66 Museum Exhibitions to See This Spring

This spring, it’s Paris calling. The French capital’s recent art history is the subject of two monumental surveys—one at the Centre Pompidou, the other at the Singaporean National Gallery of Art—that respectively focus on Black and Asian émigrés who took up residence in France. Marguerite Duthuit Faure, Henri Matisse’s daughter, is getting her own exhibition, and so are Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and John Singer Sargent, both of whom cut their teeth in Paris.

Germanophiles, too, are in luck. Anselm Kiefer is having two of the biggest shows of his career, both in Amsterdam, and the Fondazione Prada is staging what must count as one of the most sprawling surveys of German photography ever attempted. Or maybe you’re an Anglophile. For that, there are surveys for Tracey Emin, Helen Chadwick, Jenny Saville, David Hockney, Veronica Ryan, and Ed Atkins.

The great thing about artists and artworks, though, is that they often transcend national borders. Rarely traveled Caravaggio masterworks, Picasso paintings, and ancient Greek sculptures are being shipped far and wide this season. And then there’s the case of the Pirelli HangarBicocca’s artist of the spring: Yukinori Yanagi. His work shows how national identities break down over time, suggesting that they are never so concrete.

Below, a look at 66 of the spring’s most exciting shows.