Food for the Soul: Upcoming Art Exhibitions 2025

By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout

My cultural calendar revolves around art exhibitions, and I have scouted out some highlights of this year’s interesting art shows in Europe and the U.S. I have also included a longer list of upcoming art exhibitions below.

In Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Museum will start the season with a major loan exhibition to showcase an artist, Gustave Caillebotte, who could be dubbed an “unappreciated Impressionist.” The museum will display about 100 of his paintings and drawings from the Getty collection as well as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay.

The artist debuted in an 1876 show of Impressionists with painters who were his friends and protegés, but unlike Manet, Renoir, or Degas, Caillebotte’s artistic focus was on images of men rather than women. This focus is reflected in the theme of the exhibition, titled Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men. Some paintings on this theme, like Floor Scrapers, are not only very famous but also one of the stars of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, so this is a rare opportunity for American museum-goers to see this famous picture. The exhibition will run Feb. 25-May 25 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and between June 29-October 5 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

One of my favorite little museums in Paris, called the Jacquemart-André, has recently undergone a major renovation. On March 19, it will open an exhibition that confirms Artemisia Gentileschi as one of the most popular female artists in today’s exhibition circuit. In fact, the painting above, Judith with the Head of Holofernes from Florence’s Uffizi, is one of the pictures that I keep missing when I am in Florence because it so often travels to major Gentileschi exhibitions all over the world. Gentileschi is one of the heroines of my book Women in Art (available on The Solari Report site for subscribers and on Amazon) and I am looking forward to seeing Gentileschi’s gorgeous Baroque pictures up close. Judith… and other Gentileschi canvases will be at the Jacquemart André museum’s show between March 19 and August 3.

An exhibition that has spent a few months gracing the Metropolitan Museum in New York is now moving to London. Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 will be shown between March 8-June 22 at the National Gallery. The show is dedicated to the origins of modern European painting—a new type of artistic expression that meant free-standing pictures (as opposed to frescoes), representations of specific people and scenes (as opposed to standardized, religious icons), and pictures of dramatic interactions or specific emotions (as opposed to stiffly posed figures and generic looks). This is a very well-researched and curated show of the most important Sienese artists, their amazing techniques of gold-ground, and their influences and followers.

In autumn, Florence will be the location of an exhibition spread between the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo San Marco devoted to this classic artist of the Italian Quattrocento: Fra Angelico (a.k.a. in modern Italian Beato Angelico after being declared a saint in 1982). This Dominican monk painted religious frescoes of his monastery of San Marco, as well as in chapels in Rome. The exhibition reunites various works on loan from the Louvre, Kunshistorisches Museum in Vienna, Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, as well as some major American art museums. The exhibition, dubbed simply Angelico, will be running in Florence from September 26, 2025 to January 25, 2026.

The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has the world’s largest collection of Henri Rousseau works, and it is, therefore, perfectly positioned to showcase this artist in a large exhibition. Henri Rousseau: A Painter of Secrets is planned as a show that reunites 18 works that Barnes owns with European pictures in the collections of the Courtauld Institute in London and L’Orangerie in Paris. For anyone who likes the wild imagination of this self-taught genius, this exhibition should be a treat.

Below is a calendar of important 2025 art exhibitions all over the world. A full calendar of cultural, financial and political events in 2025 can be found in the Annual Wrap Up issue for The Solari Report subscribers.

ART EXHIBITIONS in 2025