Ahead of a packed month across the art world—including Frieze Seoul; The Armory Show, New York; Berlin Art Week and Barcelona's Manifesta—we round up the biggest and best exhibitions to see across the world this September.
Surrealism, Centre Pompidou, Paris
4 September-13 January 2025
Celebrating a century since the birth of Surrealism, André Breton’s rarely seen handwritten Surrealist manifesto will take centre stage at this Centre Pompidou exhibition, which includes masterpieces of the movement and gives prominence to overlooked artists. More
Suzanne van Damme’s Surreal Composition (1943)
© Collection RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women)
Maarten van Heemskerck, Frans Hals Museum, Teylers Museum and Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar, the Netherlands
28 September-19 January 2025
Across three venues this exhibition will celebrate the work of a Dutch Old Master who, until the 1980s, had fallen out of favour. It will include new findings and the artist's restored masterpiece, Saint Luke Painting the Madonna (1532). More
Maarten van Heemskerck's Self-Portrait with the Colosseum (1553)m
Fitzwilliam Museum; Photo: Andrew Normant
Monet and London: Views of the Thames, Courtauld Gallery, London
27 September-19 January 2025
London is calling—finally—for Claude Monet and his misty Thames landscapes, as The Courtauld Gallery honours the artist's ambition to reunite his paintings in the city. The show will recreate the visitor experience that Monet had planned for an exhibition in 1905 that, in the end, never happened. More
Claude Monet’s Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London (1904). The seat of government was one of just three scenes that the artist returned to in the city, along with Charing Cross Bridge and smoke stacks on the South Bank
Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, Brooklyn Museum, New York
13 September-19 January 2025
Elizabeth Catlett—a sculptor and printmaker who was once seen as a 'threat to the US'—gets her due in this touring exhibition that will show how activism and art went hand in hand. More
Elizabeth Catlett’s linocut Sharecropper (1952)
© Mora-Catlett Family/licensed by VAGA at ARS
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, National Gallery, London
14 September-19 January 2025
Inspired by Vincent van Gogh's idiosyncratic terms for two sitters—lover and poet—this 60-work exhibition will focus on the fruitful final two years of the artist's life. More
Vincent van Gogh's The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet) and Portrait of Eugéne Boch, The Poet. Both were painted in Arles in 1888
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Musée d’Orsay. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/ Adrien Didierjean