Want to know which way the winds of the artistic moment are blowing? A reliable way to answer that question is to look at what museums are exhibiting. In the shows on tap for the fall, there’s a clear interest in how best to survive the turbulence and violence in much of the world. “The World-Chaos” is the subtitle given this season to a Kurt Schwitters retrospective at Paris’s Musée Picasso, but it could just as well be applied to shows for Inji Efflatoun, Annemirl Bauer, Marion Wagschal, Ali Cherri, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, and Amar Kanwar, all of whom have responded to disturbing displays of power in their own singular ways.
Other artists have sought visual pleasure in the face of so much chaos. London’s Royal Academy of Arts is mounting a survey of artists’ responses to the French Riviera in the 19th and 20th centuries, Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern is surveying European artist colonies during an overlapping time period, and Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum is exhibiting Nordic women’s spiritualist art of the era. But sometimes, rich colors and extravagant abstraction are not enough; the career of Franz Marc, a German Expressionist who was killed in battle during World War I, proves as much. His work is being given the retrospective treatment at the K20 museum in Düsseldorf.
Perhaps the dour mood of the present is what has caused so many shows to turn to the past, often with a revisionist gaze. The São Paulo Museum of Art is continuing its wonderful “Historiás” series, this time with a focus on Latin America, and Oslo’s National Museum is bringing to the fore female Old Masters whom the canon has largely ignored. MUDAM in Luxembourg is taking a look at Japanese women artists from the postwar era, Milan’s Fondazione Prada will view antiquity through a globalist lens, and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence has an exhibition of broken artworks from years past. Fragmentary though they may be, these pieces are a lot of fun to view.
Below, a look at 84 museum exhibitions and biennials to see this fall.
