A handful of major anniversaries guarantees a spectacular year for art in 2024, with the Musée d’Orsay leading celebrations to mark 150 years since the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874. Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism (March 26 – July 14) promises a fresh look at Monet, Renoir, Morisot and co – here’s hoping for new narratives to restore a sense of the radical to this much-loved movement.
Impressionism was never confined to l’Hexagone, and the Courtauld Gallery’s autumn show (September 27 – January 19, 2025) injects some cross-channel bonhomie, reuniting for the first time in 120 years Monet’s studies of the Thames, many of which were painted a stone’s throw from the Savoy.
Hand in hand with the Impressionists comes Van Gogh, whose pulling power secures him top billing on the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary programme. Its first major exhibition dedicated to the painter, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (September 14 – January 19, 2025) coincides with the centenary of the gallery’s acquisition of Sunflowers, 1888, and Van Gogh’s Chair, 1889, two of its most popular pictures.
In Germany, much-loved Romantic hero Caspar David Friedrich takes centre stage 250 years after his birth. Famed for landscape paintings that dignify and dwarf human drama through the sublime power of nature, Friedrich’s legacy resonates across the generations. Major exhibitions in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden explore his work from different perspectives, with further offerings at his birthplace in Greifswald on the Baltic Sea.
Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion (January 26 – April 28) at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie celebrates the inimitable dancer, singer and actress, and from 7-11 February, activist and artist Tania Bruguera stages her performance Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading the Origins of Totalitarianism) at Hamburger Bahnhof.
A full century after the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Centre Pompidou-Metz pays tribute to the enigmatic figure of André Masson, keen exponent of automatic writing and creator of feverishly compelling paintings. In theme and schedule, André Masson: There is no Finished World (March 29 – September 2) overlaps with the first exhibition on French psychiatrist and heir to Freud, Jacques Lacan (December 31, 2023 – May 27, 2024), whose long-term dialogue with Surrealism remains influential today. Belgian one-off James Ensor was an influence on the Surrealists: an array of events in Brussels and beyond will mark 75 years since his death.
Contemporary concerns are to the fore at the 60th Venice Biennale (April 20 – November 24), its theme of “Foreigners Everywhere” inviting a timely exploration of “the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer, as well as the indigenous”, initiated by Adriano Pedrosa, the first Latin American curator in the Biennale’s 128-year history.
The Gallerie dell’Accademia explores Willem de Kooning’s time in Italy, and its enduring impact on his work, while in Florence the Palazzo Strozzi hosts contemporary maestro Anselm Kiefer (March 22 – July 28), followed by abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler (September 27 – February 2, 2025). The sculptor Nari Ward, a fellow American, is at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, followed by Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, famed for his satirical, sculptural machines. In Galicia, Zara supremo Marta Ortega Pérez’s MOP Foundation celebrates the legendary German-Australian photographer Helmut Newton.
Sometimes art can dispense with time altogether: the echoing grandeur of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum is the perfect setting for Rembrandt – Hoogstraten: Colour & Illusion (October 8 – January 12, 2025), a dialogue between the old master and one of his most talented pupils.
