Eight Art Exhibitions Worth Traveling For in Fall 2026

Feature image: Lee Krasner, The Eye Is the First Circle (cropped), 1960. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland ©Adagp via Artprice. Titles originally in another language have been translated to English.

Autumn is when museums open exhibitions they have spent years negotiating loans for, and the fall 2026 art exhibitions are unusually strong on both sides of the Atlantic. Paintings separated for centuries are sharing a wall for the first time, and several artists are receiving their first full career retrospectives. From London to Oslo, eight of them are worth planning a trip around.

Nine portraits by Jan van Eyck survive, accounting for half of everything known from his hand. The National Gallery has gathered all nine from across Europe for the first time in history, a reunion the museum says can happen only once. The sitters are craftsmen, merchants, and the painter's own relatives, recorded in the 1430s with a precision that still startles, down to stubble, wrinkles, and flushed cheeks. Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) hangs beside a second likeness of Arnolfini on loan from Berlin, and Jan van Eyck's Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (1433) is paired with his portrait of his wife from Bruges. Standard admission is £18, and booking ahead is wise for a show of this scale.

Forty paintings from the 1860s to the 1880s follow Pierre-Auguste Renoir through Paris's dance halls, gardens, and riverside restaurants, with courtship, friendship, and family as the thread. The headline loan is Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), which has left the Musée d'Orsay to be shown in the United Kingdom for the first time. It hangs in the Sainsbury Wing with Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Dance at Bougival (1883) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which organized the exhibition with the National Gallery and the Musée d'Orsay. Every Friday evening from October 23, 2026 to January 15, 2027, visitors can pay what they wish for entry.

Mary Cassatt lived in France for six decades and exhibited with the Impressionists four times, and this is the first major exhibition a French national museum has given her. Timed to the centenary of her death in 1926, it brings almost 80 paintings, pastels, and prints to Paris, including works from American collections that rarely travel. The curators organize her career around her own declaration, "I am independent," and follow it from her first studio to her campaigning for women's suffrage. One highlight is a film that digitally restores Modern Woman, the mural she painted for the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, four meters high and eighteen meters wide, which has since disappeared. The exhibition was organized in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Across the Seine, the Petit Palais is giving Eva Gonzalès the first large retrospective of her career, in France or anywhere else. Gonzalès was the only pupil Édouard Manet ever took on, and she built a distinct voice of her own before her death in 1883. Almost one hundred paintings, pastels, and prints trace that voice through portraits of women, quiet interiors, and Normandy landscapes. Seeing it in the same week as Cassatt at the Musée d'Orsay makes a rare double bill of women who painted alongside the Impressionists. The exhibition moves to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in February 2027.

Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock met as emerging artists in New York in the winter of 1941, married in 1945, and worked side by side in Springs, Long Island, until Pollock's death in 1956. The Met's exhibition is the first to follow the full arc of both careers at once, and the first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in more than twenty years. More than 120 works fill Gallery 899, and the subtitle comes from a painting Krasner made in 1976. Pollock's reputation long eclipsed hers, and the Met considers each artist on their own terms and in relation to the other. Entry is included with museum admission.

The Van Gogh Museum is staging the first retrospective of James McNeill Whistler ever held in the Netherlands. The American-born painter and printmaker cultivated his public image as carefully as his canvases, and the museum leans into both sides of him, the aesthete and the provocateur. More than 100 works are on view. Vincent van Gogh wrote about Whistler in his letters and admired his etchings, which gives the pairing of artist and venue its logic. A companion exhibition at The Mesdag Collection in The Hague looks at Whistler's visits to the Netherlands, an easy addition for anyone already making the trip.

Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio, worked in and around Parma in the early sixteenth century and was ranked for centuries with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Dresden owns an exceptional group of his panel paintings, and the newly restored Correggio Madonna of Saint Sebastian (c. 1524) is the starting point for the first comprehensive survey of his career ever staged outside Italy. Loans have arrived from the Musée du Louvre, the Museo Nacional del Prado, and the Galleria Borghese, among them Correggio's Danaë (c. 1530–31). The exhibition is in the Zwinger, and a combined ticket covers the rest of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

The museum prints the title with the word Woman struck through, which states the argument before a visitor reaches the first room. Between 1550 and 1650, a number of women built professional careers as painters across Europe, and the exhibition treats them as central figures of their time. Some fifty religious paintings, portraits, and still lifes by Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Clara Peeters, and Michaelina Wautier hang alongside works by the artists who taught them. The selection includes Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1639 or 1640). The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Most of these exhibitions close by the end of January, and Van Eyck opens last, on November 21.

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