Art History News

Thursday, June 25, 2026

Anniversary Exhibition Collecting for the Future

ALBERTINA

19 June until 11 October 2026

In 2026, the ALBERTINA Museum is celebrating 250 years of existence. This significant anniversary offers an opportunity to look back upon the eventful history of the collection and the institution itself as well as to look towards the future with optimism and enthusiasm – attitudes that have always been part of the ALBERTINA Museum’s self-conception. Much has already been written about the museum – but nowhere near everything has been said. What stories have yet to be told? What still awaits discovery? And how will the ALBERTINA Museum develop in the future?

Open to New Perspectivs

It is these questions that guide us through this anniversary year’s programming. Three main exhibitions with innovative approaches present the world-famous collection of the ALBERTINA from a new perspective, will usher rarely shown and entirely unknown objects into the spotlight alongside renewed scrutiny of known artistic quantities. A “path of discovery” through the extensive collections of the ALBERTINA encourages visitors to the exhibition Fascination Paper to experience this tradition-steeped medium anew and interact with art from unaccustomed perspectives.

Reappraising the history of the ALBERTINA Museum also entails centering a female personality whose pivotal role in the collection’s founding is frequently overshadowed by that of her husband, Duke Albert of Sachse-Teschen: Archduchess Marie Christine. As the favorite daughter of Empress Maria Theresia, she endowed her marriage with the wealth that made possible such wide-ranging art acquisitions. She had also been active since her youth as an artist in her own right, by virtue of which she wielded important influence over the couple’s collecting pursuits. The Anniversary Exhibition Collecting for the Future devotes itself to this collecting history with a selection that will include precious works ranging from Dürer’s Hare to the expressive drawings of Egon Schiele.

ALBERTINA MUSEUM, VIENNA includes over one million objects, numbers among the world’s most important collections of graphic art, and was founded 250 years ago: the collection of the ALBERTINA Museum. This onceprivate collection has long since become a world-class museum.

That it was Albert of Saxe-Teschen who laid its cornerstone in 1776 is well known. This exhibition, however, sheds light specifically on female contributions to this world-famous collection for the first time. The focus here is on Marie Christine, the favorite daughter of Empress Maria Theresia, and how she worked together with her husband Albert to build the collection in a systematic manner.

It is therefore the collection’s beginnings and the collectors’ respective motives that are explored, here. What profile was the collection intended to develop, and for what purpose was this collecting being done? Which artists were favored? And when did the largest groups of works by figures such as Albrecht Dürer or Egon Schiele arrive here?

These and further questions will be answered with reference to priceless examples such as Dürer’s Hare. In doing so, this presentation shall train its gaze not only on a great past but also forward, into the future.

IMAGES

**Johann August Walther: Herzog Albert von Sachsen-Teschen, 1776**
30.4 x 23.3 cm, Pinsel in Grau mit Weißhöhungen auf Pergament (© ALBERTINA, Wien)

**Johann August Walther: Erzherzogin Marie Christine von Österreich, Gattin des Herzogs Albert von Sachsen-Teschen, 1776**
30.1 x 23.4 cm, Pinsel in Grau mit Weißhöhungen auf Pergament (© ALBERTINA, Wien)

**Archduchess Marie Christine Habsburg-Lothringen: Reading Letters, Second half of the 18th century**
23,9 × 19,3 cm, Watercolor (The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna)

**Jakob Alt: Das Palais Herzog Alberts, 1816** **27.4 x 40.8 cm, Feder in Schwarz, Aquarell (© ALBERTINA, Wien)**

Café Society Art and Sociability in Paris, 1855-1914

Dixon Gallery and Gardens

Jun 19, 2026 - Sep 6, 2026

Joslyn Art Museum

Sep 26, 2026 – Jan 17, 2027

James Tissot (French, 1836–1902), "The Artists’ Wives," 1885; oil on canvas; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and "An Affair to Remember" 1982, 81.153

ORGANIZED BY DIXON GALLERY AND GARDENS WITH ORDRUPGAARD AND JOSLYN ART MUSEUM

The Dixon’s summer season kicks off with the spectacular exhibition Café Society: Art and Sociability in Paris, 1855 – 1914. In this show, the audience is invited to visit Parisian cafés by artists such as Jean-Louis Forain, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, James Tissot, and Édouard Vuillard. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Parisian café served as the central arena for modern public life. Artists, writers, musicians, and poets gathered daily at cafés of all sorts to discuss art and nurture new alliances in dialogues stimulated by coffee, beer, wine, and absinthe.

Fernand Lungren; In the Café, 1882-84. Oil on canvas; Dixon Gallery and Gardens; Museum purchase with funds provided by the estate of Cecil Williams Marshall, 2018.2

Gradually, as modern life became a core motif in late nineteenth century French art, cafés began to function as informal hatching grounds for new artistic ideas and trends. Paris became the center of an increasingly international art world, and the many foreign artists in the city found inspiration in fashionable café life and the alliances formed there. American artists, among them Robert Henri, Willard Metcalf, and James McNeill Whistler, also flocked to the French venues to depict modern life, a motif adopted by avant-garde artists to replace the historical and mythological motifs that had defined art for centuries. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the international art scene around cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Elisabeth Epstein moved to the left bank of the Seine where cafés remained a central part of artists’ everyday lives and their art.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French, 1841–1919; Young Woman (La Servante), c. 1875; oil on canvas; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960.

Café Society: Art and Sociability in Paris, 1855 – 1914 examines the development of the French café, a crucial and accessible site for artistic discussion, and, ultimately, how cafés became the subject of works of art themselves. Organized into thematic sections, the exhibition and catalogue seek to demonstrate the multitude of factors that led to the rise of café culture, from the French Revolution and the growth of the bourgeoisie to Haussmannization and the Franco-Prussian War. Though ubiquitous, cafés were also infinitely varied in their nature, making them intriguingly difficult to categorize both in the fin-de-siècle and today. As places where Parisians and expatriates of various backgrounds mingled daily, cafés were often considered a microcosm for the city of Paris itself. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the café remained an important part of daily life for artists and provided inspiration for experiments with new approaches to artmaking.



Jean Béraud French, 1849–1935; The Bal Mabille near the Champs-Elysées, c. 1870–75; oil on panel; Private collection.

The works presented in Café Society navigate these complexities while simultaneously demonstrating how the café fundamentally changed the fabric of Parisian life, allowing for daily collective social activity. These spaces proliferated rapidly, shifting how people experienced the city and each other, leading to increasingly connected populations. Alongside this social progress, the Paris café became a pervasive motif in European and American art of the nineteenth century.

The Oesterreichische Nationalbank Collection

Leopold Museum

24.04.2026-11.10.2026

The spring exhibition PREMIERE! The Oesterreichische Nationalbank Collection, shown from 24 April, is the first to afford an extensive overview of the OeNB’s diverse and rich art collection. The presentation honors the long-standing ties between the two institutions. The Oesterreichische Nationalbank, the Central Bank of the Republic of Austria, made a significant financial contribution to the foundation of the Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung in 1994, and thus played a significant part in the history and success story of the Leopold Museum.

Since the late 1980s, the OeNB has been collecting Austrian paintings and sculptures from 1918 to the present, with special emphases on the art of the interwar period (including post-Expressionism and New Objectivity) and on abstract works created after 1945. The exhibition features works by artists of New Objectivity, including Rudolf Wacker and Franz Sedlacek, as well as independent positions from the interwar period, as pursued by artists from Max Oppenheimer to Greta Freist. With regards to contemporary art, the presentation reveals interesting parallels between the different generations of artists, for instance between Maria Lassnig and Tobias Pils or Svenja Deininger and Ernst Caramelle. The collection further includes various approaches to abstraction in painting – pursued by artists from Martha Jungwirth to Herbert Brandl – as well as sculptural works, for instance by Josef Pillhofer and Julia Haugeneder.

With this presentation, the Leopold Museum continues its exhibition policy of showcasing renowned private and corporate collections, in the context of which the museum previously hosted the collection of the Fondation Beyeler, the Vienna Insurance Group Collections, the Heidi Horten Collection and the Würth Collection.

Curators: Chiara Galbusera, Hans-Peter Wipplinger

IMAGES

CARRY HAUSER 1895–1985 Judas Kiss, 1923 Oil on cardboard | 41 × 32 cm Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann © Bildrecht, Wien 2026

ALFONS WALDE 1891–1958 Sunday, c. 1924 Oil on cardboard | 76.5 × 72 cm Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann © Bildrecht, Wien 2026

RUDOLF WACKER 1893–1939 Still Life with Oil Can and “Chinese Picture”, 1925 Oil on canvas | 65 × 50 cm Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann

MAXIMILIAN REINITZ, Waidhofen an der Ybbs, 1927 © Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection | Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann

MAX OPPENHEIMER 1885–1954 The Chess Match, c. 1925/30 Oil on canvas | 55.2 × 78.2 cm Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann

JOSEF GASSLER, Portrait of Halina Wittlin-Moser, c. 1928 © Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection | Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann

GRETA FREIST 1904–1993 La danseuse (The Dancer), 1938 Oil on canvas | 99.2 × 72.2 cm Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann

MAX OPPENHEIMER 1885–1954 Surgery, 1951 Oil on canvas, mounted on wood | 125 × 110 cm Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Art Collection Photo: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann

VIENNA 1900 Birth of Modernism

With its newly conceived presentation of the collection, the Leopold Museum is creating an opulent tableau which affords uniquely rich and complex insights into the fascination of Vienna around 1900 and the atmosphere of this vibrant time.

Around the turn of the century, the Danube metropolis was the capital of both the high nobility and of liberal intellectuals, of the splendid Ringstrasse and endless slum areas, of anti-Semitism and Zionism, of a rigid conservatism and emerging Modernism. Splendor and squalor, dream and reality, dissolution of the self and new beginning characterize the esthetic pluralism and mark the Vienna of that time as a place of experimentation and a laboratory of ideas – and thus as a central motor to a turbulent movement of renewal. This heterogeneous atmosphere – Arnold Schönberg spoke of an “emancipation of dissonance” – provided the setting for the unique consolidation of cultural efforts that today makes us look upon the period of Vienna around 1900 as the source of Modernism. This departure unfolded in various disciplines, from painting and the graphic arts via literature, music, theater, dance and architecture, all the way to medicine, psychology, philosophy, jurisprudence and economics. Comprising some 1300 exhibits and spanning three floors, the exhibition presents the splendor and wealth of artistic and intellectual achievements of this era through masterpieces from the Leopold Museum as well as eminent permanent loans from Austrian and international collections.

The exhibition is created under the curatorial aegis of Hans-Peter Wipplinger and in dialogue with experts in various fields.

A SUMMER WITH KLIMT

During summer 2026, four exceptional masterpieces of Viennese Modernism will be on view in the permanent exhibition „VIENNA 1900. Birth of Modernism“. On loan from the Stiftung Sammlung Kamm in Zug, Switzerland, the presentation includes

two important landscapes by Gustav Klimt,

Richard Gerstl’s „Group Portrait with Schönberg“

and Egon Schiele’s early „Portrait of the Painter Hans Massmann“. On display at the Leopold Museum until 4 October 2026, these works enrich the museum’s permanent presentation and offer a rare opportunity to experience key works by these artists in direct dialogue with the museum’s collection.

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Frida: The Making of an Icon

Tate Modern

25 June 2026 – 3 January 2027

Tate Modern This week, Tate Modern opens the first major exhibition to explore how Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) became a global icon and a key influence on a generation of artists. Through the lens of the artists she impacted and her own extraordinary work, Frida: The Making of an Icon traces Kahlo’s extraordinary rise from a relatively unknown painter to a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Developed in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, this landmark show examines how Kahlo’s art and life inspired generations of artists across diverse media, movements and communities around the world.

For the first time in the UK in over two decades, visitors are able to experience the full breadth of Frida Kahlo’s evolution. Rarely seen self-portraits are amongst over 30 works by Kahlo, exhibited alongside photographs and personal artefacts. Building on Tate Modern’s 2005 survey show, this exhibition goes further by demonstrating Frida’s impact on art history, presenting her work in dialogue with modern and contemporary artists from across the globe who draw influence from her aesthetic, identity and biography. Together they reveal how Kahlo’s story continues to be reimagined and reclaimed by new generations, cementing her place as one of the most influential figures in the history of art.

The exhibition opens with an exploration of how Kahlo constructs and projected her identity in her paintings and personal style. Through a rich display across multiple media, visitors discover how she visually articulates her many ‘selves,’ from the personal to the political, and the physical to the spiritual. Highlights include a selection of Kahlo’s most iconic self-portraits, including Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress) 1926 and Self-Portrait with Loose Hair 1938, through which she embraces her Mexican heritage, queer self-image, feminist ideals and experience as a disabled woman. These are presented in dialogue with works by other artists of the ‘Mexican Renaissance’, such as Diego Rivera’s Portrait of Frida Kahlo c.1935 and María Izquierdo’s Dream and Premonition 1947, to illuminate the artistic and intellectual exchanges that shape her practice. They are joined by photographs and archival materials, including Kahlo’s tehuana dresses and treasured possessions from her personal collection.

The heart of the show focuses on the surrealist connections between Frida Kahlo and her contemporaries. While Kahlo famously rejected the label, her work reveals striking parallels with the movement, leading its founder André Breton to declare her “a self-made Surrealist.” Following her first solo show at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938, Breton invited Kahlo to exhibit in Paris, where the French national collection acquired her self-portrait The Frame 1938. Tate Modern presents this work and other highlights including Diego and Frida 1929, Survivor 1938, Memory (The Heart) 1937 and Girl with a Death Mask 1938. Shown alongside paintings and photographs by Latin American artists including Kati Horna and Leonor Fini, Tate Modern examines their shared fascination with motifs informed by surrealism, including masks and skeletons, and a fixation on death and dreaming.

Although Frida Kahlo’s name first appeared in US artistic circles in the early 1930s, her work and image only gained widespread recognition decades later. During the late 1960s, the US Chicana/o movement embraces Kahlo as a powerful emblem of cultural pride and political resistance, celebrating her resilience and creativity. Born from the civil rights era of Mexican heritage, these artists aim to establish a unique identity in America. The exhibition explores how Kahlo’s works such as My Dress Hangs There 1933–8, which captures her ambivalence toward the United States, resonated deeply with Mexican migrants and Chicana/o communities, making her a lasting source of inspiration. The exhibition also foregrounds the work of a new generation of artists working in Mexico in the late 1980s and 1990s. Moved by Kahlo, artists such as Nahúm B. Zenil and Georgina Quintana repurpose quintessentially Mexican imagery and popular traditions to question nationalist ideals, patriarchal structures and gender norms.

The rise of feminism in Mexico and the US during the 1970s and 1980s also sparked renewed interest in Kahlo’s groundbreaking self-representation. Her self-portraits, featuring cropped hair, a faint moustache and masculine attire, as well as her scenes of childbirth and female sexuality, boldly challenged cultural norms. Tate Modern celebrates Kahlo’s lasting impact on women artists across Mexico, the Americas and Europe from 1970 to today. Kahlo’s work is paired with artists such as Kiki Smith, Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta, creating powerful visual dialogues around identity, violence and the body as nature. The exhibition also highlights several contemporary artists who appropriate her iconography and embody her figure to address issues of race, gender, sexuality and disability, including Yasumasa Morimura, Martine Gutierrez and Berenice Olmedo.

The exhibition culminates by exploring Kahlo’s transformation into a global brand that extends far beyond her art, encompassing her image, style and persona. Featuring more than 200 objects generated by the mass-market production of Frida Kahlo merchandise, a room of ‘Fridamania’ looks at the rise of her commercial legacy. Through the licensing of her likeness and partnerships with major brands, Kahlo’s image was propelled into mainstream culture, appearing on everything from T-shirts and tequila bottles to Barbies and perfume. Fashion and pop culture ephemera are joined by the 1983 publication of Hayden Herrera’s biography of Kahlo, now translated into over 25 languages, which further solidifies Kahlo’s iconic status.

Frida: The Making of an Icon is organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with Tate Modern. Curated by Tobias Ostrander, Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator at Large, and Beatriz García-Velasco, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern.

IMAGES

Frida Kahlo, Untitled [Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird] 1940. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress) 1926. Private Collection.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Loose Hair 1946. Private collection.

Frida Kahlo, Still Life (I Belong to Samuel Fastlich) 1951. Private Collection.

Frida Kahlo, Memory (The Heart) 1937. Private Collection.

Frida Kahlo, Survivor 1938. Colección Pérez Simón.

Diego Rivera, Portrait of Frida Kahlo c.1935. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.