“Rare smiles”: Alexia Guggémos in Pursuit of an Elusive Emotion
- Laurence de Valmy
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
What if the greatest mystery of art lay in a simple smile? In Rare smiles – An Investigation in the Museums of the World, published in November 2025, art critic Alexia Guggémos explores this universal emotion, so rare on canvas, yet so essential to our humanity.
In museum galleries, faces line up, solemn, hieratic. And suddenly, a smile. Fleeting, shy, almost accidental. This fragile apparition is what Alexia Guggémos has been chasing for thirty years. In Rare smiles – An Investigation in the Museums of the World, forthcoming from Édilivre, she traces the presence, and striking absence, of this emotion throughout visual history.
“The smile drifts through the centuries like a fleeting apparition,” she writes in the opening lines.
From prehistoric carvings to digital pixels, Guggémos explores the shapes, symbols, and taboos surrounding smiles across cultures. For her, smiling is a moment of surrender, an inner movement that art has too often tried to restrain. Perhaps that is why it is so rare: because it resists pose, permanence, and control.
Neither academic essay nor travel diary, Rare smiles reads as a luminous meditation on sincerity and fragility. In a world saturated with selfies and instant emotion, the author embraces nuance and restraint.
“I never sought the grand bursts of joy. I sought the small lights,” she confides.
Those “small lights” illuminate her book, rare yet essential smiles capable of reframing how we see art and humanity itself.
The Museum of the Smile: When Utopia Becomes Reality
This isn’t Alexia Guggémos’s first foray into the subject. In 1996, she founded the Museum of the Smile, the world’s first virtual museum dedicated to this very emotion. The idea was born one day during a bus strike in Paris, when she met a young woman who had never visited the Louvre. From that chance encounter emerged a concept: a digital tour of “The Ten Most Beautiful Smiles of the Louvre”, which evolved into a broader reflection on the role of smiling in art.
Inaugurated at the Web Bar in Paris, the museum quickly became a poetic and digital laboratory. It organized concerts at the Villa Medici, Smile Days, photo contests, and even the Smile Festival, whose jury, presided over by Sabine Weiss, awarded the 2009 prize to artist Anthony Asael for his UNICEF portraits of smiling children.
In 2022, the virtual institution found a home on rue des Lévis in Paris. Today, the Museum of the Smile welcomes visitors by appointment, inviting art lovers, researchers, and the simply curious to explore this singular collection, which is now travelling.
“To unlock the mystery of the smile is to step into an unexpected museum,” La Vie wrote in 2020.
Faces and Stories
The museum brings together works by artists as diverse as Sabine Weiss, Andres Serrano, Orlan, Roman Cieslewicz, and Banksy. American artist Nari Ward’s work engages in dialogue with photographer Agnès Winter, who once projected a hundred smiling faces of New Yorkers onto the Rockefeller Center façade.
In the carved stone of Gothic cathedrals, Guggémos uncovers a striking correspondence: between the Smiling Angel of Reims and the Tempter of Strasbourg Cathedral, its ironic, mischievous twin.
Each work, whether sacred, urban, or digital, becomes for her a mirror of humanity, a trace, a vibration, a promise.
A Smile for Tomorrow
Through both her book and her museum, Alexia Guggémos invites us to slow down our gaze, to favor subtlety over spectacle, to rediscover behind each face the fragile beauty of a smile.
That small, luminous gesture connects artworks, eras, and souls, reminding us that, sometimes, the simplest expression can hold the deepest mystery.
A few artworks in the collection of the Smile Museum (photos by courtesy of Alexia Guggemos)
from left to right: Dismaland by Banksy
The projection of smiles on the Rockfeller Center by Agnès Winter
Canned Smiles by Nari Ward
Keith three eyed face by Laurence de Valmy
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