Congrats art loving expats in Europe … you have chosen well. Wherever you are, you have easy access by train or car to the world’s great museums where you’ll find the world’s great works of art. For many of Dispatches’ lists of the best whatever, we say “across Europe and beyond ….” For this 2026 list of the best art exhibitions, Europe stands alone in its cultural hegemony and influence.
Twenty twenty-five was a standout year in all of Europe”s art centers, with important exhibitions from Bilboa to Basel. Just about every genre from Impressionists to unclassifiable (we’re talkin’ to you, Gerhard Richter) was on display in our art palaces including the relatively new Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
But 2026 has barely begun, so let’s take a moment to check out what’s scheduled so far:
Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance
Now through 14 June at the Bozar in Brussels
You might be surprised to learn there is not, and never has been, a clear line of demarcation between beautiful and ugly. That the extremes on the continuum are always shifting and fading into one another as artists influence our ideals.
Without getting too metaphysical about it, the Bozar in the center of Brussels has a new show that lets some of the masters including Botticelli, Titian, da Vinci, Michelangelo and Cranach the Elder weigh in on the topic. Turns out that what was considered beautiful in, say, 1400 shifted pretty dramatically by 1600. And how can you appreciate beautiful without having ugly as a reference point?
Tickets are 18 euros and you can get yours here.
Wes Anderson: The Archive
Now thru 26 July, 2026 at The Design Museum, London
You want quirky? We got quirky. No matter how you feel about his highly stylized films, you know it’s a Wes Anderson movie from the first frame simply because of his sense of design, color palette and bizarre sets. “The Grand Hotel Budapest” alone takes you to a place few other filmmakers dare go – the netherworld between film and stage.
Now, London’s Design Museum – in collaboration with la Cinémathèque française – presents the first Wes Anderson retrospective. The show includes more than 600 objects from his films, including original storyboards, polaroids, sketches, paintings, handwritten notebooks, puppets, miniature models and dozens of costumes.
Highlights include a candy-pink model of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the vending machines from “Asteroid City,” the FENDI fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” the original stop motion puppets used to depict the fantastical sea creatures in |The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” Mr. Fox wearing his signature corduroy suit and show dog Nutmeg alongside miniature sets. The show will also present a screening of “Bottle Rocket,” Anderson’s first short from 1993.
Tickets start at about 20 pounds for adults, and you can get yours here.
A Second Life
Now through 30 August at the Tate Modern in London
“A Second Life” is the largest retrospective yet of Tracey Emin’s work, a product of a chaotic life (both artistic life and personal life). Emin started out in the 1990s as a YBA (young British artist) at the Saatchi Gallery along with Damien Hirst. Her own story is pretty crazy, the London-born daughter of a Cypriot Turk father and an English Romanichal, aka Gypsy, mother.
“Second Life” is inspired by Emin surviving bladder cancer. Her disregard for “any separation of the personal and the public, along with her commitment to unapologetic self-expression, came to define a historic moment in British culture and global art history,” according to the Tate website.
Emin’s breakthrough work was a sculpture, “My Bed,” which is literally of her messy bed, the bed she stayed in for four days consuming nothing but alcohol during a chaotic period in her life. (One of many, come to think of it. One of her works is a tent celebrating “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963 to 1995”). BTW, “My Bed” sold for 2.5 milion pounds in 2014.
All from the wild life of yet another ground breaking artist.
Tickets are free for Tate members and there are various discounts for the rest of us. You can book your tickets here.
Rothko in Florence
Now thru 23 August at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
This is one of those exhibitions that includes multiple locations. The main show is at the Palazzo Strozzi, and what better place to see enigmatic modern art than a 15th century palace in Florence? You know, that whole wildly contrasting worlds thing?
Part of the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, Mark Rothko has challenged generations of art students and collectors with his sometimes figurative work, sometimes deceptively simple abstract paintings. Rothko is most famous for paintings exploring color relationships and his tendency toward grandious statements such as he wanted to make works that would bring people to tears. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he once said. And contradictory statements such as if you are into his color relationships, “you missed the point.”
We think we know the point: His 1954 painting “Untitled (Yellow and Blue)” sold for $32 million a couple of years ago while others sold for much more back in the day.
Part of the exhibition will also be at Museo di San Marco.
Tickets are 25 euros and you can get yours here.
Matisse 1941 – 1954
Now thru 26 July at the Grand Palais in Paris
The Impressionists never seem to fall our of favor with the art-loving masses. Henri Matisse’s “painting with scissors” cut-out gouaches in bold colors he started at 80 years old have inspired generations of graphic artists. Indeed, Matisse worked as a graphic artist late in his career. He’s interesting in that he started out as just another run-of-the-mill French painter, then shifted into another dimension after he saw a painting by Van Gogh. And unlike so many artists, the best part of Matisse’s career came later in life.
“Matisse 1941 – 1954” includes more than 230 paintings, drawings, books and cut-out gouaches retrace, according to the GrandPalais website. Even if you aren’t a Matisse fan, the Grand Palais itself is worth the trip, built about 1900 as a place to celebrate French art. There’s always something cool going on there.
You can get open tickets – good for any time and date – for 20 euros. Get yours here.
Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinity Today
Now thru 2 August at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
This show is where life and art collide. The rise of toxic online Manosphere influencers such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson makes this show particularly topical. The emerging version of masculinity is Trumpian and misogynistic. But that simplistic rebranding is just a brief point on the spectrum. “Beyond the Manopshere” explores the “lived reality,” which is a lot more interesting and complex than anything young men are seeing online today.
The exhibition brings together 37 artists, with works from the 1960s to the 1990. Most of the artists aren’t marquee names. But their work shows that masculinity “is not stable or uniform, but a vessel full of contradictions. Authority and aggression exist alongside fragility and banality; control alongside exposure; fantasy alongside failure,” according to the Stedelijk Museum website.
Tickets are 22 euros and you can buy them here.
Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector
From now to 19 October at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Maybe the coolest thing about being rich and famous is, famous artists want to hang out with you. Think Andy Wahol and The Factory, Picasso and the gang hanging out with Gertrude Stein in Paris and Keith McNally mingling with Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the artists who collected at McNally’s Odeon restaurant.
At 24 years old, Peggy Guggenheim inherited a fortune from her father, who died on the Titanic. She set about using it to collect as much art as she could cram into her homes and galleries. Guggenheim promoted pretty much every mid-20th century artist you can think of at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London before moving to New York. But over the course of eighteen months – January 1938 through June 1939 – the Guggenheim Jeune gallery was “a beacon for the avant-garde movements of the era, known for championing and promoting local and international artists,” according to the museum website. And that’s what’s on display now.
Artists include Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Kandinsky, Henry Moore and many others.
Later, she even gave a show to a 15-year-old Lucien Freud.
All these years later, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is staging “Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector” as we speak, the first large-scale museum exhibition celebrating Guggenheim and Guggenheim Jeune.
Tickets are 14 euros for adults and we don’t see an extra fee for this show. You can get your tickets and schedule your visit here.
Later in the year
Frida: The Making of an Icon
25 June thru 3 January 2027 at the Tate Modern in London
If Frida Kahlo were still with us, she’d be crazy rich from all the ads and marketing campaigns that use her public domain image. That monobrow. Those eyes. That unsmiling confidence that she can do what few women had done before her … shake the art world to its foundations. And she did.
Kahlo was a rare combination of a German-Hungarian Jewish immigrant to Mexico (her father) and a Spanish/ native Mexican mother. That multi-cultural background was a huge influence on her art, as were all her physical challenges including polio and severe injuries in a bus crash. What do they say? “From pain comes art ….”
Willem de Kooning at Work
9 October thru 17 January at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
You probably know Willem de Kooning’s distinctive abstract impressionist works on sight, and even know the story of how he stowed away on a ship from his native Rotterdam, where he grew up poor, to sneak into the U.S. If you do, you’ll want to see this show marking 100 years after his arrival in the New World.
De Kooning often gets compared to his contemporary Jackson Pollack and they had a lot in common – the booze, the hard living, the women and the absolute game-changing affect they had on the world of abstract art. “I never was interested in how to make a good painting…,” de Kooning once said. “I didn’t work on it with the idea of perfection, but to see how far one could go .… “ And that he did, with his style and approach constantly evolving.
De Kooning painted for seven decades, long after he’d started to feel the affects of dementia. This show, a collaboration between the Rijksmuseum and the Art Institute of Chicago, promises about 120 works from throughout his career.
It costs 25 euros to get in the Rijksmuseum, and we don’t see an additional charge for the show. You can get your tickets here.
21 November to 11 April 2027 at the National Gallery in London
This epic exhibition will for the first time bring all of the Flemish painter’s portraits are together in one place. Or as the Tate’s American-style summary states, “For the first time in history, see all of Jan van Eyck’s portraits together. Only once, only at the National Gallery.” All is only nine, about half the surviving paintings. But hey, just deciphering that one might take the better part of a morning. The critics marvel over Rembrandt and Vermeer. But is there really a more skilled, innovative and influential artist than Van Eyck?
I remember as a college student from hillbilly Kentucky seeing Van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait” in the National Gallery and standing transfixed for what seemed like hours. I couldn’t stop puzzling through this painting, one of rare pieces universally recognized as a “masterpiece.” How did Jan Van Eyck paint the convex mirror? Does the painting celebrate a marriage? Is the woman pregnant? And what’s up with that scruffy little dog?
See more here about the mysteries of the Arnolfini painting here before you go.
The Bayeux Tapestry
Opening in September at the British Museum in London
Art and history at the British Museum with the return of the Bayeux Tapestry to its country of origin from the Bayeux Museum in Normandy. The 70-meter-long tapestry depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the victory of the Normans in their conquest of the Anglo-Saxons and the British Isles.
Though billed as a “tapestry,” which is a weaving technique like a kilim, the Bayeux Tapestry is actually an embroidered piece, with wool patterns sewn into linen fabric. The huge work was likely commissioned to mark the opening of Notre-Dame cathedral in 1077, according to the sources we found. The work depicts more than just a battle … it shows life 900 years ago, at the moment what became Britain was born. And as with most historical documents, there are a lot of historical inconsistencies. (See the video above.) Which makes the Bayeux Tapestry even more interesting.
The tapestry is on loan until July, 2027.
As you might imagine with a defining national treasure, this is more than an art show. It is a moment in history, complete with Bayeux Mania and a scramble for tickets and hotel rooms near London. Tickets go on sale 1 July, so this post will be updated.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
