. Some of these sculptures are part of the Orsay Museum exhibition. This show will run through January 19, 2020.

“The Starry Night”

Another exhibition that you may want to catch when on Paris tours is “The Starry Night” at Atelier des Lumières. This digital art gallery on Rue Saint-Maur features the works of the post-Impressionist Dutch painter, Vincent Willem van Gogh, in this exhibition. It is named after his 1889 painting, depicting a dreamy representation of the sweeping sight of a French commune from his asylum room. A suicide cut short Van Gogh’s career in 1890, and this exhibition pays tribute to him.

Gianfranco Iannuzzi, Massimiliano Siccardi and Renato Gatto spent a whole year choosing 500 works of art by Vincent from among his 2,100 artworks. They researched every single painting, made up video sequences, created a storyboard and then chose music that complements the tone that pervades the varying works by Vincent.

At this museum, numerous equipment units project moving pictures onto the walls around you, the floor, and the ceilings above. These projections are from Vincent’s intense color palette. When your eyes will adjust to every moving figure, your consciousness will absorb the music that includes opera, blues, classical overtures, jazz and Janis Joplin’s music. So you will feel like being within a world of art, which you usually see pictured inside a book or hanging upon a wall.

Meeting Painters Who Were Ahead of Their Time

In 1886, Vincent moved into his sibling Theo Van Gogh’s residence to live together. In the same year, Van Gogh came across avant-garde artists namely CamillePissarro, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Then, he developed the bold style of Post-Impressionism that prospered after he moved to southern France two years later. Incidentally, that painting style continued to flourish even during his stay in a French asylum until he came back to Paris for two months.

In the Workshop of the Lights on Rue Saint-Maur, you can surround yourself in a world of images and colors that made Vincent an international icon. Do you know that this Dutch artist only sold a painting? You will recognize pictures from his famous artworks slowly moving about in this gallery – iris, sunflowers, almond tree flowers and many of his self-portraits. Every one of these images are striking, yet it is incredible to see black crow images moving across a wall of yellow wheat color against a sky of cobalt blue. This creation is reminiscent of “Wheatfield With Crows”, which is the final work Vincent completed before shooting himself to death in 1890.

A short digital art show, “Dreamed Japan, Images of the Floating World” follows that 32-minute-long homage to Vincent. In the Japanese show, there are prints by Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. Hiroshige’s foray into the art scene in France influenced Vincent and impressionist painters. A piece named ‘Verse’ finishes the hour mark, and the program is then repeated.

You must catch this sensory experience that immerses you into an artistic world like few other exhibitions can. Visit the nearby Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris’s first municipal and garden cemetery, in which famous people are laid to rest in amazing tombs. You will also find a visit to this cemetery to be an amazing experience, much like these exhibitions.