11 Exhibitions on Our Radar This Spring

Cezanne
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen | 25 January–25 May 2026

At the Fondation Beyeler, a landmark exhibition examines the final and most influential phase of Paul Cezanne’s career. Approximately 80 oil paintings and watercolors trace his late practice across portraits, idyllic scenes of bathers, landscapes of Provence, and serialized views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Painted largely in the South of France, these works reflect Cezanne’s sustained engagement with color, light, and pictorial structure, as well as the working methods refined in his later years. Cezanne marks the artist’s first monographic presentation at the Beyeler, situating his late achievements as the foundation of modern painting and as a framework for subsequent generations of artists — a legacy later acknowledged by Pablo Picasso, who described Cezanne as “the father of us all.”

 

Metafisica/Metafisiche
Palazzo Reale, Milan | 28 January–21 June 2026
Museo del Novecento, Milan | 28 January–21 June 2026
Gallerie d’Italia, Milan | 28 January–6 April 2026
Grande Brera-Palazzo Citterio, Milan | 6 February–5 April 2026

Staged across four Milanese venues, Metafisica/Metafisiche is a citywide exhibition presented as part of the cultural programming surrounding the 25th Winter Olympic Games, opening in early February. The project examines the origins and extended legacy of Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Art), the early-20th-century movement founded by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, characterized by enigmatic spaces, classical references, and a suspended sense of time.

At Palazzo Reale, the central exhibition brings together approximately 400 works spanning painting, sculpture, photography, design, and film, as well as archival material, presenting the movement’s founders alongside figures including Alberto Savinio, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo de Pisis, and later artists shaped by Metaphysical Art’s ideas. Additional chapters at the Museo del Novecento, Gallerie d’Italia, and Palazzo Citterio explore the movement’s relationship to the city and its contemporary resonance, including responses by William Kentridge.

 

Basquiat – Headstrong
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk | 30 January–17 May 2026

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first solo exhibition at a Scandinavian museum — and the first institutional exhibition focused on his drawings — centers on one of the artist’s most recognizable motifs: the human head. Basquiat – Headstrong brings together a unique selection of works on paper, primarily drawings executed in oilstick between 1981 and 1983, many of which Basquiat kept to himself and which remained virtually unknown during his lifetime. Ranging from skulls and anatomical studies to highly stylized faces, they are neither preparatory studies nor ancillary works. Presented as fully realized artworks, they offer a concentrated view of drawing as a central component of Basquiat’s practice rather than a secondary one.

 

Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, and MoMA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art | 22 February–5 July 2026

This spring, Village Square celebrates the collection assembled by Henry and Rose Pearlman on the occasion of their foundation’s landmark gift to three American institutions: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Bringing together nearly 50 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, the exhibition features expressive landscapes and portraits by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. Shaped by close artistic friendships and personal relationships, the works reflect the Pearlmans’ belief in art’s capacity to foster shared experience. The LACMA exhibition marks the final opportunity to see the collection together on the West Coast before it travels to the Brooklyn Museum later this year.

 

Rothko in Florence
Palazzo Strozzi, Florence | 14 March 2026– 23 August 2026

Mark Rothko’s first visit to Florence in 1950 marked the beginning of a sustained engagement with Renaissance art. That relationship forms the basis of Rothko in Florence, one of the most significant exhibitions devoted to the artist. Bringing together more than 70 works spanning his career from the 1930s to 1970, the exhibition traces Rothko’s evolving pictorial language while examining the lasting influence of Renaissance art on his vision. Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna and conceived specifically for the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the project extends beyond the palazzo into the city itself. Satellite presentations at the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana place Rothko’s work in dialogue with Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, framing his exploration of color, space, and scale within a classical architectural and artistic context.

 

Renoir and Love: A Joyful Modernity (1865-1885)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris | 17 March–19 July 2026

Renoir and Love brings together key works exploring love, intimacy, and modern life in the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Focusing on the period from the mid-1860s through the 1880s, the exhibition presents scenes of couples and social gatherings set in cafés, theaters, gardens, and riverside leisure spaces. Renoir’s figures rarely exist in isolation: lovers, friends, families, and children form interconnected social worlds in which affection, desire, and companionship unfold together. Love, for Renoir, emerges not simply as a romantic pursuit but as a binding force linking people to one another and to the natural and social environments they inhabit. The exhibition marks the first major Renoir presentation in Paris since 1985, offering a renewed perspective on some of his most familiar paintings.

 

Matisse. 1941–1954
Grand Palais, Paris | 24 March–26 July 2026

In the final years of his life, Henri Matisse reinvented his practice through the gouache cut-out, developing a new visual language of color, scale, and rhythm. Matisse. 1941–1954 brings together more than 230 works — paintings, drawings, illustrated books, textiles, stained glass, and cut-outs — to trace this decisive period in the artist’s career. Created after a debilitating illness forced him to rethink how he worked, these late pieces demonstrate both radical invention and continuity with his earlier painting. Major ensembles will include Jazz (1947), the Intérieurs de Vence (1946–48), and key elements from the Chapelle de Vence, alongside important cut-outs such as La Tristesse du roi (1952), Zulma (1950), La Danseuse créole (1950), and the Nus bleus (1952). Together, they show how painting remained central to Matisse’s practice even as his materials and methods changed.

 

Henri Rousseau, The Ambition of Painting
Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris | 25 March–20 July 2026

This spring at the Musee de lÓrangerie, Henri Rousseau is reexamined through the network of dealers and collectors who shaped his career. Bringing together around 50 works from the Orangerie’s Walter-Guillaume Collection and Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation, alongside major international loans, the exhibition focuses on paintings acquired by dealer Paul Guillaume, who also advised Albert Barnes in building his Rousseau holdings. Masterpieces including The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) join portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes to trace Rousseau’s professional ambitions and working methods within the modern art market. Recent technical studies from both the Musée de l’Orangerie and Barnes Foundation further illuminate the materials and techniques behind his distinctive pictorial language.

 

Marcel Duchamp
Museum of Modern Art, New York | 12 April–22 August 2026

Few artists did more to redefine what art could be than Marcel Duchamp, whose work transformed the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and authorship across the 20th century. From the shock of Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) to the invention of the readymade and the conceptual ambition of The Large Glass (1915–23), Duchamp continually challenged the status of the artwork itself. This highly anticipated exhibition — the first retrospective of Duchamp’s work in the United States since 1973 — brings together approximately 300 works spanning his six-decade career. Drawings, paintings, readymades, photographs, and editions trace his sustained experimentation in dialogue with movements from Dada and Cubism to Surrealism and beyond, offering a comprehensive view of one of modern art’s most influential and disruptive figures.

 

Calder. Rêver en Équilibre.
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris | 15 April–16 August 2026

Marking the centenary of his arrival in France and 50 years since his death, Calder. Rêver en Équilibre presents a major retrospective of Alexander Calder spanning more than five decades of work. Bringing together nearly 300 sculptures, paintings, drawings, and other objects — from Cirque Calder (1926–31) to monumental public works — the exhibition traces Calder’s transformation of sculpture through movement, balance, and space. That language was shaped in part by his years in Paris and his exchanges with artists such as Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Joan Miró; Paris was also where Duchamp first coined the term “mobile.” Curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, the exhibition underscores Calder’s lasting redefinition of sculpture to include time, motion, and the forces of nature.

 

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince
Fondazione Prada, Venice | 9 May–23 November 2026

Shown alongside the 2026 Venice Biennale, Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince is set to be one of La Serenissima’s most closely watched cultural events of the season. Curated by Nancy Spector, the exhibition brings together two of the most provocative figures in contemporary American art in a rare, cross-generational dialogue. Through a series of thematic juxtapositions drawn from film, music, mass media, and popular culture, Helter Skelter explores each artist’s use of appropriation and found imagery to examine identity, power, and American myth. The exchange unfolds through two distinct perspectives: Jafa foregrounds the Black experience and visual culture, while Prince probes the psychology of white masculinity and celebrity. Together, their works reveal a long creative conversation that has not previously been explored.