Spotlight on Milan: Italy’s Resurgent Engine of Modern Art

Art-wise, Milan is often overlooked. The city is a hub for design, playing host to Salone del Mobile and one of the globe’s key biannual fashion weeks, but as a place in Italy to take in art, Milan’s reputation is dwarfed by those of Venice, Florence and Rome. Milan is where you see The Last Supper — Leonardo’s original, there for your delectation at the convent of Santa Maria della Grazie, if you can get a ticket. E questo è tutto. But is that all to Milan’s art scene? Of course not. And its afterthought status is due to be revised as fans show up in droves for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics from February 6–22.

It might be wise to get to Milan ahead of the crowd. The vibe will be as chill as the weather as you make your way around bohemian Brera and the area around Piazza del Duomo, home to some of Milan’s most notable contemporary art galleries. And if you’ve already made the trip, you’ll have the chance to see a gold-medal show of the non-sporting kind: The Three Greats of Spain. Three Visions, One Legacy: The Art of Dalì, Mirò, and Picasso at the Fabbrica del Vapore before it closes on January 25. Curated by Joan Abellò with Vittoria Mainoldi and Carlota Muiños, the exhibition tracks the trio’s careers from Catalonia to avant-garde Paris, with a special emphasis on the development of Surrealism. More than 250 works have been gathered from international museums and private collections, including in a space dedicated to the creation of Guernica, preparatory sketches by Picasso, and photographs by Dora Maar.

Around the same time Picasso was inventing Cubism in Paris with Georges Braque, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was penning his first Futurist manifesto in Milan. “We intend to exalt movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch,” wrote Marinetti, who was recuperating from a near-fatal accident involving his new Fiat sports car, a cyclist who got in his way, and a ditch. “We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood glistens with great pipes, resembling a serpent with explosive breath… a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot — that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Marinetti was sick of the Italian obsession with the past — with the Renaissance, with Roman antiquity. He was in industrial Milan, la città futurista, where smog-billowing factories churned out the new. Not yesterday. Tomorrow. Marinetti’s vision was catnip for creatively impatient artists such as the sculptor Umberto Boccioni and the composer and painter Luigi Rossolo; it also attracted the up-and-coming politician Benito Mussolini.

The relationship between Futurism and Fascism — and Marinetti and Mussolini — has been hard to live down, and may account, in part, for Milan’s influence on contemporary art being brushed aside. But Marinetti was keying into something important: the need for art to be as modern as modern life, drawing on the same energies and perhaps rendered with the same tools. Maybe habitation in la città futurista helped manifest that understanding, for just after World War II it was in Milan that Lucio Fontana launched the Spatialist movement, Spazialismo. Pushing toward an art that embraced science and technology, Fontana pioneered installation art in 1949 with Ambiente Spaziale, a neon-lit, phosphorescent environment installed at the Galleria del Naviglio.

The city has played a key role in the development of modern art in other ways, as well — sometimes by happenstance. At the Galleria Apollinaire in 1957, for example, Yves Klein presented Proposte monochrome, epoca blu, an exhibition of 11 identical monochrome paintings that introduced the world to the artist’s eponymous shade of ultramarine, now known as International Klein Blue, Yves Klein Blue, or simply IKB. From postwar avant-garde experimentation to the charged exchanges of the 1980s, Milan repeatedly surfaced as a crossroads. Some of the most arresting photos of Jean-Michel Basquiat are those taken by Andy Warhol on a trip to Milan they made together in 1983, shortly after the start of their legendary off-and-on-again collaboration. Fresh off inclusion in the 1982 Whitney Biennial, Basquiat was shooting into the firmament of art stars. In Milan, his work was hanging alongside that of Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and others in a group show organized by Tony Shafrazi. Basquiat was doing press — including a rare and insightful interview with Lisa Ponti for Domus magazine — and making the scene, but according to Warhol’s diaries, he was exhausted. “Jean-Michel came by and said he was depressed and was going to kill himself and I laughed and said it was just because he hadn’t slept for four days.” The following year, ballet dancer-turned-art dealer Alexander Iolas commissioned Warhol to create a series of paintings and prints based on da Vinci’s Last Supper.

In Milan, it all leads back to The Last Supper. The final exhibition of Warhol’s lifetime, Warhol—Il Cenacolo was staged in 1987 at Milan’s Palazzo delle Stelline, directly across the street from the cloister home to Leonardo’s masterpiece. From his studio in New York, Andy approached the iconic work at a remove, both conceptual and geographic, riffing on reproductions ranging from a black-and-white photo of a widely circulated 19th-century engraving to a drawing from a 1913 Cyclopedia of Painters and Painting, as well as other popular images, even those stamped on trinkets. Warhol produced more than 100 variations on The Last Supper across silkscreens, prints, and works on paper in preparation for the exhibition; about two dozen were shown. A month after the opening, he died.

What, in hindsight, many art historians read as a prophetic farewell to the king of Pop Art was, at the time, a singular cultural event. As Arthur Danto observed, “When [Warhol’s] Last Supper was displayed in Milan, in a kind of citywide two-man show with Leonardo, 30,000 people flocked to see it, hardly any of whom went to see the ‘other’ Last Supper.” The episode made clear that his art had entered the international cultural bloodstream, capable of rivalling even its most sacrosanct image.

Warhol’s art returned to Milan in 2017: Sixty Last Suppers at Museo del Novecento marked the 30th anniversary of the original exhibition with a show nearly triple in size. Five years later, Andy Warhol: The Advertising of the Form opened at the Fabbrica del Vapore — the same museum currently hosting the Dalì/Mirò/Picasso blockbuster. Both the Museo del Novecento, dedicated to 20th- and 21st- century art, and boasting a fine collection of Futurist works, and the Fabbrica del Vapore, a converted steam factory in the city’s industrial outskirts, are relatively new — part of a wave of openings since the turn of the millennium. Pirelli HangarBicocca, another industrial renovation, promotes contemporary art; Nan Goldin’s This Will Not End Well is currently on view. The Museo delle Culture, which has staged shows of Basquiat and Dubuffet in the past, can be found in another ex-industrial area southwest of central Milan.

Fashion’s eminences also contribute to the city’s cultural life: Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has staged major shows by such contemporary figures as Tacita Dean, Pipilotti Rist, and Urs Fischer, while Fondazione Prada is a must-see regardless of what’s on view, with its Wes Anderson-designed cafeteria, bookshop extraordinaire, and Cinema Godard. (A smaller Prada venue in central Milan, the Osservatorio, sits inside the Vittorio Emanuele II arcades.) The latest addition to this roster of powerhouse art galleries and institutions is Milan’s Palazzo Citterio, which opened in December 2024. An exhibition space for modern and contemporary art, the 18th-century palazzo joins the Pinacoteca di Brera, with its jaw-dropping Old Masters, and the Braidense National Library to form La Grande Brera, a Milanese cultural center traversing past, present and — given the city’s proclivities — probably the future, too. That’s the thing about Milan: it never sits still.

As part of the cultural program of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, Milan will host “Metafisica/Metafisiche” — a major exhibition dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico and the Pittura Metafisica movement — across multiple city venues, including Palazzo Reale and Museo del Novecento, opening in February 2026.