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Monet Monet Monet

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Claude Monet, the Impressionist par excellence, and unsurprisingly there's no shortage of Monet-related exhibitions, particularly in France, to mark the occasion.  So if you want to fill 2026 with luminous, atmospheric landscapes and dreamy water lilies, we have some dates for your diary.  We'll take the big shows in chronological order, which means crossing the border into Germany for the first of them. We can vouch for it that  Monet on the Normandy Coast: The Discovery of Etretat  at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt is an excellent exhibition; we saw it in Lyon late last year. Monet was fascinated by the chalk cliffs around the fishing village of Etretat with their eroded formations -- creating bizarre doors and needles -- and he produced a series of pictures showing the light and weather effects on the land and sea. There are 24 works by him on display; Monet's the star, but you'll also find dozens mo...
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Opening in March -- in a Few Places

So museums and galleries in Britain won't be welcoming art-lovers back for a while yet (not until mid-May in England, according to Boris Johnson's current timetable), but they're open in Austria, Belgium and Spain and will be unbolting their doors again in Switzerland from the start of March.  

That means we do have a few exhibitions to tell you about this month, and let's start in Switzerland, because the new show at the Kunstmuseum in Basel is scheduled to be making its way to London and New York before too long, assuming there are no more lockdowns.... Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction from March 20 to June 20 celebrates one of the most influential avant-garde artists of the 20th century. She's perhaps better-known in German-speaking countries (her face is on the Swiss 50-franc note) for her geometric designs across a wide range of media, including textiles, sculpture and painting. The exhibition is due at Tate Modern in July and then MoMA in November.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, there are two exhibitions to highlight at the Prado. Mythological Passions: Titian, Veronese, Allori, Rubens, Ribera, Poussin, Van Dyck, Velázquez starts on March 2 and brings together the six mythological paintings made by Titian for King Philip II of Spain, reunited for the first time in centuries and now back in Spain after initially being on show together at London's National Gallery. At the Prado, they're displayed as part of a total of 29 pictures of mythological love by great Renaissance and Baroque masters, 13 of them on loan. The exhibition runs until July 4.   

Opening on March 9 is the first ever exhibition dedicated to Marinus van Reymerswale. You may not recognise the name of this early 16th-century Netherlandish painter, but if you're interested in the art of this period, you're bound to have seen some of his pictures of money-changers and tax collectors, often with extravagant headgear, counting out their perhaps ill-gotten gains. Marinus: Painter from Reymerswale is on at the Prado until June 13. 
And in Milan, there's a celebration of often largely neglected women artists from the 16th and 17th centuries at the Palazzo Reale. Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana are the most celebrated of the 30-odd names represented by more than 130 works from around Italy and beyond in Le Signore d'Arte, which runs from March 2 to July 25. Some of the pictures will be on public display for the first time. 

Images

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Composition à cercles et demi-cercles, 1938, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany
Marinus van Reymerswale, The Moneychanger and his Wife, 1539, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. © Museo Nacional del Prado
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