This constellation of artists was all occupied with the problem of how to best represent an experience or a three-dimensional subject and all the weight and movement it carried. All these artists believed that there was much more to reality than what the eye had been conditioned to read.
January 2026 Art News
From New York and Detroit to London and Basel, leading museums are staging major exhibitions devoted to canonical modernist masters at a moment when our world is as uncertain and tension-wrought as their early 20th century was. Marcel Duchamp, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Andy Warhol will all be featured in the coming year around the world.
Imagine that you have just purchased the most eye-catching painting you’ve ever seen. It’s a beauty, a canvas glittering with color and that special je ne sais quoi. To art collectors, there’s almost nothing better. But there’s nothing worse than placing your new masterpiece in the wrong frame.
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains,” said Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). In Sacha Guitry’s 1916 silent film, there is a chilling and moving excerpt of Renoir painting. The artist’s hands are severely and painfully crippled by arthritis as he holds a long paint brush and a cigarette.
Before ringing in 2026, the US Senate unanimously approved the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2025, which extends and expands the original 2016 legislation allowing claims for the recovery of cultural property as a result of Nazi looting during World War II.
While activism and art have long been intertwined, environmental activism and art have a more recent history. Artists have been using their work to call attention to environmental issues since the 1960s, while activists have been using artistic vandalism to draw attention to social and environmental issues since the early 20th century.
Thailand’s first major institution dedicated to international contemporary art, Dib Bangkok, made a grand debut with a sophisticated crowd of museum directors, curators, collectors, critics, and artists attending the opening celebration on December 21, 2025. Guided by Purat “Chang” Osathanugrah, a prominent Thai business leader and educator, the museum preserves the legacy of his late father, Petch Osathanugrah, whose distinguished art collection forms its core.
The first major exhibition since 1955 of over 140 works by the great Florentine master Fra Angelico (1395-1455) was featured during the past year at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, a Medici-commissioned Dominican convent in Florence where Angelico lived and worked. The event has created an opportunity for a unique dialogue between institutions and the region.
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape everything from consumerism to creative expression, the world’s first museum dedicated entirely to the exhibition of AI-generated art is set to open this spring. DATALAND will offer visitors a multisensory journey through machine-created worlds in each of its five galleries at a Frank Gehry-designed complex in downtown Los Angeles.
More than a century after they were founded, the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte movements have shot back into the interior-design limelight. With their geometric patterning, deeply saturated colors, and obsessive focus on craftsmanship, these iconic European styles are being rediscovered by today’s designers putting together spaces that unapologetically traverse genres and eras.
