Autumn is Europe’s season for blockbuster show openings, and we have plenty of news on that front. Summer tends to be quieter, but if you’re headed to the continent sooner rather than later, and hoping to make time for both beaches and art, you won’t be disappointed. From ancient bronzes to contemporary photography, Exhibitions in Europe on view now and opening throughout the autumn offer something for everyone.
England
The Tate Modern is hosting a major survey of the South African activist photographer Zanele Muholi’s work, which opened on June 6 and runs through January 26, 2025. The exhibition, Zanele Muholi, features work from several different series on marginalized communities as well as powerful self-portraits. In the fall, the Tate Modern opens another significant survey show, the first major UK exhibition of experimental U.S. artist Mike Kelley. Running from October 3, 2024 to March 9, 2025, Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit will feature the artist’s drawings, collages, performances, found objects, and videos made from the 1970s through his passing in 2012.
From September 26, 2024 to February 23, 2025, head to the British Museum to get a unique perspective on the length and breadth of the Silk Roads. From Indian garnets found in Suffolk, to Iranian glass unearthed in Japan, Silk Roads unravels the way these overlapping trade routes linked communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, thus indelibly influencing global culture and history.
Worth the wait, The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington on November 9, 2024. The show will feature art and objects from the Golden Age of the Mughal Court (approximately 1560–1660), a period known for its creative output and internationalist culture.
Spain
Madrid’s wonderful Thyssen-Bornemisza is hosting a slate of special exhibitions well worth taking a break from the sun. Open through September 15, 2024 is Rosario de Velasco, featuring 30 paintings Velasco made from the 1920s to 1940s, as well as a number of her illustrations. The show highlights the political and social aspects of the work behind one of Spain’s great 20th century women artists, and if you can’t make the exhibit in Madrid, you can also catch it later this fall, when it travels to the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia from November 7 to February 16, 2025.
In a very different vein, Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections mines the museum’s collection to take on aspects of the colonial system including racial domination, marronage, and the civil rights struggle. The exhibition runs until October 20th, and includes work by Pablo Picasso, Otto Müller, Romare Bearden, and many more. And finally, on view from November 12 to February 9th, 2025, Gabriele Münter: The Great Expressionist Woman Painter, explores the legacy of this founding member of the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) Expressionist artist group based in and around Munich. The show includes over 100 paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, demonstrating Münter’s place as one of German Expressionism’s most important artists.
Also in Madrid this autumn is Rubens’ Workshop, on view at the Museo del Prado from October 15 to February 16th, 2025. The show stages a recreation of the artist’s workshop, using both original and recreated objects. Alongside a show of 20 of his paintings, several drawings and engravings, explore how this prolific 17th century painter collaborated with his assistants. Likewise in fall, head to the Guggenheim Bilbao for a great painter of a different era: Hilma af Klint is a survey of the radical Swedish artist’s incredible body of work that was virtually unseen until 1986. The show runs from October 18 to February 2, 2025.
Italy
Louise Bourgeois. Unconscious memories, at Rome’s Galleria Borghese, represents the museum’s first exhibit devoted to a contemporary woman artist and the first Roman exhibition devoted specifically to Bourgeois, the groundbreaking French-American artist known for her biomorphic forms and seven-decade career. The show, on view through September 15, 2024, will feature about 20 of her sculptures in dialogue with pieces from the Borghese’s permanent collection.
Head to Florence this fall for another special exhibition featuring another indelible 20th century woman artist. Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, on view at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi from September 27 to January 26th, 2025, features the American artist’s paintings made between 1953 and 2002, for which Frankenthaler relied on color, space, abstraction, and poetry to achieve her unique, rules-free approach to her creative output.
France
Paris has a few can’t-miss shows coming up this fall, ideal if you’re skipping the hubbub of the Olympics and waiting until September’s la rentrée to plan your visit. To begin, in case you didn’t get your Borghese fix at the actual Borghese, head to the lovely Musée Jacquemart André from September 6 to January 5th, 2025, for Masterpieces From the Borghese Gallery, the museum’s inaugural show after a year of renovations. The special exhibit presents around forty masterpieces, including work from Caravaggio, Rubens, Botticelli, Raphael, and Titian.
Keep the Italian connection going at the Louvre, at Masterpieces From the Torlonia Collection, on view through November 11, 2024. The show features the largest-ever private collection of ancient Roman sculpture, assembled by Rome’s Torlonia princes. This is the first time the collection has been made available for public viewing since the mid-20th century, and will be shown here in conjunction with examples of ancient sculpture held in the French national collection.
Enjoy completely different artistic perspectives at the Musée d’Orsay, which has several special exhibitions opening this fall. Our first pick is Céline Laguarde: Photographer, dedicated to the early 20th century photographer and the evolution of her work within the artistic movement of pictorialism. The show is on view from September 24 to January 12, 2025. Returning to painting, Caillebotte: Painting men, which opens October 8th and runs through January 19, 2025, features Gustave Caillebotte’s 19th century realist paintings depicting workers, athletes, and male nudes. The show highlights Caillebotte’s own sense of modernity against a backdrop of an evolving societal perspective on masculinity.
Head across town to the Fondation Louis Vuitton for a trip to the 1960s. Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…, on view from October 16 to February 24, 2025, is dedicated to Pop Art, with a special focus on the work of Tom Wesselmann, known for his collages, landscapes, nudes, and embossed still lifes. Thirty-five of the other artists who round out the show include Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, and Ai Weiwei.
Finally, if your French travels bring you south, don’t miss Mirómatisse: Beyond Images, on view at Nice’s Musée Matisse through September 29, 2024. The show examines the relationship between Henri Matisse and Joan Miró’s works by highlighting the stand each artist took against Western visual tradition, with a particular focus on Miró’s Fauvism and the influence of his work on Matisse during the 1930s.
Austria
Enjoy an overview of recent contemporary art and gain a better understanding of the city of Vienna itself at the Wien Museum’s exhibition, Sold! New Acquisitions from Vienna’s Collection of Contemporary Art, 2018-2023. The exhibition, held from September 26 to February 23, 2025, helps viewers understand the City of Vienna as a buyer of contemporary art, and the importance of the Municipal Department and Culture, which acquires around 80 works by Vienna-based artists every year.
If you prefer your art wearing a few centuries of patina, visit Rembrandt-Hoogstraten at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien from October 8 to January 12, 2025. With a wealth of international loans, this show demonstrates the artistic interplay between Rembrandt and one his students, Samuel van Hoogstraten, a successful artist at the Habsburg court.
The Albertina Museum has a terrific fall slate. First, there’s Robert Longo, on view from September 4 to January 26, 2025. The show features the contemporary American artist’s hyper realistic, dramatic charcoal drawings that explore themes of nature, politics, and history. Next up, there’s Chagall, an exhibition showing 90 of the artist’s works from across his creative periods, which swing from the traditional to the avant-garde, achieving an artistic language all his own — one that relies just as much on roosters and donkeys as the cosmos. The show is on view from September 28 to February 9, 2025.
Finally, pay a visit to Egon Schiele – Adrian Ghenie, which honors Schiele’s missing work — around a quarter of the artist’s paintings are lost, destroyed, or their whereabouts are unknown. Through black and white photographs, evidence of the work remains. Ghenie envisions their return through his “Shadow Paintings,” which emphasize the human body, which Schiele employed as a way to convey deeper-reaching statements about human existence and spirituality. The show is on view from October 11 to February 9, 2025.
Germany
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is offering some of the 20th century’s greatest hits. On view through October 6, 2024, Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty is a major survey of over 300 of the artist’s paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, Polaroids, films and collages, all tied together by the theme of Warhol’s quest to visualize his own idea of beauty. Come fall, the museum opens Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well. Running from November 23 to February 23, 2025, this retrospective will rely on slide shows, video installations, and music to demonstrate Goldin’s engagement with themes of love, intimacy, addiction, and loss.
Another American artist will be honored across town at the Hamburger Bahnhof, exhibiting Mark Bradford, the Los Angeles-born artist’s first German solo museum show, from September 6 to March 10, 2025. The special exhibition will feature Bradford’s paintings, sculptures, installations, and video work, centered on themes like economic disparities, urban life, and race and gender issues.
There’s one more U.S. artist with a solo show to check out in Berlin this season. The young contemporary photographer Tyler Mitchell, who got his start in fashion, offers an expansive view of beauty, style, and utopia as it relates to black life in the exhibition Wish This Was Real, on view at C/O Berlin through September 5, 2024. Later this fall, the photography museum will also show Dream On. Berlin, the 90s, featuring photographers from the East German photo agency OSTKREUZ, who documented the formative years and social transformation of the city after the fall of the Wall. The show runs from September 14 to January 23, 2025.
For a very different period, head to Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie from September 27 to January 26, 2025, to see Claude Monet’s works representing his three earliest views of Paris, considered the first Impressionist cityscapes, ever. The aptly titled Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape begins with the three 1867 paintings, and expands to demonstrate their influence on other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, including Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro, and Henri Matisse, who were also inspired to rediscover the city as a now, iconic motif.
Next door in Potsdam, the Museum Barberini will be the first German museum to devote a posthumous retrospective to the French avant-garde artist Maurice de Vlaminck. Maurice de Vlaminck: Modern Art Rebel will feature around 70 of his works, ranging from his early 20th century beginnings to his experimentations with Cubism and final landscape paintings. The retrospective can be visited from September 14 to January 12, 2025.
If you’re headed to Bavaria, Walk the Line at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne offers six concurrent exhibitions, all demonstrating different artistic paths into abstraction. The shows are on view through September 8th, 2024, and feature artists like Hans Hartung, Geraldine Frisch, and the Gutai group, an innovative 20th century Japanese artist collective that included Toshio Yoshida and Chiyu Uemae.
Finally, coming up in November, the Alte Pinakothek special exhibition Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into Art represents the first major show featuring work solely by this Amsterdam artist who died in 1750, a Düsseldorf court painter whose paintings were so in demand during her lifetime that she produced only a few annual works (she also had eleven children). Her realistic floral still lifes are as magnificent now as they were to collectors during the 18th century.
Sweden
Stockholm’s Moderna Museet offers a couple great special exhibitions this fall. Honoring the 100th anniversary of French poet André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism in the Moderna Museet Collection mines the museum’s own permanent collection to celebrate all things Surrealism. Artworks by Maya Deren, Renée Magritte, Joan Miró, and Robert Rauschenberg will be on view. The show runs from October 6, 2024 to January 18, 2026.
In collaboration with Berlin’s Brücke Museum, the Moderna Museet will also shine a light on the artist group Brücke, Germany’s contribution to international modernism. From September 21 to March 9, 2025, German Expressionism will feature work by the architecture students — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff — who founded Die Brücke to break with the strict norms of the German Empire.
Visitors will find romance, of a sort, at Stockholm’s National Museum. The Romantic Eye, on view from September 26 to January 5, 2025, explores the alluring if sometimes frightening imagery of Romanticism. Artists on view will include Caspar David Friedrich, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Eugène Delacroix. Also, view contemporary artists like Mariele Neudecker, Leif Engström, and Lars Nilsson.
Denmark
The always tempting Louisiana Museum has revealed little so far about its upcoming fall special exhibition, The Ocean. However, that wouldn’t stop me from catching a commuter train from Copenhagen to go see. Paintings, photographs, and maps express the beauty, mystery, and horror of what makes up three-quarters of our planet’s surface. Explore this exhibit from October 11 to April 27, 2025. Back in town, Käthe Kollwitz — Mensch at the National Gallery explores the social and political themes behind the German artist’s sketches, prints, and sculptures, produced from the late 19th century through the mid-20th. The show runs from November 7 to February 23, 2025.
Special Mention
On view through November 24, 2024, Becoming Anna-Eva Bergman at Oslo’s National Museum highlights the inspiration the 20th-century painter found in French and Norwegian landscapes. This exhibition balances the abstraction and figuration of her works, including large-scale paintings like The High Mountain and Pyramid. For a dose of realism, visit Warsaw’s National Museum for a special exhibition featuring the work of Józef Chełmoński. A Polish painter working from the late 18th century through the early 19th century, Chełmoński is known for his romantic images of nature and village life. Józef Chełmoński 1849-1914 runs from September 27 to January 26, 2025.
Finally, should you have a layover at the Amsterdam hub that leaves you time to catch a show, head to the Rijksmuseum through September 1st for Stop Motion, which uses 25 photographs by the British-American photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to focus on the unique moment in history when the camera was found to be superior to the human eye. From September 27 to January 12, 2025, take in 4,000 years of history via Asian Bronze, a special exhibition gathering 75 masterpieces spanning statues of gods to everyday objects.
Cover photo: Paolo Ferrarini
[Written June 2024]
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