The best exhibitions and openings of 2024: Europe

During the 1950s and 1960s, Frank Auerbach created a remarkable series of monumental charcoal portraits. They became the foundation of a body of work that would come to be celebrated for the ways in which it pushed the boundaries of materiality.

Each of these haunting images could take several months to complete, some requiring up to 70 sittings. The young artist (born in 1931) would draw, erase and redraw his sitters, working long into the night, and the surface of his paper often became so worn that he would have to patch it.

The resulting images, occasionally punctuated with violent streaks of crimson chalk, reflect the scars left by the Second World War. Auerbach, who was born in Berlin, was sent by his Jewish parents to a school in England in 1939. He never saw his mother and father — who perished at Auschwitz — again.

Seventeen of these charcoal heads, loaned from both public and private collections, are being presented together for the first time at The Courtauld this spring, in a show that reflects on the formative stages of a career now in its eighth decade.

Less than a year after the closing of Vermeer, which became the Rijksmuseum’s most visited exhibition ever, comes a show dedicated to another painter who personifies the Dutch Golden Age: Frans Hals. Hals’s most famous picture, The Laughing Cavalier, is being loaned from London’s Wallace Collection, making the journey home for the first time in more than 150 years.

In the Netherlands it will join around 50 of Hals’s portraits of 17th-century soldiers, children, lovers and drunkards. Painted with thick, creamy brushstrokes, their ruddy cheeks, wry smiles and shimmering eyes make them appear ready to leap from the canvas.

The show first opened in 2023 as a chronological survey at London’s National Gallery, where it received rave reviews. In Amsterdam, however, the curatorial team have decided to hang the exhibition thematically, with rooms dedicated to subjects including ‘family portraits’ and ‘small pictures’.

Roy Lichtenstein’s pictures of jet planes and soap-opera starlets, which parodied the ‘low’ art of American comic books, made him one of the leading protagonists of the Pop Art movement. Yet it’s been more than a decade since his last major retrospective, at Tate Modern in London. Filling the void is a new show at Vienna’s Albertina, which celebrates what would have been the year of the artist’s 100th birthday.

A number of important loans have been secured — chief among them being the early work Drowning Girl, which was acquired by New York’s MoMA in 1971. Unveiled in 1963 at the artist’s second solo show with the influential gallerist Leo Castelli, the painting, said to have been inspired by Picasso’s depictions of weeping women, repurposed the image of a drowning heroine from the splash page of a comic illustrated by Tony Abruzzo.

The forthcoming show also promises to introduce audiences to some of the lesser-known areas of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, including his still-life paintings, enamel works and abstract woodcuts.

In 1929, a group of artists including Maurice Denis, Paul Signac and Edouard Vuillard set about securing the former Parisian apartment of Eugène Delacroix — the de facto leader of the French Romantic school of painting — as a space to house a museum dedicated to his life and work.

Today, it falls under the auspices of the Louvre, yet remains one of the city’s lesser-known museums. It’s been closed for renovations since September 2023, but relaunches in March with the exhibition Ingres and Delacroix: Artists’ Objects.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 18 years older than Delacroix, was the hero of Neoclassicism — and staunchly opposed to Romanticism. This show examines their rivalry and respective contributions to 19th-century art, not only through the pictures they created, but also the objects they surrounded themselves with at home, from ancient Greek vases to Moroccan weapons, Empire-style furniture and musical instruments.

The show moves to the Musée Ingres Bourdelle in Montauban, near Toulouse, from 12 July to 10 November 2024.

Since this Florentine palace reopened as a public art gallery in 2006, it has held more than 70 exhibitions, focusing on artists ranging from Donatello to Jeff Koons. Under the leadership of director general Arturo Galansino, the institution’s curatorial dialogue between tradition and innovation has enticed more than three million visitors.

From 22 March, Anselm Kiefer will take the spotlight, with a show entitled Fallen Angels. Centre stage will be his celebrated paintings, which are often interpreted as physical topographies, built up with layers of lead, glass, straw, wood and ash to reflect the post-war landscape of his native Germany. Early reports indicate that a selection of previously unseen work will also be included.

‘This exhibition will showcase the enduring and original strength of Kiefer’s reflections and his artistic production, bridging the gap between history and the present, materials and thought,’ says Galansino, who is curating the show.

On 15 April 1874, an exhibition by the ‘Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, etc’ opened on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, featuring works by Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Degas, Morisot and Sisley, among others. In a mocking review, the critic Louis Leroy referenced the title of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise — which he said looked ‘unfinished’ — with his headline, ‘The Exhibition of the Impressionists’. And so the Impressionist movement was born.

Paris’s Musée d’Orsay is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the landmark show this spring, with an exhibition that brings together some 130 artworks to retell the story of its massive impact — despite the fact that only a few thousand curious people ever went to see it.

Using new research, it will look at the events that led up to this group of avant-garde painters deciding to host their own show independent of the Salon, as well as what happened to some of its lesser-known participants. It will also place a selection of works from the Impressionism exhibition alongside paintings from the same year’s Salon, illustrating the radical impact of this ‘clan of rebels’ in 19th-century Paris.

Oslo’s Munch Museum, which houses more than 26,000 works by Edvard Munch across 13 floors on the city’s waterfront, launched to great fanfare in 2021. From 13 April 2024, the 11th floor will be home to Edvard Munch: Horizons, an exhibition exploring the artistic currents that shaped Europe between 1880 and 1950 — roughly the span of Munch’s career.

Examples of the Norwegian’s work will be hung in dialogue with pieces by Emil Nolde, Oscar Kokoschka, Gabriele Münter, Raoul Dufy and others, illustrating how these artists experimented with unnatural colours, simplified forms and themes of dystopia and existentialism.

‘The Munch Museum houses a substantial collection of Modernist art,’ says the show’s curator, Lars Toft-Eriksen. ‘Through this display, we bring Munch’s art into a context of European Modernism.’

To coincide with the 2024 Venice Biennale, the city’s storied Galleria dell’Accademia is opening a show dedicated to the work of the Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning.

Curated by Gary Garrels, the former senior curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Mario Codognato, the director of the Anish Kapoor Foundation, it focuses on two pivotal trips de Kooning made to Italy.

The first was in 1959, when the artist was at the height of his commercial and critical success. Over the course of four months, from a base in Rome, he became increasingly experimental, working on the floor with black enamel paint and pumice, tearing and collaging his paper. It was also during this trip that he met Cy Twombly and Alberto Burri.

The second trip occurred a decade later, in 1969, and was notable for the fact that the artist began to work with clay for the first time, creating 13 small sculptures that were cast in bronze editions by his friend Herzl Emanuel.

Throughout Germany, more than 160 events are being held in 2024 to mark the 250th birthday of one of the country’s most admired artists — the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

Hamburg’s Kunsthalle is hanging Friedrich’s work in dialogue with pieces by some of the contemporary artists he has influenced. The Pommersches Landesmuseum in the Baltic city of Greifswald kicks off the year with a show that traces his life through his drawings and archival documents. Meanwhile, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, in the artist’s home city of Dresden, has two simultaneous shows that celebrate his local connections.

In April, a major Friedrich survey opens at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, where the artist’s largest show to date was held in 1906 — famously resurrecting his reputation, 66 years after he had died in relative obscurity. The upcoming exhibition features some 50 drawings and 60 paintings, including several of his most iconic images, among them The Sea of Ice, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen and The Monk by the Sea.

London’s Tate Modern is turning over its Eyal Ofer Galleries to a show exploring Der Blaue Reiter, or the Blue Rider group. Founded in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, the collective of German Expressionists shared a deep interest in the spiritual nature of colour. ‘Art is a bridge to the spirit world,’ Marc declared in 1912.

For the upcoming show, more than 130 works have been assembled with the help of Munich’s Lenbachhaus, home to the world’s largest collection of Blue Rider works. The core of this collection comes from the 1,000 paintings, prints and drawings by Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky and others that were donated by Kandinsky’s partner, the artist Gabriele Münter, in 1957.

The exhibition will examine how the collective shook the establishment, ultimately laying the foundations of abstraction, before being marginalised by the Nazis, who labelled their work ‘degenerate’. Throughout the war, Münter saved many of the artists’ works, hiding them at her house in Murnau.

Elton John has said that, after music, his second passion is photography. He and his husband, David Furnish, have built an impressive collection of more than 8,000 images.

In 2016, The Radical Eye at Tate Modern in London presented 150 works from the collection, dating from between the 1920s and 1950s. Now, the V&A South Kensington is mounting the largest photography exhibition in its history: some 300 of the couple’s photographs, from 1950 to the present.

Fragile Beauty is divided into eight sections, including one devoted to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — John and Furnish own some 2,000 images of the event, the world’s largest collection on the subject.

Elsewhere, highlights include Herb Ritts’s Versace Dress, Back View, El Mirage (1990) and Herman Leonard’s Chet Baker, New York City (1956) — the jazz musician being a recurring presence throughout the collection.

This hugely ambitious show first opened at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town in November 2022, exploring modes of self-representation by Black artists from across the globe over the past 100 years.

Curated by the museum’s director, Koyo Kouoh, it included works by more than 150 artists, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jacob Lawrence, Chéri Samba, Danielle McKinney, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Joy Labinjo. As well as a catalogue, it was accompanied by a musical score and a year-long series of online lectures.

In May, the exhibition travels to Switzerland for a five-month stint at the Kunstmuseum Basel. It’s been updated for this second showing, with the works now divided into five themes: the everyday; joy and revelry; repose; sensuality; and triumph and emancipation.

Main image, clockwise from top left: Willem de Kooning, Untitled (Rome), 1959, at Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice; Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant, 1872, at Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Tyler Mitchell, Simply Fragile, 2022, at V&A South Kensington, London; Frans Hals, Portrait of a Couple, probably Isaac Abrahamsz Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, circa 1622, at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Caspar David Friedrich, Selbstbildnis, circa 1810, at Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Cinthia Sifa Mulanga, Wait your turn — Competitive Sisterhood, 2021, at Kunstmuseum Basel