this summer: London, Paris, New York
If your holiday happens to land you in one of the three art capitals, here are three exhibitions for each, worth carving out half a day for.
London
🎨 Frida: The Making of an Icon. Tate Modern, from 22 June. More than 130 works by Frida Kahlo and a separate strand on “Fridamania”, from socks to eyeshadow palettes.
🪞 Anish Kapoor. Hayward Gallery, 16 June-18 October. Kapoor takes over the whole gallery, terraces included, and shows new monumental works that burst the boundaries of sculpture.
🎞 Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait. National Portrait Gallery, from 4 June. Marking the centenary of Monroe's birth: her life and myth seen through portraits by the finest photographers and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Paris
💗 Renoir and Love plus Renoir Draftsman. Musée d'Orsay, until 19 July. A blockbuster mounted together with London's National Gallery and the Boston MFA: Renoir as the bard of tenderness and pleasure and, alongside it, Renoir the draughtsman, the underside of his method.
🌿 Henri Rousseau. Musée de l'Orangerie, until 20 July. A major retrospective of the master of naive art.
👑 Baroque Splendor: the collection of the Hispanic Society of America. Musée Jacquemart-André, until 2 August. The Spanish Golden Age: Baroque painting from one of the finest collections of Spanish art outside Spain.
New York
🖌 Raphael. The Met, catch it before the end of June. More than two hundred works by Raphael, with the emphasis on the draughtsmanship and precision of the High Renaissance.
🚽 Marcel Duchamp. MoMA. A retrospective of the man who exhibited a urinal and broke the back of the entire 20th century.
🏙 Whitney Biennial 2026. Whitney Museum, running all summer. The 82nd Biennial, with 56 artists on AI, climate anxiety and geopolitics.
