Best art exhibitions in 2026: Europe

Paul Cezanne never visited Switzerland, but the country played a decisive role in shaping his posthumous reputation. Early collectors such as Rudolf Staechelin and Oskar Reinhart were among the first to recognise the importance of the French Post-Impressionist, acquiring his work at a time when it was still widely misunderstood. Their foresight helped establish Switzerland as a major centre for Cezanne’s art, a position it retains today. Fondation Beyeler, just outside Basel, holds several outstanding examples, including a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire and a number of portraits depicting members of the artist’s inner circle.

This exhibition brings together more than 50 paintings and watercolours from Cezanne’s late period in Aix-en-Provence. Focusing on his final years, it examines the radical way in which he rethought form, colour and light, and shows how his innovations paved the way for modern masters such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

In February, the 25th Winter Olympic Games will take place in Milan and the Alpine town of Cortina d’Ampezzo. To complement the sporting events, a Cultural Olympiad is also being held. This will include numerous exhibitions, among them a set of shows being staged across four Milanese venues under the collective title Metafisica/Metafisiche.

Its subject is Pittura Metafisica (‘Metaphysical Art’), a movement created by the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà in the early 20th century and characterised by dreamlike scenes. As well as showing work by its key figures (including Mario Sironi and, early in his career, Giorgio Morandi), Metafisica/Metafisiche will explore the movement’s rich legacy: it influenced a host of cultural figures, from the Surrealists to Alfred Hitchcock. Also under consideration will be the links between Pittura Metafisica’s artists and the city of Milan.

These oilstick-on-paper drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat were never intended for exhibition. They were created between 1981 and 1983, during a particularly productive period in Basquiat’s life when he was still moonlighting as a graffiti artist in Manhattan. The images depict a variety of heads, some with flesh and some without, which have been interpreted over the years as self-portraits.

Basquiat was known for incorporating symbols into his paintings, such as crowns, skulls and snakes, but these drawings are unusual for having no accompanying words or phrases — Basquiat was a master of urban street drawl — and without this ‘visual brainstorming’, the images are difficult to analyse. However, in their entirety they add another layer to the work of the enigmatic artist who died prematurely at the age of 28.

Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch has long been a highlight of the superb collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Now it is taking centre stage in the museum’s next exhibition, BIRDS, which is guest-curated by the British historian and broadcaster Simon Schama. Featuring artworks by Holbein, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Tracey Emin and more, alongside manuscripts, films and natural history exhibits, the show traces humanity’s relationship with birds as symbols of love, beauty and freedom, but also in their roles as pets, food and trophies.

Schama has also produced a book to accompany the show, featuring texts by Martine Gosselink, the museum’s director, and Laura Cumming, who in 2023 explored the life of Fabritius in Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death.

This will be the first retrospective in Spain devoted to the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi. He is renowned, above all, for his atmospheric paintings of the inside of the Copenhagen apartment he shared with his wife, Ida. She appears in many of them — alone and, more often than not, with her back to us. There’s a hushed quality to these scenes, something to which the show’s subtitle (‘the eye that listens’) alludes.

The curators will consider what set Hammershøi’s work apart from similar domestic interiors by Danish peers of his (such as Peter Ilsted and Carl Vilhelm Holsøe). They will also explore the role that Ida played in his creative process, and the importance in his oeuvre of lesser-known work, in the genres of portraiture and landscape painting. In July 2026, this exhibition will transfer to the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland.

Located in the German city of Potsdam, the Museum Barberini boasts a superb collection of works by French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters — the likes of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Paul Signac. This makes it an apt venue to host an exhibition devoted to Max Liebermann, one of the principal champions of Impressionism in Germany around the turn of the 20th century. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1847, the artist spent much of the 1870s living in Paris, and returned to his home city in 1884.

The exhibition will feature more than 100 paintings — a number by Liebermann himself, and the majority by other German artists associated with Impressionism, such as Lovis Corinth, Dora Hitz, Gotthardt Kuehl, Maria Slavona, Max Slevogt and Fritz von Uhde. The Barberini will be this show’s second venue, after its transfer from the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris recently closed for long-term renovation. One positive result is that numerous works in its collection by Constantin Brancusi are free to form the core of this exhibition — the sculptor’s first major show in Germany for 50 years.

It will chart his artistic path from academic training, via a brief period in Auguste Rodin’s workshop, to the peaks of modernism for which he is renowned. Brancusi pushed his medium to the brink of abstraction, developing a new organic vocabulary that evoked — rather than resembled — people and things in the real world.

The exhibition will feature 150 works, including celebrated sculptures from the Pompidou such as La Muse endormie (1910) and La Colonne sans fin III (circa 1928). It will also include a partial reconstruction of Brancusi’s studio in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, which was bequeathed to the French state upon his death in 1957.

The reputation of Bernado Bellotto has often existed in the shadow of his uncle and teacher, Giovanni Antonio Canal, otherwise known as Canaletto. Both artists were born in Venice, where the elder painter started off creating pictures of the city’s decay, before making a fortune by turning to its pomp and pageantry. His canvases proved a hit with aristocrats from England, where he spent a decade painting vedute (topographical pictures).

The younger artist initially mimicked his uncle’s style, even signing himself ‘Canaletto’ on occasion. Eventually, however, as he moved between the courts of Dresden, Vienna, Munich and Warsaw, his work excelled, becoming more detailed and dramatic, and many now consider him the superior artist.

Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum is reigniting the debate by exhibiting the pair in dialogue. With key loans from the Wallace Collection, the British Museum and the Princely Collection of Liechtenstein, the show sets the painters’ careers in the context of their times, tackling topics including the impact of war on the 18th-century art market, and whether either artist ever used a camera obscura.

In 1941, in his early seventies, Henri Matisse decided to reinvent himself. Confined to a wheelchair while recovering from abdominal cancer surgery, he began cutting sheets of paper coated with brightly coloured gouache into bold geometric shapes, then arranging them into lively compositions that straddled painting and sculpture. This new art form went on to dominate his final years, until his death in 1954 — a period that he called his ‘second life’.

Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which is closed for renovations until 2030, has partnered with the nearby Grand Palais to exhibit more than 230 works from this final flourishing of Matisse’s career. The show is conceived as a journey through the constant metamorphosis of the artist’s studio — or cut-out ‘garden’, as he imagined it. There are key loans coming from the Met, the Hammer Museum, Fondation Beyeler and MoMA, which mounted a blockbuster show on the same theme in 2014-15.

Brassaï never intended to be a photographer. He left Hungary for Paris in 1924 in order to become a painter, and remained true to his artist’s vocation throughout his career, using photography to explore various avant-garde innovations. In Surrealism he found the perfect vehicle to study his adopted city. Paris de Nuit, his most famous book, reads as a visual poem in which the French capital is depicted as a mysterious Elysium: all fog and ghostly luminosity.

Published to critical acclaim in 1933, it prompted the novelist Henry Miller to describe Brassaï as ‘the eye of Paris’. The photographer continued to experiment throughout his career, pushing the boundaries between photography as record and as pure image-making, and influencing countless later artists including Hiroshi Sugimoto and Nan Goldin.

Arguably, no other living artist has blurred the lines between graphic design, graffiti and Pop art more than Brian Donnelly, also known as KAWS. Initially a scene painter for animated films, during the 1990s he created his own family of cartoon characters — first in spray-paint, then through screen-prints and toys, and eventually turning to oil on canvas and huge public sculptures.

Vienna’s Albertina Modern is using the story of KAWS’s meteoric rise as the starting point for an examination of the wider phenomenon of artists being influenced by comic strips — from Basquiat to Keith Haring, Tschabalala Self, Peter Saul, A.R. Penck, Raymond Pettibon and Ad Reinhardt. The result is a show that raises the question: which mediums constitute ‘high’ and ‘low’ art?

Of all the Colour Field artists, Helen Frankenthaler was arguably the most faithful to the movement. In the 1950s, she poured oil paint diluted with turpentine onto unprimed canvases so that it bled into feathery pools of varying intensity. The approach became known as the ‘soak-stain’ technique, and before long other Abstract Expressionists were adopting her method. Not that Frankenthaler was ever credited with the invention — this was the 1950s, and male artists dominated the discourse.

Frankenthaler continued to paint in this manner for six decades, and eventually critics were forced to reckon with her experimental output — one that explored the relationship between line, space, movement and colour with a lyrical concentration. This exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel brings together more than 50 works, making it the largest presentation of the artist in Europe to date.

Main image, clockwise from left: at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Mlle Pogany I, 1912-13. Plaster. © Succession Brancusi — All rights reserved / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025. Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn. At Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Pommes et Oranges, circa 1899 (detail). Oil on canvas. 74 x 93 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: © GrandPalaisRMN (musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. At the Grand Palais, Paris, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Nu bleu II, printemps, 1952. Gouache on paper, cut out and glued onto paper mounted on canvas. 103.8 x 86 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo: © Service de la documentation photographique du MNAM — Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI. At the Palazzo Reale, Museo del Novecento, Palazzo Citterio and Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, Arduino Cantafora (b. 1945), Domenica, 2016, (detail). Vinyl and oil on board. 80 x 120 cm. Collezione Antonio Colombo, Milano. At the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916), Three Young Women, 1895. Oil on canvas. 128 x 167 cm. Ribe Art Museum, Ribe. Photo: © Ribe Art Museum