Best exhibitions of 2025: Europe

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec gave Suzanne Valadon her name. Born Marie-Clémentine in 1864, she was a teenager when she started modelling for Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, leading Lautrec to comment that she reminded him of the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders. She didn’t mind: it was by watching these ‘old men’ that she learned how to paint. ‘I took the best of them, their teachings, their examples,’ she said.

This hotly anticipated exhibition of Valadon’s work brings together some 200 paintings and drawings, including the 1923 tour de force Le Chambre bleue (The Blue Room), her celebrated riposte to centuries of female nudes. Depicting a woman in drawstring pyjamas reclining on a crumpled bed while smoking a cigarette, it is a defiant portrait of female emancipation. It was an apt subject for an artist who, in 1894, had become the first woman painter to be admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Despite Paris being the couture capital of the world, the Louvre has never mounted an exhibition dedicated to the relationship between fashion and its collections. But from 24 January, around 100 outfits and accessories made between 1960 and 2025 will be placed throughout 9,000 square metres of the museum’s galleries in dialogue with masterpieces of art and craft.

One highlight is an evening coat from Chanel’s Autumn/Winter 1996-97 haute couture collection that was embroidered with thousands of sequins at Paris’s famous Lesage workshops. The design, inspired by Chinese Coromandel lacquer screens, was by Karl Lagerfeld, and referenced Coco Chanel’s taste in decorative arts: she had several such screens cut into panels to line the walls of her office. It is displayed alongside a French commode — made around 1750 in the workshop of Jacques Philippe Carel — set with similar screens, which were popular at European courts in the 18th century.

Elsewhere, outfits by designers including John Galliano for Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen and Hubert de Givenchy are curated in conversation with objects such as a suit of armour made for King Henry III of France, a 16th-century reliquary bust of Saint Ferdinand and a cabinet from around 1700 by the celebrated craftsman André-Charles Boulle.

When Alexej von Jawlensky left the military in 1889 to become an artist, he had one desire: to paint ‘only what was in me, in my soul’. This exhibition charts the life of one of the key protagonists of the Expressionist movement.

Born in Russia in 1864, Jawlensky lived in St Petersburg before moving to Munich in 1894, where he fell in with a group of like-minded painters, including his fellow countryman Wassily Kandinsky. These artists believed fervently that they must engage with the world around them and use their art to express their wonder at what they saw.

Jawlensky’s response was to create bold portraits in dazzling colours — beautiful, enigmatic reflections of the human psyche. The artist believed that the spiritual content of great art transcended style, resulting in paintings that were direct and immediate. The exhibition ends with the artist’s ‘meditations’: small, mysterious paintings made at the end of his life when he was suffering from arthritis.

The Italian sculptor Marisa Merz was a member of the post-war Arte Povera movement that sought to create art using humble materials. Merz favoured wool, copper, nylon thread and twisted aluminium, which she used to make deceptively simple objects that alluded to her life as a female artist, a wife and a mother. Unlike her contemporaries Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto and her husband Mario, Merz was more focused on the domestic environment than the industrial landscape, and as a result her sculptures were embraced by the burgeoning feminist movement in Italy in the 1960s.

Born in Turin in 1926, Merz studied as a dancer and worked as a model for the painter Felice Casorati, becoming an artist in her own right after meeting Mario Merz in the 1950s. Listen to the Space focuses on the poetry and fragility of her art, and features landmark works that have not previously been exhibited.

No other country in the modern age has made more of an impact on the art of photography than America. And over the past decade, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has been steadily building one of the most important collections of American artists working in the medium, which it is unveiling for the first time in a mammoth exhibition.

Featuring more than 200 images spanning the period from 1839 to the 21st century, American Photography is the biggest survey of its kind ever to take place in Europe. With works by names such as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Paul Strand and Andy Warhol — alongside images by anonymous and unknown photographers — it explores how America’s social and cultural history has been documented and disseminated by its native image-makers.

The show is the fruit of decades of work by curators Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom. Together, they’ve been stewarding the Rijksmuseum’s photography collection since the 1990s. In 2023, they were the first non-American winners of the prestigious Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) award for promoting the field. Their richly illustrated book accompanying the exhibition will no doubt become a landmark text on the topic.

In 1932, the year in which Samuel Courtauld founded the Courtauld Institute, the English industrialist met Oskar Reinhart, scion of a Swiss family made wealthy by trade with South Asia. Both men were set on using their fortunes to amass great collections of art, spanning Old Masters to French modernism, and they shared a similar taste in artists. The Reinhart Collection, based in Winterthur, has maintained close affinities with the Courtauld’s permanent collection.

In February, a selection of Reinhart’s most important works will travel from their home, Am Römerholz — the collector’s former villa in Winterthur — to the Courtauld’s gallery in Somerset House, London.

Among the important pictures making the journey are Goya’s Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks; Géricault’s A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank; Cezanne’s Still Life with Faience Jug and Fruit; Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Clown Cha-U-Kao; Manet’s Au Café; and Van Gogh’s A Ward in the Hospital at Arles and The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles. The latter were painted while the Dutchman was recovering from a mental breakdown and self-mutilation, as depicted in the Courtauld’s own Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.

Many of the works have never been shown in the UK before, and the exhibition marks the first display of Reinhart’s collection outside Switzerland.

Between 2022 and 2023, nearly three million visitors flocked to see the mind-bending work of Refik Anadol at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, catapulting the Turkish digital artist to fame.

Since then, as he recently revealed to Christie’s, he has been furthering his research into AI and data sets, employing teams of scientists to gather images and sounds from across 16 rainforests in order to create algorithms that reflect the inherent intelligence of the natural world.

In March, Anadol will become the inaugural artist of the Guggenheim Bilbao’s new ‘in situ’ series, combining his use of multi-sensory architectural installations, immersive data paintings, sculptures and performance to create an exhibition that explores what it means to be human today. Later in 2025, British artist Mark Leckey will continue the series.

Travelling from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to London, Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 charts the way in which four gold-ground panel painters turned the Italian city into a crucible of devotional art.

The leader of the school, Duccio di Buoninsegna — usually known simply as Duccio — is represented by his Maestà, the first major double-sided altarpiece in Western painting, which was produced for the city’s cathedral around 1310 and marks a fundamental shift in narrative painting. For the show, three of the altarpiece’s surviving panels held in the gallery’s own collection have been reunited with others from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

A number of panels from triptychs and polyptychs — loaned by the Louvre, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, among others — illustrate the work of the master’s three most important followers: Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Despite the fact that none of these men survived the catastrophic plague of around 1348, the emotional power, daring innovation and supreme technical abilities of their pictures inspired a creative surge that would soon become the Renaissance.

Since reopening in 2023 following a £41-million refurbishment, London’s National Portrait Gallery has been riding a wave of popularity. That looks set to continue in 2025 with a show dedicated to an often overlooked part of Edvard Munch’s oeuvre: his portraits.

Depicting family, friends, lovers, patrons and collectors — as well as the Norwegian painter himself — this group of works made between the 1880s and 1920s dispels the commonly held belief that Munch was an isolated figure racked with anxiety. He was, in fact, sociable and bohemian.

This chronological survey, bringing together some 40 pictures, is curated by Alison Smith, former chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery and now director of collections and research at the Wallace Collection. It features important loans from the Munch Museum in Oslo, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo.

There hasn’t been a major exhibition in the UK dedicated to Cartier in almost 30 years, but the V&A is making up for lost time with an extensive new show that will explore the company’s evolving influence on art, design and craftsmanship since the turn of the 20th century.

Showcasing more than 350 precious jewels, historic gemstones, watches and clocks, the exhibition will chart Cartier’s transformation from a family-owned jewellery house in Paris to a globally recognised brand with a reputation as ‘the jeweller of kings and the king of jewellers’. It will also explore how the firm has broadened its appeal in the worlds of cinema, music and fashion.

Treasures on display will include a rare, 23.6-carat pink diamond brooch commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II and completed in 1953, and the 1902 Scroll Tiara, which has been worn by both Clementine Churchill (at the coronation of Elizabeth II) and Rihanna. Also on show will be Grace Kelly’s engagement ring, which the actress wore in her final film, High Society, before becoming Princess Grace of Monaco. Complementing the display of precious objects will be previously unseen drawings from the V&A and Cartier archives.

In September 2024, the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon reopened to the public after a five-year renovation led by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. Set within the grounds of Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Foundation, it now houses the collection of the eminent art collector and philanthropist Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), as well as offering a virtuoso programme of temporary exhibitions.

The museum’s spring blockbuster juxtaposes around 100 works by the Portuguese artist Paula Rego and the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão to reveal the proximity of their inspirations and themes — in particular, their focus on the history of women in contrasting parts of the world. It also examines their interrogation of the complex relationship between Portugal and Brazil wrought by colonialism.

Opening the show is Rego’s The First Mass in Brazil, a rarely exhibited work from a British private collection, which reimagines the original 1860 painting of the same name by Victor Meirelles. Painted in 1993, it depicts the suffering of indigenous women being forcibly converted to Christianity.

The lives and careers of Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung are inextricably linked. The couple married in Paris in 1929 before moving to Menorca in 1933, where both explored the relationship between aesthetics and mathematics — particularly the harmony of the ‘golden ratio’ — in their art.

Following their divorce in 1939, Bergman experimented with illustration and a non-figurative painterly style, while Hartung continued to explore the possibilities of gestural abstraction. In the early 1950s, Bergman and Hartung reunited in Paris, remarrying in 1957. In 1973, the couple moved to Antibes, where the house and studios they designed later became the Hartung-Bergman Foundation.

Organised in cooperation with the foundation, this exhibition places the duo’s work in dialogue for the first time to reveal their differences and commonality — notably their shared interest in nature, the cosmos and the language of music. Alongside masterpieces from major turning points in their careers will be never-before-seen sketches and archival material, including photographs, studio equipment and personal items.

Main image, clockwise from top left: Simone Martini (1284-1344), The Angel Gabriel, circa 1326-34 (detail), at the National Gallery, London. Collection KMSKA — Flemish Community. Photo: © Collection KMSKA — Flemish Community / Hugo Maertens. Amanda López (b. 1982), Homegirls, San Francisco, 2008, at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. National Museum for American History, Washington, D.C. © Amanda López. Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Hans Jaeger, 1889 (detail), at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, The Fine Art Collections. Photo: © Nasjonalmuseet / Børre Høstland. Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), Les Deux Soeurs, 1928 (detail), at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Private Collection. Photo: © Matthew Hollow. A late Art Deco brooch, Cartier London, 1940, at the V&A South Kensington, London. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Alexej von Jawlensky (1864-1941), Heilandsgesicht: In der Liebe ist ewig was geistig ist (The Face of The Saviour: Love Carries Forever Spirituality), 1935, at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Private Collection, Riehen, Switzerland. Photo: Max Ehrengruber