ACROSS EUROPE, LANDMARK SHOWS REFRAME 20TH-CENTURY MASTERS

Colours! Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou
Grimaldi Forum, Monaco
Through 31 August 2025

Color takes center stage at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco, where more than 100 modern masterpieces from the Pompidou Center — including works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — are presented in a vibrant, sweeping exhibition. Organized across seven monochromatic galleries, the exhibition unfolds as a multisensory experience combining sound and scent with designs by Ron Arad, Jean Prouvé, Ettore Sottsass and Philippe Starck. By situating painting in dialogue with sounds, fragrance and design, it invites visitors to rethink the role of color and its profound sensation. 

Jean Tinguely
Musée Rath, Geneva
Through 7 September 2025

The centenary of Jean Tinguely’s birth is marked in Geneva with a major exhibition at the Musée Rath. One of the most inventive sculptors of the 20th century, Tinguely transformed discarded materials into whirring, clanking machines that satirized consumer culture while pushing sculpture into motion and performance. The exhibition brings together more than 30 mechanical sculptures, including Si c’est noir, je m’appelle Jean restored for the occasion, alongside previously unseen drawings that revive his playful chaos and poetic critique of modern life. 

Matisse Méditerranée(s)
Musée Matisse, Nice
Through 8 September 2025

At the Musée Matisse, a new exhibition traces how the Mediterranean Sea became central to the artist’s vision. More than a backdrop, it was a conceptual space that Paul Valéry once described as a “machine for making civilization,” inspiring Matisse to forge new chromatic and structural languages. By situating his work within the deep histories and artistic traditions of the Mediterranean, the exhibition shows how the region shaped his motifs and provided the foundation for his most radical explorations of color, line, and space.

Cezanne au Jas de Bouffan
Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence
Through 12 October 2025

This summer marks the launch of Cezanne 2025, a season of cultural events across Aix-en-Provence, the artist’s birthplace. At its heart is the phased unveiling of Jas de Bouffan, Cezanne’s family estate, which they owned for 40 years and where he created some of his most iconic images. The Musée Granet celebrates the restoration of the house with an exhibition of more than 130 paintings, drawings, and watercolors from collections worldwide. Tracing the four decades Cezanne spent working at Jas de Bouffan, it brings together rarely seen early works, including early murals, alongside masterpieces that chart the evolution of his style—situating the estate not simply as his home but as the crucible of his artistic vision.

Orizzonti | Rosso
PM23, Rome
Through 23 October 2025

Opening its doors in Piazza Mignanelli 23, PM23 is a new venue dedicated to cultural initiatives supported by the Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti. Its debut exhibition, Orizzonti | Rosso, presents an immersive journey through 80 works in which art and Valentino’s iconic red dresses enter into dialogue. From the radical minimalism of Lucio Fontana to the vibrant pop canvases of Andy Warhol, each work expands Valentino’s exploration of red across both form and meaning. Red emerges here not only as a color, but as a transformative language that continues to shape culture.

Picasso - The Code of Painting
PoMo, Trondheim
Through 26 October 2025

Picasso – The Code of Painting turns to the artist’s late period — often overlooked yet defined by extraordinary freedom and intensity. More than 50 paintings and 13 ceramic plates reveal how, in his final decades, Picasso shattered tradition with raw brushwork and distilled forms, leaving a legacy that continues to shape contemporary art. These works reflect both the major conflicts of the 20th century and the transformations reshaping painting, showing how Picasso’s late style was at once deeply personal and engaged with the world around him. After its debut in Trondheim, the exhibition will travel throughout Scandinavia, with presentations at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (22 November 2025–5 April 2026) and the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg (7 May–6 September 2026).

Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne
Kunstmuseum Luzern
Through 2 November 2025

The legendary 1935 exhibition These, Antithese, Synthese at the Kunstmuseum Luzern championed artists denounced as “degenerate” in Nazi Germany. At a moment when Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian were being defamed across the border, Lucerne presented their work alongside that of Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Alexander Calder, marking the museum’s emergence on the international stage. Eighty years on, the museum revisits that landmark moment with a reconstruction that is the result of five years of research. Today’s exhibition reunites many of the original works alongside others of equal significance by. Set against the backdrop of the interwar years, it highlights how the visions of these modernists defied cultural intolerance and shaped the course of 20th-century art.

Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence
Through 2 November 2025

One of modernism’s most radical sculptors, Barbara Hepworth forged a language of abstraction rooted in organic materials and spatial rhythm. From her early carvings in wood and stone to her monumental bronzes, she expanded the boundaries of sculpture by drawing on music, dance, politics, and science, creating forms that spoke both to the intimate human experience and to universal structures of life. Fondation Maeght’s presentation situates her firmly within the heart of modernism, in dialogue with contemporaries like Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, while emphasizing her singular vision. Her work remains vital today for the way it dissolves boundaries between nature and form, the personal and the collective, and art and life itself.

Pierre Soulages. The Meeting
Musée Fabre, Montpellier
Through 4 January 2026

In 1941, while preparing to teach at the Montpellier School of Fine Arts, a young Pierre Soulages discovered the Musée Fabre — an encounter he later recalled as especially meaningful. Eight decades later, that connection comes full circle with a sweeping retrospective honoring the French Master, the first of its scale in Montpellier. Organized in six chapters and comprising nearly 120 works, the exhibition opens with two late canvases from 2020 and 2021, and places Soulages in dialogue with Rembrandt, Mondrian, and Picasso, as well as contemporaries such as Hans Hartung, Anna-Eva Bergman, and Zao Wou-Ki, among others. The exhibition also forms part of the Musée Fabre’s bicentenary celebrations, underscoring the deep ties between Soulages and the museum to which he made an exceptional donation of twenty works in 2005.