From a once-in-a-lifetime Duchamp to Marina Abramović in Venice and the 90s through Edward Enninful’s eyes. The art calendar that justifies booking the flights.
2026 is an unusually strong year for museum exhibitions, partly because post-pandemic institutional backlogs are still clearing and partly because several of the world’s most important artists and subjects are converging on major spaces simultaneously. The Venice Biennale gives the year an art-world heartbeat, but the exhibitions on this list are the ones worth building separate trips around. Some are once-in-a-generation. One has not happened since Richard Nixon was in office.
Raphael: Sublime Poetry
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York | 29 March to 28 June 2026
The largest Raphael exhibition ever staged in the United States. Carmen Bambach, who curated the Met’s landmark Michelangelo show in 2017, has assembled over 200 works: drawings, tapestries, and paintings drawn from public and private collections globally, including the Louvre’s “Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione.” This is the kind of show that happens once in a decade at most, and the timing is sharp: Raphael died at 37, in 1520, and the concentration of his output into such a brief life makes a comprehensive survey feel genuinely different from most retrospectives. Go in April or May to catch it before the summer crowds thicken. Pair with dinner at any of the Upper East Side restaurants that have earned their Michelin recognition specifically to serve Met visitors.
Marcel Duchamp
Museum of Modern Art, New York | 2026 (through autumn)
Here is the extraordinary fact: the last comprehensive North American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp opened in 1973. For an artist widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures in 20th-century art, who essentially asked the question that contemporary art is still trying to answer (“what is art, and who decides?”), this gap is staggering. MoMA’s show brings together nearly 300 works across six decades: painting, sculpture, film, photography, drawings, and printed matter. The show travels to Philadelphia Museum of Art from October 2026 and then to the Centre Pompidou and Grand Palais in Paris in spring 2027. If you are going to New York at any point between now and October, this is the exhibition to go to. It is being described by multiple critics as the art event of the year in North America.
Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice | 6 May to 19 October 2026
Opening just ahead of the Biennale preview days, this is the first time a living female artist has had a major solo exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, one of the world’s great repositories of Renaissance Venetian painting. Marina Abramović’s performance work placed in dialogue with Bellini, Titian, and Tintoretto is a genuinely strange and genuinely compelling proposition, and the timing makes it inseparable from the Biennale as a reason to be in Venice in May. The Accademia is one of the most beautiful museum buildings in Italy. Seeing Abramović’s transgressive body of work in that context is exactly the kind of curatorial collision that the art world occasionally does brilliantly.
The 90s
Tate Britain, London | 2026
Edward Enninful, former editor of British Vogue and one of the defining cultural figures of that decade’s fashion and art world, has curated this examination of the 1990s for Tate Britain. The 90s were an extraordinary moment in British culture: the YBAs, Britpop, the reinvention of British fashion, a sense of optimism and deliberate disregard for hierarchies that defined everything from music to photography to art. Enninful’s curatorial eye on his own formative decade is a strong premise. This is the exhibition that will be most discussed by people who lived through it and most revelatory for those who did not. Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” (1998), one of the most famous British artworks of the 20th century, features in the concurrent “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” show at Tate Modern. A Tate double-bill in one afternoon is a genuinely good day.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
Victoria and Albert Museum, London | 28 March to 20 September 2026
Still open and worth urgency. The V&A is staging the first major museum show in the UK dedicated solely to Schiaparelli: a century-spanning exhibition tracing the house from its founding in the 1920s to the present, with particular focus on Elsa Schiaparelli’s relationship with London and her British clients. Over 200 objects, including archival garments, accessories, jewellery, paintings, photographs, sculpture, and furniture. For anyone with an interest in the intersection of fashion and art, the relationship between Schiaparelli and the Surrealists (Dalí, Cocteau, Man Ray), and the question of what constitutes a fashion house’s identity across a century, this is a serious exhibition. The V&A has made it a genuinely multi-disciplinary show rather than a garment parade. Go before the summer half-term rush makes it uncomfortable.
Alexander Calder: Rêver en Équilibre
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris | 2026
The Fondation Louis Vuitton, which occupies Frank Gehry’s extraordinary building in the Bois de Boulogne, is staging a major Calder retrospective developed in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation. It celebrates both the 50th anniversary of his death and the 100th anniversary of his arrival in France. The Fondation’s own architecture, all glass sails and curved white surfaces, is one of the best settings in the world for sculpture, and Calder’s mobiles and stabiles, kinetic and joyful and endlessly inventive, are among the works most worth seeing in person rather than in reproduction. This is a different experience to reading about it. Paris in May, with the Musée d’Orsay’s Renoir show and the Grand Palais’s Mickalene Thomas retrospective also running, is among the strongest multi-exhibition propositions in any European city this season.
Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First
Royal Academy, London | 28 February to 19 April 2026
This one is closing on 19 April, which means you have days, not weeks. Rose Wylie is 91 years old, a painter who came to wide recognition relatively late in her career and has since proven herself one of the most vital and entirely original artists in Britain. Her biggest exhibition to date, showing at the Royal Academy, presents older work alongside her latest canvases in a show that will not be repeated at this scale. If you are in London before the 19th, go immediately. The work is funny, strange, warm, and completely unlike anything else you will see this year.
Mariko Mori
Mori Art Museum, Roppongi, Tokyo | 31 October 2026 to 28 March 2027
A reason to plan a Tokyo trip in the autumn. Mariko Mori’s first Japanese exhibition in 24 years at the Mori Art Museum (which was founded by her uncle, making this something of a homecoming) will be a major retrospective of her spiritually ambitious, technically innovative installations and sculptures. The 53rd-floor gallery space in Roppongi Hills is one of the most striking museum settings in Asia. Tokyo in November, after the summer heat, with Capella Kyoto opening this year adding a new hotel reason to extend the trip to Kyoto, makes autumn 2026 a strong moment for Japan travel generally. Book ahead for the kaiseki restaurants. Book further ahead for Capella.
The short version of the 2026 art calendar: go to New York before June for Raphael and stay for Duchamp. Go to Venice in May for Abramović and the Biennale in the same week. Go to Paris in May for Calder and stay for the food. Go to London before 19 April for Rose Wylie. And start thinking about Tokyo in November.
