French Lessons in Paris Through Art and Culture: Bespoke French Lessons Paris at the Venice Biennale 2026

With Bespoke French Lessons Paris, I was in Venice for the opening days of the Venice Biennale 2026, first for a programme I had organised in French: private visits to palazzi, houses, workshops and places off the beaten track, imagined for a dear student and later extended to members of the delegation of the Bienal de São Paulo.

The French came first. The doors opening came first.

I have Venetian roots, and Venice has never been, for me, a postcard city. It is children playing on the campi, Venetians taking an ombra after the market, cicchetti around six, mothers stopping after work, older men leaning at counters, young people laughing too loudly, someone disappearing into a calle with the certainty of someone who still lives there.

That was the Venice I wanted to enter with our students: a living city, not a view.

Some of the private places we visited had been shaped or rethought through the architectural intelligence of Carlo Scarpa, Valeriano Pastor and Michelina Michelotto. We entered houses where architecture was not a label, but a lived experience: thresholds, stairs, courtyards, water, wood, light, restoration. The owners received us themselves, often in French. The rooms were not displayed. They were opened. Each visit became a conversation.

French Lessons in Paris Through Art and Culture

French Lessons in Paris Through Art and Culture is not an abstract line for us. It is what happened in Venice.

French moved through staircases, courtyards, boats, exhibition rooms, private houses. Someone searched for a word. Someone asked a question. Someone tried to describe a restoration that had preserved time instead of erasing it.

Bespoke French Lessons Paris has always attracted artists, collectors, curators, writers, patrons, designers and curious international students who want French to belong to their cultural life. Not French as an ornament. French as a way of entering a room, a studio, a dinner, a collection, a city.

Venice made that obvious.

Casanova, Proust, Kauffmann: Venice in French

There is nothing artificial about speaking French in Venice. The city has always had another life in French.

Casanova, the most Venetian of adventurers, wrote Histoire de ma vie in French, the language of cultivated Europe in the eighteenth century. The manuscript is Venetian in appetite, gossip, movement and theatrical intelligence, but its language is French. The self he invents for posterity is a French sentence with Venetian nerves.

Proust came to Venice in 1900 with his mother, Reynaldo Hahn and Marie Nordlinger, after working on Ruskin. Venice entered him through stones, reflections, churches, the melancholy of places where art and memory seem to have the same temperature.

And then there is Jean-Paul Kauffmann, whose Venise à double tour follows another obsession: the closed churches, the locked doors, the city withheld. His Venice is not the obvious one. It is the one that must be requested, waited for, negotiated with, almost courted.

This is the Venice I recognise. Not the city consumed in a glance, but the city that resists, delays, withholds, and sometimes, if trust is there, opens.

Venice Biennale 2026: The Strength of the Intimate

Then came the Biennale.

The 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys, conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh, is not a Biennale of shouting. Its force lies in attention, in lower frequencies, in rooms where memory, repair, grief, fragile materials and spiritual life are allowed to gather without being turned into spectacle.

This is why some of the louder moments interested me less. The Austrian Pavilion, with Florentina Holzinger’s performance around bodies, water, technology and the great bell, produced an event. But the Biennale felt strongest elsewhere: where it did not insist, where it trusted the intimate, where it let a work breathe before asking to be judged.

Koyo Kouoh’s intelligence seemed to remain in the rooms. Not as sentiment. As structure.

Yto Barrada at the French Pavilion

At the French Pavilion, Yto Barrada’s Comme Saturne, curated by Myriam Ben Salah, brought the question of language into matter.

Words did not sit politely beside the work. They passed through colour, textile, gesture, labour, family memory, migration, political sediment. Barrada understands that a word is never only a word. It has a weight, a history, a surface.

This is exactly what happens when French becomes more than vocabulary. A student may know the dictionary meaning of a word and still not know its social temperature, its humour, its tenderness, its danger.

Barrada’s pavilion held that difference beautifully.

The Belgian Pavilion: Letters That Misbehave

The Belgian Pavilion stayed with me because the letters had stopped behaving.

They were no longer neat signs waiting to be read. They had become things: carried, dragged, exposed, almost exhausted. Language had fallen out of the sentence and into the room.

There was humour in it, but also panic. The alphabet looked as if it had been up all night and no longer remembered its job.

After Barrada, where language was folded into colour and textile, Belgium gave another answer: letters can also become noise, weight, rhythm, wreckage.

In Venice, that made sense. Everyone is always half translating. A sentence begins in Italian, swerves into French, breaks into English, ends in Portuguese. Nothing stays pure for long.

Kader Attia at the Arsenale

Kader Attia brought the temperature down without lowering the intensity.

At the Arsenale, his work returned the eye to repair, wounds, belief, fracture, the afterlife of colonial histories. With Attia, repair is never clean. It does not make the broken thing new again. It keeps the scar visible.

Venice was the right city for that thought. Everything there is repaired: stones, façades, boats, churches, houses, reputations, histories. Nothing survives untouched.

Attia does not let beauty remain innocent. He asks what was broken, who broke it, who remembers, who profits, who repairs.

Michael Armitage at Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

I also went to see Michael Armitage’s The Promise of Change at Palazzo Grassi because Palazzo Grassi is Pinault, and Pinault is one of the great French presences in Venice.

The exhibition was not part of the official Biennale route, but during the Biennale nothing in Venice is entirely outside the conversation. Armitage’s paintings brought another register: colour, heat, unease. They draw the eye in, then refuse comfort. Bodies, landscapes, political tension and violence move through them without settling into explanation.

But I include Armitage here also because of Pinault: the French collection, the French foundation, the catalogues, the curators, the dinners, the openings, the whole Parisian art world entering Venice through Palazzo Grassi.

For many of our students, this is precisely where French matters. Not as school French. As a language spoken around paintings, collections, exhibitions and difficult beauty.

Speaking French at the Biennale

After a visit, everyone comes out into the light and begins to speak.

Someone was moved. Someone disagreed. Someone missed a detail. Someone searches for the word for a colour, a silence, a discomfort. In Venice, those conversations moved between French, Italian, English and Portuguese. French kept returning.

That was the point of our presence at the Biennale. Bespoke French Lessons Paris was there through a real programme, real students, real visits, real conversations, and a way of using French inside the art world.

In Paris, this can happen in a museum, a café, a bookshop, a private lesson, a walk. In Venice, for a few days, it happened in palazzi, boats, courtyards, exhibition rooms and private houses.

The lesson was the city. The subject was art. The language was French.

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Bespoke French Lessons Paris offers private French lessons in Paris and online for artists, collectors, curators, writers, patrons, designers and curious international learners who want French to remain connected to art, culture and real conversation.