Our pick of the shows to see in the world's great art cities in 2026

Paris: springtime brings Rousseau and Renoir

There are a few days left in January to catch the Georges de la Tour exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André (until 25 January), which has seen record visitor numbers. Here, the candlelight master is positioned in dialogue with Caravaggio’s Europe-wide sphere of influence. These ideas will find an intriguing resonance in the subsequent Clair-obscur group show at the Bourse de Commerce (4 March-31 August), which examines the legacy of chiaroscuro in Modern and contemporary practices.

At the Musée de la Musique, Kandinsky: The Music of Colour includes nearly 200 works by Wassily Kandinsky, focusing on the pioneering painter’s synaesthetic practice (until 1 February). The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is hosting two standout shows: US painter George Condo (until 8 February), his largest survey to date, and Belgium-based Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga (until 22 February).

In the spring, the Musée d’Orsay will open Renoir and Love (17 March-19 July), celebrating the painter’s tender and enchanted worldview. Organised with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, it will reunite the Musée d’Orsay’s own Dance at Le moulin de la Galette (1876) with internationally held masterpieces including Mother Anthony’s Tavern (1866), from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), from the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Accompanying it is a version of Renoir Drawings, currently on view at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York (until 8 February). This delves into the painter’s radical and rarely seen works on paper.

Lastly, Henri Rousseau: The Ambition of Painting travels from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia to the Musée de l’Orangerie (25 March-20 July), bringing together the largest collections of works by the painter.

New York: fresh eyes on familiar names

Several solo shows in New York this year will present unfamiliar views of otherwise canonical artists. At the Neue Galerie, Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (12 February-4 May) will explore how the influential connection between Egon Schiele and a Vienna-based gynaecologist during the final decade of the Austrian Expressionist’s life shaped his sensitive depictions of the human body. Schiele’s charged portrait of Von Graff himself will be the centrepiece of the show.

Also opening the same month will be Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture at the Frick Collection (12 February-11 May), which will look at the sumptuous portraits by the British artist Thomas Gainsborough through a fashion lens across more than two dozen paintings.

The obscure works created during the final decade of Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee’s life will be shown by the Jewish Museum in Paul Klee:
Other Possible Worlds (20 March-26 July), highlighting what he created during his years in exile after the Nazis categorised him as a “degenerate” artist.

Meanwhile, the Morgan Library and Museum will exhibit a selection of more than 110 contact sheets from the 1950s through to the 1980s in Hujar: Contact (22 May-25 October), all drawn from its own collection of more than 5,700 contact sheets by the master US photographer Peter Hujar.

Tokyo: women artists strike big in Japan

Japan’s women artists of the 1950s and 60s receive their due in Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan, running until 8 February at the National Museum of Modern Art. The show explores the “anti-action” activities of 14 artists including Kazuko Enomoto, Mitsuko Tabe and Yayoi Kusama.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum will celebrate its centennial this year with pieces from the British Museum’s collection of some 40,000 items from Japan for Edo in Focus (25 July-18 October). Screens, scrolls and woodblock prints celebrate the cultural flourishing of the Edo era (1603-1868) in a show that will also travel to the Osaka Nakanoshima Museum of Art.

The National Arts Center, Tokyo, will revisit a more recent period of the UK with YBA & Beyond: British Art in the 90s from the Tate Collection (11 February-11 May). The UK’s post-Thatcherite rebels’ reshaping of the UK art scene echoes even here.

And Mori Art Museum will present a show on artist Mariko Mori’s integration of science and metaphysics with art (31 October-28 March 2027). The 80 works trace Mori’s explorations of a Buddhist-informed posthumanism in the first exhibition in Japan dedicated to the artist since 2002.

Madrid: Spain’s capital celebrates the many aspects of painting

Painting will rule the day in Madrid in 2026. Two solo shows that are already open are the Museo del Prado’s expansive exhibition of the German Neoclassical artist Anton Raphael Mengs (until 1 March) and nearby CaixaForum’s Henri Matisse show (until 22 February). The latter is largely comprised of works on loan from Paris’s Centre Pompidou while it undergoes its major renovation.

Scandinavian painting from the 19th century will make a strong showing in the spring, with Vilhelm Hammershøi’s first Spanish survey at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (17 February-31 May) and a show of Swedish Gilded Age portraitist Anders Zorn at the Fundación Mapfre (19 February-17 May).

Exceptional women artists will be in the spotlight too. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is honouring some lesser-known 20th-century pioneers, first with a survey of the Galician Surrealist Maruja Mallo (until 16 March) and then in spring with a show of the Catalan textile artist Aurèlia Muñoz (29 April-7 September). Summer at the Thyssen will feature Ewa Juszkiewicz’s subversive takes on history painting (26 May-6 September) and Carmen Laffón’s soft-hued landscapes (23 June-27 September).

Elsewhere, an exhibition will mark 50 years since the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Inquietude: Liberty and Democracy (until 8 March) at La Casa Encendida explores the end of both Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships through the work of more than 50 artists, including Joan Miró, Paula Rego and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

London: the big beasts of British art to the fore

Some of the biggest—and, to be frank, most marketable—names in British art are getting major workouts in 2026, with many of London’s major institutions giving up space to household names. Leading the way is a 40-year retrospective for Tracey Emin at Tate Modern (27 February -31 August); her famous bed will be there, but not her equally famous tent, which was sadly burnt to a crisp in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire. Over at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), there will be a selection of drawings by Lucian Freud (12 February-3 May) which concentrates on his preparatory work for human studies and portraits. Not to be outdone, David Hockney is landing at the Serpentine (12 March-23 August) with recent works including his giant iPad frieze A Year in Normandy, while Modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth will be celebrated at the Courtauld Gallery (12 June-6 September) with a show focusing on her overlooked works using rich colours.

Tate Britain is going back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, firstly with a show of James McNeill Whistler (21 May-27 September), who was technically American but lived in London for nearly half a century, followed by a Bloomsbury Group double act, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (12 November-11 April 2027), who were key to the growth of the British avant-garde.

Elsewhere is a profusion of riches, both old and new. The Barbican is looking back over a century as it considers the influence of Pan-Africanism in its Project a Black Planet exhibition (11 June-6 September), which will include the likes of Chris Ofili, Marlene Dumas and Kerry James Marshall; Frida Kahlo pitches up at Tate Modern (25 June-3 January 2027) with a substantial selection; and the NPG scores an easy win with a show devoted to images of Marilyn Monroe (4 June-6 September) on the centenary of her birth, with works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty and Eve Arnold in the frame. Finally, for all you pop culture nerds, the former Vogue editor Edward Enninful is curating a show for Tate Britain called, simply, The 90s (1 October-14 February 2027). If you can remember it—well, you were probably there.