9 artists having major museum moments this year and next

The first monographic exhibition in France dedicated to John Singer Sargent’s indelible portraiture, Sargent: Dazzling Paris at Musée d’Orsay explores the artist’s immersion in the society of the City of Light with over ninety works, including some that have never been exhibited in France. Open through 11 January 2026, the show foregrounds the artist’s attachment to the city where he trained, a connection which held strong even after his move to London in the 1880s.

Organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it debuted earlier this year, the survey highlights Sargent’s role in documenting late 19th-century cosmopolitan culture with masterpieces such as his infamous 1884 Portrait of Madame X, which Sargent would later describe as ‘the best thing he had ever done’.

Alexander Calder’s ingenious approach to sculpture takes centre stage this fall at both the newly opened Calder Gardens in Philadelphia and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Calder Gardens offers a friendly and immersive environment dedicated to the artist’s inventive spirit and kinetic sculptures, with landscape design by Piet Oudolf.

Running through March 2026, High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 honours the centennial of the artist’s miniature multi-act spectacle comprising more than one hundred wire sculptures. Calder began the work as a young American artist living in Paris, and more than twenty works related to Circus — including drawings, paintings, and archival materials, along with loans from the artist’s foundation in New York — will enlarge the scope of its latest presentation, reaffirming Calder’s vital contribution to 20th-century American modernism with bold experimentation and innovative joy.

While The Drawing Center in Soho recently hosted a stunning and comprehensive survey of the Modernist painter Beauford Delaney’s works on paper, the artist currently shines bright at the recently reopened Studio Museum in Harlem. A fitting venue, given that in 1978, one year prior to the artist’s passing, the Studio Museum presented Delaney’s first institutional retrospective. The painter emerged as a unique figure with connections to both the early 20th-century bohemian scenes in Greenwich Village and Harlem, as well as the Parisian avant-garde — in his expatriate years he was supported by his close friend the writer James Baldwin. These exhibitions advocate for the legacy of a major artist who bridged the histories of European modernism and a distinctly American lens on identity and creativity.

To mark the centennial year of Joan Mitchell’s birth, museums from California to New York in the United States, as well as institutions in France and Australia, are saluting the ultimate conductor of colour. From La Grande Vallée IX (1983) on view at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny to Marge (1990) at the National Gallery of Victoria, you’d be hard-pressed to miss Mitchell’s unmistakable presence throughout the art world this year.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s evocative new exhibition When Objects Dream showcases Man Ray’s visionary fusion of photography and Surrealism, which paved the way for conceptual art. Open through 1 February 2026, this ambitious show explores Man Ray’s invention of the rayograph, wherein everyday objects were placed on light-sensitive paper to produce camera-less photographs. (The show’s namesake comes from Dada poet Tristan Tzara’s description of Man Ray’s captured moments.)

Featuring gems from the Met’s permanent collection, as well as works from more than fifty lenders, the exhibition is the first to consider his rayographs in the context of his output from the 1910s through the 1920s and affirms the artist’s enduring relevance to the history of modernist innovation.

The Barnes Foundation’s Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations this past spring surveyed one of the most prominent painters working today. Organised with the Dallas Museum of Art, the exhibition gathered more than thirty paintings and related drawings to consider gendered imagery in art history and popular culture, which Cecily Brown’s work masterfully engages and subverts. Picking up the loaded mantle of Abstract Expressionist painting, Brown’s ambitious paintings make history come alive for the present. Look out for the artist’s landmark solo presentation at London’s Serpentine South in 2026.

From 17 March to 19 July 2026, the first retrospective in Paris devoted to Pierre-Auguste Renoir since 1985 will go on view at the Musée d’Orsay with a focus on the driving concern of the influential Impressionist’s work: love. Organised in collaboration with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this travelling exhibition will bring together masterpieces not seen together since the 1985 Grand Palais show. For those restless for more Renoir, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York recently inaugurated the first exhibition in a century dedicated to his drawings.

The major Black figurative artist and one of the most important living American painters Kerry James Marshall is the subject of a new retrospective which opened just last month at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and runs through 18 January 2026. Titled The Histories and organised in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, this exhibition is the artist’s largest ever outside of the United States and anywhere since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s monographic show Mastry. The Histories’ 70 works include the never-before-loaned Knowledge and Wonder (1995), a commission from the City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library.

The third in a trilogy of exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris devoted to New York painters who emerged in the 1980s centres on George Condo. The most significant exhibition of the artist’s work to date, it spans more than four decades of Condo’s polyphonic portraits of psychological states. Works borrowed from American and European museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art join selections from private collections for the first time in Paris. With approximately 80 paintings and 110 drawings, the exhibition is both a promising entry point for newcomers to his work and a gift to those who, like Condo, managed to survive the 1980s.