October 2026 Global Museum Guide: 31 Openings Worth the Flight?
A verified guide to 31 October 2026 exhibition openings worldwide, with featured works, exact dates, and a clear call on which shows deserve a dedicated flight.
October's museum calendar is lopsided. London and New York carry nine of this issue's 31 openings between them, while the rest of the month's strong work spreads across Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, Basel, Kyoto, Cleveland, San Francisco, Mexico City, and Melbourne.
The cutoff is strict: an exhibition qualifies only when its opening date falls between October 1 and October 31, 2026. Drawing on a 50-museum watchlist, 31 openings cleared that bar with a museum page stating both an opening and a closing date. Several anchor institutions opened their autumn blockbusters in September, and a handful of announced October shows carried no readable closing date on their own pages. Everything below is confirmed against the institution's own page, and the closing section names what did not make it.
The flight test works the same way it has all year. Yes marks an exhibition that is rare, tied to the building it is in, unusually large, or hard to reproduce anywhere else. Yes, if already in [city] marks a show strong enough to carry a trip you have already booked. Specialist trip marks one that earns a dedicated journey for a defined interest. No standalone flight marks a show that may be excellent while remaining short of a long-haul ticket on its own.
The short list: worth flying out?
| Verdict | Exhibition | Museum and city | Opens | Why it earns the verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | Korea | British Museum, London | Oct 1 | 23 Korean National Treasures inside a survey of 2,000 years of Korean art, drawn from a 23,000-work bequest and largely unseen in the UK. 1 |
| Yes | Renoir and Love | National Gallery, London | Oct 3 | 45 paintings, among them Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), shown in the UK for the first time. 2 |
| Yes | Zurbarán 1598–1664 | Louvre, Paris | Oct 7 | The first large-scale international Zurbarán exhibition since 1987–88, mounted with the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. 3 |
| Yes | Willem de Kooning at Work | Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam | Oct 9 | More than 120 works covering 65 years of drawing, with Woman I hung in the Gallery of Honour near the Night Watch. 4 |
| Yes | Roy Lichtenstein: Like New | Whitney Museum, New York | Oct 11 | About 130 works, plus the first reunion of everything Lichtenstein showed at Leo Castelli in 1962. 5 |
| Yes | Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio | MoMA, New York | Oct 25 | Sculptures rarely lent out of the Atelier Brancusi, in an exhibition built with the Centre Pompidou. 6 |
| Yes | The Tale of Genji | Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto | Oct 6 | About 250 works, and the museum's first exhibition on the novel in roughly fifty years. 7 |
| Specialist trip | Ten Kings of Hell: The Afterlife in Medieval Korea | Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland | Oct 11 | Ten 14th-century hanging scrolls reunited for the first time since the 1960s. 8 |
| Specialist trip | RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me | SFMOMA, San Francisco | Oct 3 | Nearly 150 works from RM's collection, in the exhibition's only US presentation. 9 |
| Yes, if already in London | Light & Magic: The Birth of Art Photography | Tate Modern, London | Oct 14 | 200 vintage prints that recast Pictorialism as a worldwide movement. 10 |
London and Cambridge: the month's densest cluster
Korea — British Museum, London
Dates: October 1, 2026–January 31, 2027, in Room 35. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: 23 Korean National Treasures and Treasures, among them a bronze dagger and spearhead, a Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara, The Practices and Vows of Samantabhadra, celadon alms bowls, a Sun, Moon and Five Peaks six-panel folding screen, a faceted bottle with bamboo design, and Kim Hong-do's Sound of Autumn. 1
The exhibition runs from around 300 BC to the present and gathers sculpture, painting, and decorative arts from royal tombs, Buddhist temples, scholars' studios, private homes, and modern art spaces. Almost everything in it comes from the 23,000 works that Lee Kun-Hee bequeathed to the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, in 2021. The British Museum describes the result as the most comprehensive chronological survey of Korean visual and material culture in Europe in more than 40 years, and most of the objects have never been shown in the UK. 1
The museum's own introduction frames the show around how exchange shaped Korean culture over two millennia, which is why the objects sit in settings as different as a tomb, a temple hall, and a scholar's desk. 1
Worth flying out? Yes. Twenty-three national treasures leaving Korea at once, most of them for the first time in Britain, is the kind of loan that does not repeat. Book the timed slot before booking the flight, since the run closes at the end of January and Christmas week will absorb the last of the tickets.
Renoir and Love — National Gallery, London
Dates: October 3, 2026–January 31, 2027, in the Sainsbury Wing. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: 45 paintings, including Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée d'Orsay) in its first UK showing, Dance in the Country (1883) and Dance at Bougival (1883, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), The Umbrellas (1881, reworked 1885, National Gallery), The Great Bathers (1884–87, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Mother Antony's Tavern (1866, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), La Place Clichy (1880, Fitzwilliam Museum), and The Luncheon (1875, Barnes Foundation). 2
The exhibition concentrates on two decades, the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, when Renoir painted the new public spaces of Paris and the people filling them. More than a third of his canvases from those years show courtship, friendship, and family life, and the Gallery reads the group as a sustained study of modern love rather than a run of pretty scenes. This is the first exhibition the National Gallery has devoted to Renoir since 2007 and the most significant showing of his work in the UK in 20 years; it was organised with the Musée d'Orsay and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and follows the Paris run that closed in July. 2
Worth flying out? Yes. Dance at the Moulin de la Galette has stayed in Paris for a century and a half and the Gallery has it until the end of January. Pair it with the Zurbarán at the Louvre, which opens four days later and shares the same three organising museums.
Light & Magic: The Birth of Art Photography — Tate Modern, London
Dates: October 14, 2026–February 21, 2027. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: 200 rare vintage prints by more than 80 artists, among them Ilse Bing, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Olive Cotton, Robert Demachy, František Drtikol, Gertrude Käsebier, Heinrich Kühn, Lang Jingshan, Adolph de Meyer, William Mortensen, Iwata Nakayama, Aleksandr Rodchenko, August Sander, Josef Sudek, Soichi Sunami, Edward Weston, and Yevonde. 10
Tate calls this the first major exhibition to treat Pictorialism as a global movement, and the geography carries the argument: the prints come from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia, and the show follows the movement into the 1960s, well past the point where the European account normally ends. Four chapters cover its emergence, photographic printmaking, the societies, camera clubs, and salons that moved it across borders, and its meeting with Modernism. A catalogue edited by Charmaine Toh is published in October. 10
Worth flying out? Yes, if already in London. The exhibition rewrites a movement most photography collections treat as a European and American story, and four months is enough time to plan around it. The reason it sits below the top tier is the competition in the same city this month.
Cambridge: what the Fitzwilliam opened
Dates: An Enamel Revolution: China and the World, October 20, 2026–February 21, 2027, Gallery 26; A Call to Art: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, October 23, 2026–May 3, 2027. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: enamelled porcelain, glass, and copper from the 1600s onward in the first show, and in the second a group led by William Morris's La Belle Iseult (1858), May Morris's Honeysuckle wallpaper (designed 1883), Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Helen of Troy (1863), the Kelmscott Press frontispiece to News from Nowhere (1892), and Arthur Hughes's April Love (1855–56). 1112
An Enamel Revolution traces how Chinese workshops pushed enamelling onto porcelain and glass as well as copper, and how they adapted the results for buyers in Europe; it is organised with the Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and entry is free. A Call to Art takes the Pre-Raphaelites' belief that art and beauty could change a society, formed in answer to industrialisation, and sets it beside the crafts the circle actually produced. Cambridge is a 50-minute train from London, so both can ride on the same trip as the capital's four openings. 1112
Paris and Amsterdam: two old masters, one immigrant
Zurbarán 1598–1664 — Louvre, Paris
Dates: October 7, 2026–January 25, 2027. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: Sainte Casilda (c. 1635, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) heads a selection running from the monumental canvases Zurbarán painted for Andalusian monasteries to his portraits and still lifes, with a section on Juan de Zurbarán (1620–1649). 3
The Louvre staged this with the National Gallery, London and the Art Institute of Chicago, and the last international presentation on this scale was the Metropolitan Museum and Grand Palais show of 1987–88. Seven sections move through the career chronologically and thematically, and a closing group of late 19th- and early 20th-century works traces Zurbarán's pull on Manet, Picasso, and Juan Gris. The museum describes the ambition as an ambitious selection of the finest paintings rather than the complete catalogue of an exhaustive monograph. 3
The Louvre shows Zurbarán in the same rooms, on one ticket, as Sculpting Colour, its exhibition of masterpieces from the Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid, so a visitor sees two views of 17th-century Spain in a single walk. 3
Worth flying out? Yes. Thirty-eight years is a long gap for a painter this central to Spanish Baroque, and the three organising museums hold between them most of the reason to see him. Any Paris itinerary in the next four months can absorb it without a special journey.
Willem de Kooning at Work — Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Dates: October 9, 2026–January 17, 2027. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: more than 120 works covering 65 years, including Excavation (1950) and Pink Angels (c. 1945), with Woman I (1950–52) and Woman and Bicycle (1952–53) hung in the Gallery of Honour near the Night Watch. 4
De Kooning left Rotterdam as a 22-year-old stowaway in 1926, and the Rijksmuseum has built the centenary of that departure around his drawings. The museum's argument is that he drew to explore, correct, repeat, and surprise himself, and that the process sits underneath everything he made in every medium. The exhibition was developed with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Willem de Kooning Foundation, and it gives the artist a place among the Rijksmuseum's Dutch masters in the Gallery of Honour. 4
Worth flying out? Yes. This is the first comprehensive overview of de Kooning's drawings anywhere, and the two Woman paintings do not normally leave New York together. Amsterdam is also running three more October openings, which turns a single exhibition into a long weekend.
Whistler. Dandy and Disruptor — Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Dates: October 16, 2026–January 10, 2027. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: Arrangement in Grey: Portrait of the Painter (1872, Detroit Institute of Arts) among paintings, watercolours, and prints, with Snow, Amsterdam (1882) shown at the Mesdag Collection in the companion display Whistler. Loving the Netherlands. 13
The Van Gogh Museum and the Mesdag Collection made this with Tate Britain, and it is the largest European retrospective of Whistler in thirty years and the first in the Netherlands. Whistler's case for art that works on mood the way music does, and his shared fascination with Japanese prints, are the threads that connect him to Van Gogh. 13
Worth flying out? Yes. The three-decade gap and the Dutch angle make this the strongest single-artist exhibition in continental Europe this month, and the Van Gogh Museum's own Yoshitoshi show opens two weeks earlier in the same building.
New York: Pop, Brancusi, and a room full of books
Roy Lichtenstein: Like New — Whitney Museum, New York
Dates: October 11, 2026–May 10, 2027, with member previews October 8–10. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: about 130 works from the early 1940s through the 1990s, including Look Mickey (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), Little Big Painting (1965), and Rouen Cathedral, Set III (1968–69); a nearly 96-foot recreation of Greene Street Mural (1983); and works by Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone, and Sturtevant. 5
The Whitney has reassembled everything Lichtenstein showed at Leo Castelli in 1962, the debut that fixed Pop in the public mind, and hangs it as one group. Around it the exhibition follows his six decades of work on how images get built, enlarged, copied, and recirculated, which the museum argues reads differently in an era of endless reposting. This is New York's first Lichtenstein retrospective since 1993. 5
Worth flying out? Yes. A 33-year gap for a New York retrospective of a New York artist, plus the Castelli reunion, puts this above the city's other October openings. The run is long enough that the flight can wait for a cheaper week.
Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio — MoMA, New York
Dates: October 25, 2026–February 27, 2027, on Floor 6, with member previews October 22–24. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: Bird in Space, Endless Columns I–IV, Fish (1930), and Leda (1926), shown with Brancusi's own photographs, films, hand-carved furniture and pedestals, tools, and archival material. 6
Brancusi left the contents of his studio on impasse Ronsin to France in 1957 so that it would stay whole, and it became the Atelier Brancusi. The Atelier belongs to the Centre Pompidou, which is currently closed for renovation, and rarely lent sculptures from it are travelling to New York for the first time in decades. MoMA sets them against its own Brancusi holdings and several local loans, and the studio's equipment is treated as part of the art. 6
Worth flying out? Yes. The Atelier is the single most complete record of how a 20th-century sculptor worked, and its move to New York is temporary and partial. Given the Paris closure, this is the best chance to see the studio's contents in years.
The Met and MoMA, in brief
Dates: There Are No Words: Si Lewen's Parade, October 1, 2026–January 5, 2027; The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, October 4, 2026–January 23, 2027; Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany, October 22, 2026–February 7, 2027. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: Lewen's 63-drawing cycle The Parade (ca. 1950); artists' books from the Helen and Sam Zell Collection at MoMA, including Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme rebound by Paul Bonet, Salvador Dalí and Paul Éluard's L'immaculée Conception, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore's Aveux non avenus (1930), and works by Max Ernst, Toyen, Georges Hugnet, and Unica Zürn; and at the Met under 120 design drawings by Frederick Wilson, Jacob Holzer, Agnes Northrop, Clara Driscoll, and Julia Munson. 141516
The Parade is the work of a Polish-born artist who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, served in the US Army's German-speaking Ritchie Boys unit, landed in Normandy, and reached Buchenwald shortly after its liberation in 1945; the Met acquired the cycle in 2024 and this is its first public showing. The Surrealist book show tracks a form the movement used to smuggle experimental writing and photography past the ordinary reader. Designing the Gilded Age reunites the Chrysler Museum's stained-glass window Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria (1911) with its original wisteria transoms for the first time in at least fifty years. 141516
Among the three, the Met's Tiffany show has the clearest claim on a traveller's time, since the design drawings and the finished windows have not been seen together for half a century. Include the other two on a New York trip that already has Lichtenstein and Brancusi booked.
Kyoto: the novel that built a visual world
The Tale of Genji: Radiant Culture of the Japanese Imperial Court — Kyoto National Museum
Dates: October 6–November 29, 2026, in two installations: Part I, October 6–November 1; Part II, November 3–29. The museum closes Mondays, opens Monday October 12, and closes Tuesday October 13. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: about 250 works, including the Blue-Cover (Aobyōshi) manuscript edited by Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), "Leaves of Wild Ginger" (Aoi) from the Moriyasu edition of the Illustrated Handscrolls of The Tale of Genji, later manuscript editions and commentaries, paintings and decorative art, and material tracing the novel's afterlife in the performing arts. 7
Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji in the Heian period, and the museum's subject is the visual and material culture the text generated over the following millennium. Kyoto National Museum has not given the novel an exhibition on this scale in about fifty years, and it has drawn the objects from collections across Japan. Part I and Part II show different material, and the museum notes that some works rotate within each installation. 7
Worth flying out? Yes. Fifty years between exhibitions, roughly 250 objects, and a two-month window make this the month's strongest reason to fly to Asia, and the Moriyasu handscrolls rarely travel at all. Tickets go on sale in advance through the museum's online site and the show will be crowded in the first week.
Cleveland and San Francisco: hell scrolls and a private collection
Ten Kings of Hell: The Afterlife in Medieval Korea — Cleveland Museum of Art
Dates: October 11, 2026–January 3, 2027, in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: more than 100 works from collections in Korea, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom, centred on ten 14th-century hanging scrolls of the Kings of Hell together for the first time since the 1960s, with the museum's Fourth King of Hell (late 1300s), an 1100s knife sheath, and a 1300s Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, plus contemporary works by Anicka Yi, Park Chan-kyong, and Gala Porras-Kim's The Third King of Hell Afterimage (2025). 8
Cleveland organised the exhibition with the National Museum of Korea and takes the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) as its frame, asking how medieval Koreans imagined the world beyond death and what works of art did inside that imagining. The museum ties the period's preoccupation with purgatory to the pressures around it, among them the climatic volatility of the Little Ice Age and the Black Death, and Gala Porras-Kim's commission asks what becomes of objects like these once they enter Western collections. 8
Worth flying out? Specialist trip. Goryeo Buddhist painting is thin on the ground outside Korea, and a ten-scroll set reassembled after 60 years will not be reassembled again soon. The subject makes this one for travellers with a standing interest in Korean or Buddhist art rather than a general art weekend.
RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me — SFMOMA, San Francisco
Dates: October 3, 2026–February 7, 2027, on Floor 7, with member previews October 1–3. Status: Confirmed. Featured works and artists: nearly 150 works from RM's personal collection shown with works from SFMOMA's, including Yun Hyong-keun's Untitled (1973), Chang Ucchin's The River Scene (1988), Kim Whanki's 26-I-70 #141 (1970), Yoo Youngkuk's Work (1982), Han Youngsoo's Deoksugung Palace, Jeong-Dong, Seoul (1956–63), Kim Yun Shin, and Wonwoo Lee, alongside Yves Klein's Éponge (SE251) (1961), Giorgio Morandi's Fiori (1949), Wayne Thiebaud's Clown and Beast (2018–19), and Mark Rothko's No. 14, 1960 (1960). 9
RM curated the exhibition with SFMOMA's América Castillo and Hyoeun Kim, and the hang moves Korean ceramics, calligraphy, painting, and sculpture from the fifth century to the present into conversation with modern and international work. It is the exhibition's only US presentation, tickets are timed and carry a surcharge — $10 on weekdays and $12 at weekends and on holidays — and RM recorded the audio guide himself. 9
Worth flying out? Specialist trip. The show is the largest presentation of Korean modern and contemporary art assembled in the United States in recent memory, and it is built from a private collection that has never been shown publicly in the country. The reason it sits below the top tier is the subject: a traveller with no particular interest in Korean art or in RM's collecting will find the same ground covered by the British Museum's Korea this month.
The rest of October's confirmed openings
| Exhibition | Museum, city | Dates | Featured works and artists | Why it matters | Worth flying out? | Status and source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Es Devlin: Other Worlds | Design Museum, London | Oct 2, 2026–Apr 4, 2027 | A replica of Devlin's London studio; the "30-Year Desk" covering The Lehman Trilogy, Forest of Us, the London 2012 closing ceremony, and the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show; a new staging of Come Home Again | The first European retrospective of a stage designer whose work most visitors have already seen | Yes, if already in London | Confirmed. 17 |
| Yoshitoshi: Master of the Moon | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam | Oct 1, 2026–Jan 4, 2027 | 100 prints from One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885–90) | Van Gogh collected and studied Yoshitoshi's prints; this is the series in full | Yes, if already in Amsterdam | Confirmed. 13 |
| Chez Matisse | H'ART Museum, Amsterdam | Oct 3, 2026–Feb 14, 2027 | Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, from Matisse's 1900 self-portrait to the late cut-outs | The Centre Pompidou's own collection travels while its Paris building is closed for renovation | Yes, if already in Amsterdam | Confirmed. 18 |
| Prix Marcel Duchamp 2026 | Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris | Oct 2, 2026–Feb 7, 2027 | Work by the four nominees: Joël Andrianomearisoa; David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin; Laura Henno; Josèfa Ntjam | The winner is announced on October 22, so the exhibition's meaning changes halfway through its run | Specialist trip | Confirmed. 18 |
| Louise Bourgeois. Extrême tension: Drawings and Engravings | BnF Richelieu, Paris | Oct 20, 2026–Feb 21, 2027 | Drawings and engravings from the holdings of the BnF and the Centre Pompidou, brought together for the first time | Follows how Bourgeois's drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and writing depend on one another | Specialist trip | Confirmed. 18 |
| Shara Hughes: Sink In | ALBERTINA, Vienna | Oct 9, 2026–Feb 28, 2027 | Large canvases Pop (2021), Weighted Blankets (2022), Tuck (2021), and Sink In (2026), with mixed-media works on paper | Invented landscapes built from fauvist colour, Georgia O'Keeffe's scale, and a deliberately feverish palette | Specialist trip | Confirmed. 19 |
| Her Story: Women Artists of the ALBERTINA | ALBERTINA, Vienna | Oct 30, 2026–Feb 14, 2027 | Five centuries of works from the collection: Diana Scultori, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffmann, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Berthe Morisot, Käthe Kollwitz, Sonia Delaunay, Meret Oppenheim, Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, VALIE EXPORT | The Albertina's first exhibition devoted to the women in its own collection, in its 250th-anniversary year | Yes, if already in Vienna | Confirmed. 20 |
| Ruth Asawa | Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel | Oct 18, 2026–Jan 10, 2027 | Wire and bronze sculpture, drawings, prints, paintings, and public-space commissions | The first European retrospective of Asawa (1926–2013), developed with SFMOMA and MoMA | Yes, if already in the region | Confirmed. 21 |
| Tony Cokes: On Boredom | Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago | Oct 3, 2026–Mar 14, 2027 | A two-part installation on the Bluhm Family Terrace: the windows become a billboard reading "Let yourself be free," from Aretha Franklin's 1968 recording of "Think," with a freestanding sign quoting Mark Fisher | Cokes's first public outdoor presentation in Chicago, with a soundtrack audible across the terrace | No standalone flight | Confirmed. 22 |
| The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990 | LACMA, Los Angeles | Oct 18, 2026–Jan 24, 2027 | More than 60 works and archival material from the gallery founded in South L.A. by Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis, which showed David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, and Carrie Mae Weems early | The first large-scale exhibition on a gallery that shaped a generation of Los Angeles artists after the Watts Rebellion | Yes, if already in Los Angeles | Confirmed. 23 |
| Bare Bones: Skeletons in Japanese Art | Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis | Oct 24, 2026–Jan 3, 2027 | 23 works from the museum's collection, 1830s to 2018, led by Takeuchi Ryūa's screens Skeletons at Play and Skeletons as a Courtesan Procession (c. 1900–20) and Hokusai's The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji (c. 1831–32) | Free, and built around a rare recent acquisition rather than a loan show | No standalone flight | Confirmed. 24 |
| Takehisa Yumeji—An Artist Who Defined His Era | National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo | Oct 23, 2026–Jan 11, 2027 | 500 works and materials from collections across Japan, including Kurofuneya (1919) and the Yumeji Collection of Works: Spring (1911) | Yumeji (1884–1934) worked as painter, poet, journalist, illustrator, and product designer, and this show treats him as the bridge between fine art and mass media in Taishō Japan | Specialist trip | Confirmed. 25 |
| Álvaro Urbano: Helen | Museo Jumex, Mexico City | Oct 16, 2026–Feb 7, 2027 | A new installation built around Casa Cueva in Pedregal de San Ángel, the house the architect Juan O'Gorman designed and shared with the botanist Helen Fowler O'Gorman | Urbano rebuilds the atmosphere of a house and its garden from Fowler O'Gorman's 1961 book Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants | Specialist trip | Confirmed. 26 |
| Raúl Silva: Gateway | Museo Jumex, Mexico City | Oct 16, 2026–Feb 7, 2027 | A video installation with archival material, paintings, and sculptural elements, made around Cancún and the submarine cables that land there | Silva's first solo exhibition in Mexico reads the resort and the cables beneath it as one infrastructure story | Yes, if already in Mexico City | Confirmed. 27 |
| Passage: The Art of Atong Atem | The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne | Oct 30, 2026–Jun 14, 2027 | More than 65 works, including Red dust sticks to you (2022), the Surat series (2022) shown in full for the first time, Banksia (2021), and the new commission As Above | The first major solo exhibition for the Melbourne-based South Sudanese artist, and free to enter | Specialist trip | Confirmed. 28 |
If you only book one trip
Choose London for the month's densest programme. Korea at the British Museum and Renoir and Love at the National Gallery are both first-tier, Light & Magic rewrites a photographic movement at Tate Modern, and the Design Museum's Es Devlin retrospective fills a wet afternoon. Cambridge is a 50-minute train away and adds two more October openings, one of them free.
Choose New York if you want two marquee single-artist shows in one city. The Whitney's Lichtenstein has been 33 years in coming, and MoMA's Brancusi brings the contents of the Paris studio over while the Atelier's home building is shut. The Met adds Tiffany design drawings and Si Lewen's wordless war cycle.
Choose Kyoto if one exhibition can carry a long-haul flight. The Tale of Genji runs two months, brings together roughly 250 objects, and has no equivalent in Europe or America this year. Pair it with Tokyo's Takehisa Yumeji retrospective, which opens two weeks later.
Choose Amsterdam for a concentrated European weekend. De Kooning's drawings fill the Rijksmuseum, Whistler's thirty-year retrospective leads the Van Gogh Museum's autumn, and the same building opens Yoshitoshi's moon prints in the first week of the month.
Choose Cleveland for a specialist journey. The ten Goryeo hell scrolls have not stood together since the 1960s, and Cleveland pairs them with the museum's own recent acquisitions and with three contemporary artists working the same ground.
The booking rule is the same as it has been all year: secure the timed ticket first for anything with a surcharge or a short run, then buy the flight. This month that means the British Museum, SFMOMA, and Kyoto.
Cover image: detail from Sun, Moon and Five Peaks, a six-panel folding screen in Korea at the British Museum. Image from the British Museum.
References
- 1British Museum: Korea
britishmuseum.org
- 2National Gallery: Renoir and Love
nationalgallery.org.uk
- 3Louvre: Zurbarán
louvre.fr
- 4Rijksmuseum: Willem de Kooning at work
rijksmuseum.nl
- 5Whitney: Roy Lichtenstein, Like New
whitney.org
- 6
- 7Kyoto National Museum: The Tale of Genji
kyohaku.go.jp
- 8Cleveland Museum of Art: Ten Kings of Hell
clevelandart.org
- 9SFMOMA: RM x SFMOMA
sfmoma.org
- 10Tate: Light & Magic
tate.org.uk
- 11Fitzwilliam Museum: An Enamel Revolution
fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
- 12Fitzwilliam Museum: A Call to Art
fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
- 13Van Gogh Museum: highlights of the season
vangoghmuseum.nl
- 14The Met: Si Lewen's Parade
metmuseum.org
- 15MoMA: The Surrealist Book
press.moma.org
- 16The Met: Designing the Gilded Age
metmuseum.org
- 17Design Museum: Es Devlin
designmuseum.org
- 18Centre Pompidou: exhibition programme
centrepompidou.fr
- 19ALBERTINA: Shara Hughes
albertina.at
- 20ALBERTINA: Her Story
albertina.at
- 21Fondation Beyeler: Ruth Asawa
fondationbeyeler.ch
- 22
- 23LACMA: upcoming exhibitions
lacma.org
- 24Minneapolis Institute of Art: Bare Bones
new.artsmia.org
- 25MOMAT: Takehisa Yumeji
momat.go.jp
- 26Museo Jumex: Álvaro Urbano, Helen
fundacionjumex.org
- 27Museo Jumex: Raúl Silva, Gateway
fundacionjumex.org
- 28NGV: Passage, The Art of Atong Atem
ngv.vic.gov.au
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