10 Must-See Exhibitions Shaping Our Fall Agenda

Theatre Picasso
Tate Modern, London
17 September 2025–12 April 2026

Theatre Picasso brings the Spanish artist's interest in performance into focus, marking 100 years since the creation of The Three Dancers (1925), housed in the museum’s permanent collection. Staged by contemporary artist Wu Tsang and writer and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, the exhibition brings together more than 50 works, including paintings, sculptures, textiles, and works on paper. Picasso drew endless inspiration from circus performers, dancers, and bullfighters, as well as the historical role of the artist — a persona as theatrical as his subjects. The exhibition expands into live performance with an extended program that invites artists, dancers, and choreographers to interpret its themes.

Opening of Calder Gardens
Calder Gardens, Philadelphia
21 September 2025 

Calder Gardens, Philadelphia’s new cultural landmark, inaugurates its galleries and sculpture park with a rotating installation of works by Alexander Calder, spanning five decades of his career. The presentation, conceived in dialogue with Herzog & de Meuron’s architecture and Piet Oudolf’s landscape design, aims to underscore the dynamic and evolving nature of Calder’s art. Calder Gardens is committed to a continuously rotating selection of works, encouraging sustained engagement and repeat visits. The inaugural installation includes an “altar” to Calder’s artistic lineage, featuring paintings and sculptures by his mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder — all of whom lived and worked in Philadelphia.

Berthe Weill. Avant-garde gallery owner
Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris
8 October 2025–26 January 2026

The Musée de l’Orangerie presents the first major exhibition dedicated to Berthe Weill, the Parisian dealer who championed modern art for four decades yet has remained largely overlooked in art history. Guided by her motto “Place aux jeunes” (“Make way for the young”), Weill promoted more than 300 artists, often giving them their earliest exposure. She helped launch Pablo Picasso’s career, organized Amedeo Modigliani’s only lifetime solo show, and advanced Fauvism, Cubism, and the School of Paris, while also championing women artists such as Émilie Charmy and Suzanne Valadon. Featuring around 100 works, the exhibition restores Weill’s rightful place in the story of modern art.

Miró and the United States
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
10 October 2025–22 February 2026

In the mid-20th century, Joan Miró forged vital connections with the United States that shaped his art and influenced generations of American painters. Framed around his New York retrospectives in 1941 and 1959 and the seven visits he made between 1947 and 1968, the exhibition reveals how his encounters in America became central to his artistic development. Some 160 works chart this exchange, bringing Miró’s art into conversation with that of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, and others. Together, these works recast Miró’s broad legacy within the story of 20th-century art.

Manet & Morisot
Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 
11 October 2025–1 March 2026

In late 19th-century Paris, Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot forged a friendship that proved pivotal to the story of modern art. Friends, colleagues, and eventually in-laws, their relationship, which unfolded between 1868 and 1883, was marked by collaboration, rivalry, and mutual influence. Morisot’s role, once defined by Manet’s portraits, is recast by the Legion of Honor with new scholarship that recognizes her as an equal peer. The exhibition traces their dialogue from early works like The Balcony (1868–69) to shared motifs of the 1870s and the reunited seasonal allegories — Morisot’s Summer (1878) and Winter (1880) with Manet’s Spring and Autumn (1881).

Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana 
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
11 October 2025–2 March 2026

Lucio Fontana is best known for his radical slashed canvases, but clay was also a medium he returned to throughout his career. Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana is the first museum exhibition devoted exclusively to this vital body of work, presenting more than 70 pieces — several never before seen — from public and private collections. Organized by art historian Sharon Hecker, the exhibition reveals Fontana’s ceramics as a site of constant experimentation for the artist, from the informal collaborative works he made with Tullio d’Albisola and the Mazzotti workshop in Albisola to the visionary forms that anticipated his concetto spaziale. 

Philip Guston: The Irony of History
Musée Picasso, Paris
14 October 2025–1 March 2026

Philip Guston wielded art as a weapon against power, from his early expulsion from art school in Los Angeles to his paintings that exposed Ku Klux Klan violence. After rising as a leader of the New York School, he shocked the art world in the late 1960s by abandoning abstraction for a raw figurative approach inspired by comics. The Irony of History, conceived around Guston’s “Nixon Drawings” (1971–75), explores the satirical and grotesque energy that fueled his work. Influenced by Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, and George Herriman, Guston fused caustic satire with painterly force, creating a body of work as unsettling as it is incisive.

Gerhard Richter
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
17 October 2025–02 March 2026

Gerhard Richter’s six-decade career, spanning photo-based painting, abstraction, sculpture, and drawing, unfolds in a landmark retrospective of 270 works at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The exhibition ranges from his blurred family portraits and early color charts of the 1960s to pioneering abstractions, glass and steel sculptures, and the late drawings he has pursued since 2017. Moving between figuration and abstraction, skepticism and belief, Richter has continually reinvented the language of painting. By tracing both ruptures and continuities across his oeuvre, this retrospective offers the most comprehensive view to date of one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Renoir Drawings
Morgan Library & Museum, New York
17 October 2025–8 February 2026

Renoir Drawings is the first exhibition in a century to examine the artist’s works on paper in depth. Nearly 100 drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints trace Renoir’s evolving approach, from academic studies and quick impressions of urban and rural life to finished portraits and late sketches of friends and family. Case studies illuminate his preparatory process for landmark canvases, including The Great Bathers (1884–1887). Together, these works reveal how paper provided Renoir with a site of constant experimentation, where he tested ideas, refined compositions, and explored the human figure and landscape with an intimacy that complements his most celebrated paintings.

Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection
Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid
28 October 2025–1 February 2026

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents 50 masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee from the Museum Berggruen in Berlin, offering a rare dialogue between two of the 20th century’s most distinctive voices. Assembled by legendary dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen, the works reflect his lifelong devotion to both artists. Though opposites in temperament, Picasso and Klee shared a radical commitment to experimentation, distortion, and irony, revealing surprising intersections in their approaches to form, humor, and the reinvention of tradition. Highlights from the Thyssen collection, including works once owned by Berggruen himself, further underscore the close ties between the two collections.