TEAMWORK in Antwerp! Pieter Bruegel, Hendrick van Balen and the others

 From 14 June to 5 October 2025, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD, Dresden State Art Collections) is showing "TEAMWORK in Antwerp! Pieter Bruegel, Hendrick van Balen and the others", an exhibition on the structure and work of important studios in 17th-century Antwerp. 

The exhibition is based on a comprehensive research project on the Flemish painting collections in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister that began in 2012. The latest, previously unpublished results of this research show how artists from different painting workshops joined forces and produced paintings together in efficiently organised work processes. The exhibition illustrates how this collaboration functioned on many different levels.

Almost all of the 53 paintings and 28 drawings and prints come from the SKD's holdings - plus six selected loans from Leipzig, Antwerp and private collections. More than half of the paintings have not been exhibited in Dresden since the Second World War, and some from the Brueghel and Francken family workshops have never been shown before.

After the storms of the Counter-Reformation under Spanish-Habsburg leadership, Antwerp experienced a new economic boom at the beginning of the 17th century, which brought a certain prosperity to an increasingly broad class of citizens. Cabinet paintings, i.e. small-format pictures with religious or mythological themes, landscape paintings and still lifes, were in great demand. So much in demand that artists, especially celebrated artists such as Jan Bruegel the Elder, Hendrik van Balen and Frans Francken the Younger, could barely keep up with production. As a result, workshop practice focussed on efficiency became increasingly important: Painters and their studios formed networks and co-operated in the production of paintings with an intensity and professionalism that had not previously been observed in Netherlandish painting.

The exhibition shows how this collaboration was organised, who was involved and how the paintings were produced. Artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder and Frans Francken the Younger gave their names to the works. When paintings were painted in large numbers and of poorer quality in their workshops by assistants, pupils or itinerant labourers, care was taken to paint them at least ‘in the manner of’ Brueghel I or Balen’. The copies were sometimes so good that it was difficult to distinguish them from the original. The research project was able to shed light on this: 45 works were intensively analysed both technically (usually using radiation diagnostic methods, dendrochronology and microscopy) and in terms of art history. It was discovered that the big names sometimes concealed different artists.

The exhibition presents all the protagonists and the characteristics of their paintings: Jan Brueghel the Elder, for example, was famous for his landscape paintings and floral still lifes, while Hendrick van Balen loved to paint mythological figure scenes and Frans Francken specialised in small-figure biblical scenes.

They combined their talents for the efficient production of cabinet paintings. The division of labour took place not only within a studio, but also between the individual houses.

Works on paper form a separate focus in the exhibition. Drawn studies were created for popular motifs from everyday life, special natural scenes and fictional subjects, which were often widely received artistically. Drawings also served as sketches of ideas to clarify the overall composition and helped the artists to discuss individual motifs. TEAMWORK shows a total of 28 drawings and prints from the collection of the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden. Among others, the very rare and therefore rarely exhibited pen and ink drawing ‘The Gooseherd’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder will be on display. Works of art such as this sheet provide an intimate insight into the process of creating the paintings and into artistic workshop practice.

Individual motifs are used to illustrate how they can be found in the various paintings and in different qualities. The visitors are encouraged to look closely and recognise painting styles and handwriting. The exhibition thus becomes a ‘school of seeing’.

IMAGES

Jan Brueghel d.Ä., Landschaft mit dem Rohrdommeljäger, 1605© Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Foto: Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut

Hendrik van Balen, Das Hochzeitsfest des Bacchus und der Ariadne, um 1606/1607© Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Foto: Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut

Frans Francken d.J., Maria mit Kind und musizierenden Engeln in einer Blumengirlande, um 1620© Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Foto: Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut

Jan Breughel, Die Erschaffung der Tiere© Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Pieter Bruegel d. Ä., Nachfolger, Die Predigt Johannes des Täufers, um 1600© Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Foto: Steffen Lohse-Koch

Monomania

 Rijksmuseum

4 July to 14 September, 2025

This summer, for the first time in the history of the Rijksmuseum, a contemporary artist has been invited to curate a major exhibition, spanning the entirety of the Philips Wing.

Entitled Monomania – Rijksmuseum’s 2025 summer exhibition will be curated by the internationally acclaimed Indonesia-born Dutch artist Fiona Tan, who represented the Netherlands at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Tan’s fascination with the birth of psychiatry at the beginning of the 19th century serves as the starting point for the exhibition that draws from Rijksmuseum’s extensive collection including works by Francisco Goya, Edvard Munch, Raden Saleh as well as Japanese masks and christening gowns

Théodore Géricault, Portrait of a Kleptomaniac, c. 1820–1824, Ghent, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 1908-F; gift of The Friends of the Museum Ghent, 1908.

Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (c. 1822) by the French artist Théodore Géricault (Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent) serves as the starting point for Fiona Tan’s research into the development of psychiatry at the beginning of the 19th century. The painting is part of Les Monomanes, a series of ten portraits of individuals believed to have an obsessive fixation. Only five of these paintings are still known today. Géricault, along with many other 19th century artists, was fascinated by the extremes of the psyche. They were keen to explore, like the physicians of the time, the idea that mental afflictions could be read upon the face.

Odilon Redon (signed by artist), Ophélie, la cape bleue sur les eaux (Ophelia with a Blue Wimple in the Water), 1900 - 1905, Rijksmuseum, Inv.no. SK-A-4840.

Edvard Munch, The Sin (Standing Nude with Red Hair), 1902, Rijksmuseum. inv.no. RP-P-1953 -888.

Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne

Kunstmuseum Luzern

July 5-November 2 2025

A superlative exhibition was mounted in the newly opened Kunstmuseum Luzern in 1935 featuring works by Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder and others. Whereas at the same time in National-Socialist Germany art by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian was being defamed as «degenerate», in 1935 the Kunstmuseum Luzern showed precisely these modernist positions, at the heart of an ever more totalitarian Europe. The Kunstmuseum Luzern made its mark internationally with the historic exhibition entitled These, Antithese, Synthese. To this very day, the exhibition is considered as «legendary», «inimitable» and «unsurpassable». The museum branch considers the 1935 exhibition to be impossible for a medium-sized institution like the Kunstmuseum Lucerne to reconstruct due to the high calibre of the art it displayed; this belief roused the current team’s ambition. So now, under the heading Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne, works will be presented that were on show in Lucerne back then, or that qualify as valid alternatives to works not available on loan, for whatever reasons. 

Over a period of more than five years, research was carried out on the almost one hundred works in the original 1935 exhibition. Most of them date from the 1920s and 30s and since then, by way of the art market, are owned by the world’s most prestigious museums or by private collectors. Other works have been lost, however, and some have even been destroyed. What is more, the research work was hampered by the unsatisfactory source situation. Not many papers dating from 1935 documenting the historic exhibition have been preserved. In addition to the exhibition catalogue, which has few illustrations, all that exists in Lucerne’s city archives is a scanty folder containing documents related to the exhibition. That it has been possible to get quite a large number of the original works on loan is all the more astonishing. 

Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne presents magnificent art. The celebrated works also draw attention to additional stories, as the historical context of the legendary 1935 exhibition These, Antithese, Synthese includes the emergence of modern art, resentment toward the avant-garde, fascism and communism. Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne conveys the intellectual, political and cultural turmoil of the period between the world wars. This exhibition therefore stands for a critical self-reflection on the part of the institution and its history. For contrary to the 1935 exhibition’s own aspiration to honour the promise of modernism and facilitate an alternative to capitalism and fascism, that exhibition clearly overlooked women or artists of non-European origins. 

The only presented female artist was Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Given that the three exhibition makers, Paul Hilber, Konrad Farner und Hans Erni, are known to have rejected Barbara Hepworth’s work, the exhibition Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne is including a large group of works by that artist. It is thus highlighting the history of modern art’s marginalised women artists, taking Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Barbara Hepworth as examples. 

The exhibition heightens our sensitivity to contexts. At the same time, it offers an overwhelming art spectacle for the senses in view of the fact that the art is, plainly and simply, inspirational. Viewers will have the special and unique opportunity to experience the brilliant works by modern art’s women pioneers gathered together at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. 

 Publication 

A comprehensive catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition, intensifying its cultural significance and illustrating it by a large number of reproductions. curated by Fanni Fetzer With Hans Arp, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Paul Cézanne, Giorgio de Chirico, André Derain, Hans Erni, Max Ernst, Luis Fernández, Alberto Giacometti, Julio González, Juan Gris, Jean Hélion, Barbara Hepworth, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Ben Nicholson, Amédée Ozenfant, Wolfgang Paalen, Pablo Picasso, Sophie Taeuber-Arp 

These, Antithese, Synthese – reconstructed, 1935/2025, with essays by Fanni Fetzer, Stanislaus von Moos, Beni Muhl, Bettina Steinbrügge a. o., ed. by Kunstmuseum Luzern, Skira Edition, g/e, 336 pages, ISBN 978-88-572- 5395-4, –

Images

Joan Miró, Peinture, 1925, Öl auf Leinwand, 116 × 89 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München – Pinakothek der Moderne, Foto: Sibylle Forster, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen © Successió Miró / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich Wassily Kandinsky, Durchgehender Strich, 1923, Öl auf Leinwand, 140.8 × 202 × 2.7 cm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, erworben 1967 aus einer Spende des Westdeutschen Rundfunks, Foto: Walter Klein
Pablo Picasso, Head: Study for a Monument, 1929, Öl auf Leinwand, 73 × 59.7 cm, The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Trustee Corporation Fund (BMA 1966.41) © Successió Picasso / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich

Alberto Giacometti, Tête-crâne, 1934, Gips, 18.5 × 20 × 22.5 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, Geschenk des Künstlers, 1965 © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, Foto: Stefan Altenburger

Fernand Léger, La liseuse, mère et enfant, 1922, Öl auf Leinwand, 73 × 116 cm, Privatsammlung, Schweiz © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich

Barbara Hepworth, Large and Small Form, 1934, weisser Alabaster, 24.8 × 44.5 × 23.9 cm, The Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, Gift of Margaret Gardiner, 1979 © Hepworth Estate Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Echelonnement, 1934, Öl auf Leinwand, 65 × 50.8 cm, Collection du Musée de Grenoble. Foto: Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble - J.L. Lacroix

Paul Cézanne, Boîte à lait et citron, II, 1879–80, Öl auf Leinwand, 22.2 × 44 cm, Sammlung Rosengart, Luzern

Hans Erni, Plastide, 1934, Öl auf Leinwand, 73 × 92 cm, Nachlass Hans Erni, Luzern, Foto: Andri Stadler

Hans Erni, Plakat zur Ausstellung These, Antithese, Synthese, 1935, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Foto: Andri Stadler

(Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art 

June 12– September 14, 2025

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art presents (Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art, a collaborative exhibition that explores the rich, complicated, and evolving topic of the American landscape, from its origins in 19th-century painting to the present. The exhibition is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between four participating museums in the Art Bridges Cohort Program’s American South Consortium. (Un)Settled will be on view at the Wadsworth June 12– September 14, 2025. (Un)Settled uniquely brings together artworks from each of the partners’ collections to broaden the story of American art. 

The show presents a more expansive and complex view of landscape and its relationship to identity by including artwork spanning hundreds of years and representing regions across the United States and sites in Latin America. 

“In collaboration with our three nationally acclaimed museum partners through the Art Bridges Cohort Program, this show brings together selections of American art and material culture that are beautiful, poignant, and thought-provoking. The Wadsworth is proud to celebrate the significance of landscape across art history and its relevance in American art and visual culture. Additionally, the display of many incredible loans in this museum will provide visitors with a rich, meaningful experience,” says the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Director Matthew Hargraves. 

Why (Un)Settled? 

(Un)Settled highlights shifting attitudes toward landscape’s relevance and resonance in American art. This multidisciplinary show features over 60 works of art including baskets, ceramics, glass, photography, and painting. Building upon a central framework of the Wadsworth’s noted Hudson River School paintings, each section opens with an artwork from the nineteenth century in conversation with modern and contemporary interpretations. 

To present a more comprehensive history, the curatorial selection included the perspectives of Native American artists, women, and artists of color. (Un)Settled foregrounds multiple historic and cultural perspectives in each of its five thematic sections: The Beaten Path opens the show by revealing moments of connection and tension between people and their surroundings. Expanding Horizons features artists whose travels changed their perspectives and points of view. Counterpoints relates place and identity, foregrounding the experiences of individual. Seminatural explores the romanticization of our views, be they natural or urban, and attempts to impart order onto our surroundings. (Un)Settled closes the exhibition, reflecting upon this multifaceted term that addresses the movement of people over time, conversations about the significance of place, and how landscape relates to a dialogue about national identity. 

The exhibition in its totality reveals how artist’s impressions of the landscape are an enduring cultural touchpoint, and are inherently unsettled. There are through lines from historic to contemporary, such as environmental awareness which emerges in the first section in Thomas Cole’s 1827 View of the White Mountains and remains a central part of Jacqueline Bishop’s electrifying painting After the Rain (Methane) (2014–15), displayed in the final section. 

Similarly, contemporary artist Tom McGrath’s abstracted view of downtown Los Angeles appears alongside Albert Bierstadt’s romanticized topographical views of the American West, which McGrath cites as inspiration for his panoramic style. The juxtaposition of a traditional 19th-century Coast Salish basket with a contemporary response by glass artist Dan Friday (Lummi Nation, Coast Salish) brings to light the role of tradition and memory sustained over generations. 

William Christenberry’s photographs record specific places, primarily in the western part of his home state of Alabama, and reflect upon memory, transformation, and physical change wrought by time on landscape and the built environment. Similarly, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s black and white portraits of the Gullah Geechee on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina address disappearing or threatened cultural heritage and, in the artist,s words, “keep for the eyes of history the way Daufuskie was.” 

“From the local scenery to national parks, the individual to the communal, our cultural values and beliefs can be shaped by our surroundings. (Un)Settled reminds us of this through beautiful and compelling works of art,” says Erin Monroe, Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. 

Monroe worked with Laura Leonard, Art Bridges Project Coordinator and Curatorial Researcher on the final artist selection and interpretative materials. As Leonard stated, “This project was enriched by the dialogue we had with our partners and sharing different viewpoints on the topic. As a result, the exhibition includes several regional artists to expand beyond the familiar and expected.” 

For the Wadsworth’s presentation as the final venue for this traveling exhibition, the museum will include additional works from the permanent collection that further highlight the significance of artists relating to the landscape, such as Mark Dion’s sculptural display of objects excavated from the Seekonk River Providence Cabinet (2001) and Alma Thomas’s abstract painting Red Azaleas Jubliee (1976). 

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT), is the lead institution in the Art Bridges Cohort Program, centered on collection-sharing initiatives with its three partner museums: the Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia, SC), the Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL), and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL). Together, the four institutions are known as the American South Consortium. An Art Bridges Foundation partnership (Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art , a mid-sized exhibition, is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program. 

Images 

Thomas Cole (1802–1848), View in the White Mountains, 1827. Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Bequest of Daniel Wadsworth, 1848.17

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951) Jake with his boat arriving on Daufuskie’s shore , 1978. Columbia Museum of Art, Gift of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, 1985.4.38 © Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe

 Jacqueline Bishop (b. 1955), After the Rain (Methane), 2014–2015. Oil on linen. MontgomeryMuseum of Fine Arts Association Purchase, 2018.7 © Jacqueline Bishop; 

Albert Bierstadt

In the Yosemite Valley

1866
89.2 x 127 cm
Oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford
Bequest of Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt

Washington Allston ~ Coast Scene on the Mediterranean, oil on canvas, 1811
Date	1811
Medium	oil on canvas

Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth"

 

Brandywine Museum of Art 

June 22–September 28, 2025Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens Jacksonville, FloridaOctober 25, 2025–February 15, 2026.

Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), Evening at Kuerners, 1970, drybrush watercolor. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Wyeth. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Opening at the Brandywine Museum of Art this summer, Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth brings together some of the artist’s most iconic works featuring the landscape, buildings, and inhabitants of Kuerner Farm in Chadds Ford, PA. Now a National Historic Landmark owned and operated by the Brandywine, Kuerner Farm inspired nearly 1,000 artworks by Andrew Wyeth in a wide variety of genres and media. Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm is the first focused exhibition on this defining subject, surveying the artist’s sustained engagement with the site over the span of seven decades. This nationally traveling exhibition—co-organized by the Brandywine and the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, NC—has been years in the making and features nearly 50 paintings, including major works loaned from both private and public collections nationwide, as well as previously unexhibited works that will be new to public display. The exhibition will be on view at the Brandywine from June 22 through September 28, 2025, before traveling to its third and final venue later in the fall.

Kuerner Farm stands a short walk from Andrew Wyeth’s Chadds Ford studio—also a National Historic Landmark owned and operated by the Brandywine. Through many years of immersion in this landscape, walking and sketching and gradually earning the trust of the Kuerner family, the artist gained unusual access to the property, inside and out, and took sustained inspiration from the layers of this landscape, the evocative farmhouse at its heart, and the people who lived and worked there. “Visitors to the exhibition will be immersed in this multi-decade story of Wyeth’s engagement with the Kuerner Farm. Through this journey it becomes apparent that this was the place where key tenets of Wyeth’s practice crystallized, including the self-limited palette and geographic range that served as gateways to his distinct mode of modernism,” said William L. Coleman, Ph.D., co-curator of the exhibition and the Brandywine Museum of Art’s Wyeth Foundation Curator and Director of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center. “Inspired by a significant but little-known watercolor of the pond found on the Kuerner property—a mysterious feature that the artist once called ‘the eye of the Earth’—this exhibition also marks 25 years of public access to the site through the Brandywine.”

Wyeth’s depictions of Kuerner Farm included some of his most iconic masterworks in his career in both tempera and watercolor. Highlights in the exhibition include the temperas Karl (1948), Groundhog Day (1959), and Snow Hill (1989), along with watercolor masterpieces like Evening at Kuerners (1970), Wolf Moon (1975), and Loden Coat (1978). “Kuerner Farm completely captivated Wyeth,” said Allison C. Slaby, Reynolda’s curator and the exhibition’s co-curator. “In his depictions of the farm, we gain a sense of the Kuerner world in its entirety: the land, the hill, the pond, the house, and its inhabitants. For decades, Wyeth had free rein at this singular place. It became for him ‘a world of his own.’ This exhibition presents a refreshed approach to these works, centering this iconic place that not only captured the fascination of one of America’s most notable painters, but that also held his love and affection over the course of his life.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a generously illustrated hardcover catalogue published by Rizzoli Electa, supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Like the exhibition itself, the catalogue gives a thorough examination of Wyeth’s connection to Kuerner Farm with essays from the exhibition co-curators, Coleman and Slaby, as well as contributions by Karen Baumgartner, Collection Manager in the Brandywine’s Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center, and artist James Welling.

Following its presentation at the Brandywine, Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth will travel to the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida—the exhibition’s third and final venue—where it will be on view October 25, 2025–February 15, 2026. Generous support for the exhibition is provided by national sponsor Wells Fargo, with additional support for the exhibition and its publication provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

IMAGES

Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), Evening at Kuerners, 1970, drybrush watercolor. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Wyeth. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), The Kuerners, 1971, drybrush watercolor. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), Snow Hill, 1989, egg tempera. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), Karl, 1948, egg tempera. Albuquerque Museum, gift of Hope Aldrich, PC2023.29.1. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography by David Nufer

Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), Loden Coat, 1975, watercolor on paper. Private collection. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), Wolf Moon, 1975, watercolor. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting

National Portrait Gallery- London

12 February – 3 May 2026

NPG 7196 Bella in her Pluto T-Shirt (unsigned trial proof without face), 1995 © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved [2025] / Bridgeman Images

NPG 7195 Bella in her Pluto T-Shirt (etching), 1995 © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved [2025] / Bridgeman Images. Collection: National Portrait Gallery

Ahead of a major exhibition in 2026, the National Portrait Gallery has today announced the acquisition of 12 new works from the estate of Lucian Freud, one of Britain’s greatest portrait artists. Among these are 8 etchings, including a trial proof, which are the first of their medium by Freud to enter the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. A curated selection of these newly acquired works will be exhibited at the NPG from today as part of a free display that explores Freud’s working practice and dedication to portraiture. 

One of the newly acquired etchings, which depicts the artist’s daughter, Bella Freud, will feature in the new exhibition, the first of the National Portrait Gallery 2026 programme. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting will explore the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the human face and figure from the 1930s to the early twenty-first century, focusing on Freud’s mastery of drawing in all its forms – from pencil, pen, and ink to charcoal and etching. In addition, a carefully selected group of important paintings will reveal the dynamic dialogue between his practice on paper and on canvas. Opening on 12 February 2026, tickets will go on sale this autumn.

Ahead of this, Bella in her Pluto T-Shirt (etching) and other new acquisitions – including an unsigned trial proof of the sitter, without face, and a preparatory sketch of the work – are exhibited as part of a reconfigured Collections display in gallery 26, titled The Making of an Artist: The Lucian Freud Archive. This archive display illustrates Freud’s creative process, with works exhibited side by side to demonstrate specifically how the artist reworked the face of his sitter in the final print. Other highlights include previously unseen sketchbooks and childhood drawings; the artist’s etching tools; and two artworks by Freud’s father, Ernst Freud.

The National Portrait Gallery acquired the archive of Lucian Freud in 2015, and – since its reopening in 2023 – has displayed the artist’s childhood drawings, letters and sketchbooks. This reconfigured display, which opens today, focuses on Freud’s life, artistic techniques and processes, with a particular emphasis his etching prints, plates and unsigned trial proofs.

“My father spent a long time working on Bella in her Pluto T-shirt, and he reworked my face several times before finalising the etching – it was really unusual for that to happen. And it was quite interesting, in a way, to see that not everything came out right, and how to deal with something when it doesn’t. Sometimes he would ‘scrap’ something, as he called it, and then start again. And this time he just didn’t… Eventually, it was good. I think that’s been a very useful lesson in my work and my life. You don’t give up: you look for a way to see how things can work and then something will come if you’re in that mindset.”
Bella Freud
Fashion designer and daughter of Lucian Freud

“The Lucian Freud Archive at the National Portrait Gallery is an incredible resource that helps us share unique insights into the artist’s working practice, from his childhood drawings to later sketchbooks. Ahead of next year’s major exhibition, which will focus on Freud’s skill as a draughtsman across many mediums, this free archive display in gallery 26 will delve into the ways in which he worked as a printmaker, displaying his tools and trial proofs alongside new etchings – the first to enter the NPG’s Collection. We’re delighted the Arts Council has supported the NPG in allocating the etchings and archive material to us.”
Carys Lewis
Archivist, National Portrait Gallery

“Over the course of his career, Lucian Freud developed a fondness for the National Portrait Gallery, working with us in the lead up to 2012 to produce the last major retrospective conceived in his lifetime. Partly in recognition of this relationship, the NPG is home to the artist’s rich and extensive archive, which has been at the heart of the research for this upcoming exhibition, Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting. This is the first museum exhibition in this country to focus on the artist’s works on paper. I look forward to sharing some of the fascinating and rarely exhibited archive material alongside important national and international loans when the exhibition opens in 2026.”
Sarah Howgate
Senior Curator Contemporary Collections, National Portrait Gallery

 

Kirchner x Kirchner

 Kunstmuseum Bern

12.9.2025-11.1.2026

A major work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers), is about to leave the Federal Chancellery in Berlin. The painting is known to a wide public because almost every evening it has been visible on the television news in the background of the German government’s Cabinet sessions. Exceptionally, it is now being allowed to leave its customary place, to appear as a guest in the Kunstmuseum Bern. For the first time since its joint exhibition with its pendant, Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well) in 1933, the two paintings will be shown together, reunited, in the autumn exhibition Kirchner x Kirchner in the Kunstmuseum Bern, where they will form the sensational highlight of the exhibition.Kirchner x Kirchner: A homage to Kirchner’s biggest retrospective in 1933.

Between 12 September 2025 and 11 January 2026, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the exhibition Kirchner x Kirchner. It features around 65 top-class works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) which are rarely shown in Switzerland. The artist is considered as one of the most outstanding protagonists of modern art. With this exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Bern is recalling the largest retrospective in the artist’s lifetime, held in the Kunsthalle Bern in 1933 and curated by the artist himself.

Kirchner’s monumental pair of paintings reunited as a highlight of the Kirchner x Kirchner exhibition thanks to a sensational loan from Berlin.
One particularly highlight of the 1933 exhibition was the presentation of the monumental pair of paintings Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers) and Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well). They were hung in the entrance hall of the Kunsthalle, where they formed a dramatic introduction (see press image 03). The artist made these two works as a unit in the mid-1920s in Davos, where he had been recovering from service in the First World War since 1917, and both the landscape and the life of the mountain farmers inspired him to explore new motifs.

‘I also already have an idea for the exhibition. Both 4 m paintings should go in the entrance hall. The rear wall of the lantern light room is hung with 8 [eight] 75 x 150 formats. That provides a calm horizontal as an introduction, and when one looks through the door there are only the verticals of the portrait formats. A wonderful harmony on the right and left the big wooden figures of Adam and Eve.’ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, letter to Max Huggler, former Director of Kunsthalle Bern, 21 December 1932.

Today it’s a genuine sensation that the Kunstmuseum Bern is able to show, reunited after more than 90 years, the two oil paintings Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers) (see press image 01) from the Cabinet Room of Berlin’s Federal Chancellery and its pendant Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well) (press image 02) from its own collection.

‘The Federal Republic of Germany is doing the Kunstmuseum Bern a very great honour by exceptionally authorising the loan of this significant work by Kirchner. It makes us extremely happy that we are enabled in to show these two major works together again to the public for the first time, entirely as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner intended.’
Nina Zimmer, Director, Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee

‘That these two works, of central importance for Kirchner’s work and sense of himself as an artist can no be shown together again for the first time – fully in line with his original intention – fills me with great joy and deep gratitude.’
Nadine Franci, Curator of Prints & Drawings at Kunstmuseum Bern and Curator of the Exhibition.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen [Sunday in the Alps. Scene at the Well], 1923-24/ around 1929
Oil on canvas with original painted frame,
168 x 400 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern

© Kunstmuseum Bern

Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well):
an exceptional acquisition for the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern
After the 1933 exhibition the two works went their different ways. The Kunstmuseum Bern bought Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (Alp Sunday. The Scene at the Well) (1923-24/around 1929) directly from the 1933 Kirchner exhibition thanks to donations and a generous accommodation by the author. This purchase by the Kunstmuseum Bern meant much more to Kirchner than mere financial support – it was an overdue symbolic recognition. Until then he had not been represented by a painting in a single Swiss museum collection. In Germany his works were gradually disappearing from exhibitions, and were banished to storage.

‘I have now had the painting bought by the Museum on Tuesday: Scene am Brunnen (The Scene at the Well), delivered without accident to the place in the Museum that they indicated. [....] Now it will presumably be hung, and will hopefully bring pleasure to many people, just as it brought me pleasure to depict this peaceful, healthy life of our mountain peasants in the midst of their landscape. To be able to do so, I spent summer in the Alps with them every year for 6 years.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Letter to Johann Conrad von Mandach, Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern (1920-1943), Davos Wildboden, 27.4.1933

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Sonntag der Bergbauern [Sunday of the Mountain Farmers], 1923-24/26
Oil on canvas, 170 x 400 cm
Federal Republic of Germany

© Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers):
a symbolic sign from the Federal Republic of Germany as reparation and for peace.
The journey of the counter-loan Sonntag der Bergbauern (Sunday of the Mountain Farmers) led from the artist’s estate to the Federal Chancellery in Germany. The German Expressionists already found their way into the new Chancellery in Bonn under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. As a sign of reparation for the defamation that had taken place under the Nazis, and as a sign of peace, he had offices in the building decorated with works by Expressionist artists in 1975. The artworks were loans from museums, from the Federation’s collection or from private collectors. Roman Norbert Ketterer, the administrator of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s estate, was friends with Helmut Schmidt, and entrusted him with the large-format painting Sonntag der Bergbauern (170 x 400 cm) as a permanent loan. Helmut Schmidt had it displayed to commanding effect in the Cabinet Room, in the so-called Chancellor’s Building of the Bonn Federal Chancellery. The painting was purchased by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1985.

When the new Federal Chancellery went into operation in Berlin in 2001, the painting moved with it, finding a prominent and symbolic place in the Cabinet Room of the Federal Government.

Since the 1970s the painting has been present as a background to television reports from the German government before Cabinet sessions, and has entered the collective consciousness in that way (press image 04). The juxtaposition of the two paintings brings to the fore once again that ‘image of calm and peace’ that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner already suggested in a letter to Nele van de Velde on 7 October 1921 – even before he started work on the painting. May it shine out upon our contemporary world.

03

Franz Henn

View of the Kirchner exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern with Alpsonntag. Szene am Brunnen (left) and Sonntag der Bergbauern (right), 1933.
Photography

© Erbengemeinschaft Eberhard W. Kornfeld

04

Cabinet room in the Federal Chancellery in Berlin with the painting Sonntag der Bergbauern by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the background

© Bundesregierung / Guido Bergmann

05

Meret Oppenheim

Neue Sterne [New Stars], 1977-1982 Oil on canvas, 205 x 248,5 cm Kunstmuseum Bern, Legacy Meret Oppenheim

© 2025, ProLitteris Zürich

Press images

Current and upcoming exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Bern

Carol Rama. Rebel of Modernism

until 13.7.2025

Marisa Merz. Ascoltare lo spazio / Listen to the Space

until 17.8.2025

Kunstmuseum Bern of the Future. The Architectural Competition

until 28.9.2025

Collection Intervention by Amy Sillman

until 2.11.2025

Kirchner x Kirchner

12.9.25-11.1.26

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Tuesday 10:00–20:00

Wednesday–Sunday 10:00–17:00

Monday closed

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