As summer draws to a close, museums around the world are preparing for one of the busiest periods of the cultural calendar. The autumn of 2026 brings major retrospectives, historical rediscoveries and exhibitions that reconsider some of the most familiar figures in art history from unexpected perspectives. From Paris and London to New York and Berlin, these are some of the exhibitions worth keeping an eye on in the months ahead.
Cézanne and Us — Grand Palais, Paris
23 September 2026 – 17 January 2027
Rather than presenting Paul Cézanne through a conventional retrospective, the Grand Palais turns its attention to what happened after him. Cézanne and Us examines the extraordinary influence the French painter exerted on generations of artists who followed, bringing together almost 180 works.
The premise is particularly fitting for an artist whose importance extends far beyond the paintings he produced himself. Cézanne’s treatment of space, form and perspective became fundamental to the development of modern art, and his influence can be traced through markedly different artistic movements. The exhibition brings his work into dialogue with artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Piet Mondrian, Joan Mitchell and Bridget Riley. Rather than treating Cézanne as an isolated historical figure, the exhibition presents him as the beginning of a conversation that continued throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
Kerry James Marshall — Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
18 September 2026 – 24 January 2027
Another major Paris exhibition this autumn is dedicated to American artist Kerry James Marshall. Bringing together more than 70 works, the exhibition marks Marshall’s first major presentation in France.
Marshall has spent decades placing Black figures at the centre of large-scale paintings that engage with both everyday life and the history of Western art. His work draws on a wide range of pictorial traditions while addressing the historical absence of Black subjects from many of the institutions and narratives that shaped the canon. Seen together on this scale, the works offer an opportunity to follow the development of a painter whose practice combines contemporary experience with an extensive engagement with art history.
Tintoretto — Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris
11 September 2026 – 24 January 2027
Venetian painting takes a prominent place in the autumn programme with a major exhibition devoted to Jacopo Robusti, better known as Tintoretto. Around forty paintings and graphic works will be brought together at the Musée Jacquemart-André.
Tintoretto occupies a distinctive position within sixteenth-century Venetian painting. His dramatic compositions, unusual perspectives and energetic handling of figures gave his work an intensity that distinguishes it even within a period associated with painters such as Titian and Veronese. The exhibition provides an opportunity to examine his development through a focused selection rather than attempting to reduce a long and prolific career to a simple chronological survey.
The timing also makes the exhibition particularly interesting within a season dominated by modern and contemporary art. It offers a reminder that experimentation with composition, movement and visual drama is by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon.
Scott Kahn: Silent Night — David Zwirner, New York
10 September – 17 October 2026
This autumn, David Zwirner in New York presents Silent Night, an exhibition dedicated to the landscape paintings of American artist Scott Kahn. Bringing together new and recent works alongside paintings from the past twenty-five years, the exhibition focuses on a genre that has remained central to Kahn’s practice throughout his career.
Kahn’s landscapes begin with recognizable places and experiences, but rarely remain straightforward records of them. Houses, trees, gardens and distant horizons appear familiar while shifts in colour, atmosphere and light can make the scenes feel strangely removed from everyday reality. In some paintings, clouds become almost theatrical presences; elsewhere, unusual shadows or intensely coloured skies transform otherwise ordinary surroundings. The result lies somewhere between observation and memory, allowing the real and the slightly uncanny to exist within the same image.
The exhibition also demonstrates how much possibility remains within one of painting’s oldest genres. Rather than treating landscape as a neutral description of a place, Kahn uses it to explore the way familiar surroundings can change through season, time of day and personal experience. Silent Night therefore offers a particularly fitting addition to New York’s autumn programme for anyone interested in the continuing possibilities of representational painting.
Renoir and Love — National Gallery, London
3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027
One of London’s major exhibitions this autumn turns to Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his fascination with human relationships. Bringing together around 40 paintings from collections across the world, Renoir and Love focuses on works from the 1860s to the 1880s, a period in which Renoir was developing both his distinctive approach to painting and his place within the emerging Impressionist movement.
Rather than presenting a conventional overview of his career, the exhibition approaches Renoir through the relationships that populate his paintings. Couples, families and groups of friends appear in gardens, cafés and dance halls, turning scenes of modern Parisian life into studies of affection, companionship and social interaction. Among the works brought to London is Bal du moulin de la Galette from the Musée d’Orsay, which will be shown in the UK for the first time.
The exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider an artist whose paintings are among the most recognizable images of Impressionism. Beyond their celebrated colour and handling of light, Renoir’s works record the gestures, glances and physical proximity through which people relate to one another. Seen together, these paintings reveal how central human connection was to his vision of modern life.
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