From New York to London and Amsterdam, five exhibitions defining the autumn art calendar

October is one of the moments when the international art world seems to accelerate. After the quieter rhythm of the summer months, museums reopen their programmes with major exhibitions, galleries return to a full calendar of openings and fairs, and collectors begin moving between the world's principal cultural capitals.

This October, the museum programme is particularly rich. Across New York, London and Amsterdam, some of the most important institutions are revisiting artists who have fundamentally shaped the visual culture of the twentieth century, while also questioning the way their work is understood today.

There is Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, brought together in a major reassessment of Abstract Expressionism; Roy Lichtenstein, whose fascination with repetition and images suddenly feels remarkably close to our digital present; the cultural explosion of the 1990s at Tate Britain; Willem de Kooning returning to the Netherlands exactly one hundred years after leaving it; and Henri Matisse arriving in Amsterdam through an exceptional collaboration with Centre Pompidou.

Rather than following a single movement or generation, these exhibitions reveal a broader conversation about influence, artistic legacy, image-making and the constant rewriting of art history.

Here are five exhibitions worth making space for this October.

01 Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

October 4, 2026 – January 31, 2027

Few stories in twentieth-century American art are as familiar — and as complicated — as that of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous brings their practices together in an exhibition that looks beyond the mythology of the couple and considers them as two artists whose careers developed both independently and in profound relation to one another.

The exhibition brings together more than 120 works and follows the full arc of their careers, from their respective beginnings in American modernism to their emergence as central figures of Abstract Expressionism. It is also the first major New York exhibition devoted to either artist in more than twenty years and the first at The Met to examine their careers together.

The choice of title is particularly revealing. Past Continuous, borrowed from a 1976 painting by Krasner, suggests a history that has never truly stopped developing. And this is perhaps the central idea behind the exhibition: the past is not fixed. Artists who once appeared to occupy clearly defined positions can be reconsidered as new generations ask different questions of their work.

Pollock's revolutionary drip paintings remain among the defining images of post-war American art, but Krasner's career demonstrates a very different kind of persistence. Her practice moved continually through abstraction, collage, colour and material experimentation, resisting any single definition.

Seen together, their work also raises a larger question about artistic legacy. How are reputations formed? Why do some artists become synonymous with an entire movement while others are gradually rediscovered? And what happens when the history of art is revisited from a contemporary perspective?

At The Met this autumn, Abstract Expressionism becomes not simply a historical movement, but a living subject of reconsideration.

The New Collectors perspective: this is an exhibition particularly relevant to anyone interested in the relationship between artistic legacy and the way cultural value evolves over time.

02 Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

October 11, 2026 – May 10, 2027

Roy Lichtenstein understood something about images long before the internet made images almost impossible to escape.

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New brings together approximately 130 works spanning the 1940s through the 1990s, offering a broad reconsideration of an artist whose visual language became one of the defining symbols of Pop Art.

Lichtenstein transformed comics, advertising, commercial printing and mass culture into paintings and sculptures that appeared mechanical, precise and reproducible. Yet the apparent simplicity of his work concealed an intensely considered artistic process.

The Whitney exhibition focuses precisely on this tension.

Across painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture and film, Lichtenstein repeatedly investigated how images are copied, enlarged, translated, circulated and transformed. The exhibition includes some of his best-known works, among them Look Mickey, Girl with Ball, Masterpiece and Drowning Girl, while also bringing together works from his first Pop-style exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962.

The subject could hardly feel more contemporary.

Today, images are constantly cropped, filtered, reposted, reproduced and altered. The distinction between an original image and its countless iterations has become increasingly fluid. Lichtenstein was working decades before social media, smartphones and generative artificial intelligence, but his fascination with the instability of images speaks directly to the visual environment of the present.

This is what makes Like New more than another retrospective of a Pop Art icon. It becomes an opportunity to look again at the mechanics of visual culture itself.

Lichtenstein's question was never simply what an image depicts. It was also what happens to an image when it moves from one context to another.

The New Collectors perspective: among the five exhibitions, this is perhaps the one that creates the most direct bridge between twentieth-century art history and today's image-saturated culture.

03 The 90s: Art and Fashion

Tate Britain, London

October 8, 2026 – February 14, 2027

The 1990s are increasingly becoming history.

At Tate Britain, The 90s: Art and Fashion examines one of the most culturally transformative decades of recent history through the intersection of contemporary art, fashion, photography, music and popular culture.

Curated by Edward Enninful, the exhibition brings together more than 100 works and objects by artists, photographers and designers associated with the decade. The exhibition includes figures connected to the Young British Artists as well as major names from fashion and photography, presenting a period in which the traditional boundaries between disciplines became increasingly difficult to maintain.

That collision is central to understanding the decade.

The 1990s produced an extraordinary exchange between the gallery, the fashion magazine, the nightclub, the runway and the street. Artists entered popular culture while fashion became increasingly conceptual, provocative and closely connected to contemporary art.

For today's audience, however, the decade can be viewed from a completely different distance.

The visual language that once appeared radical — the relationship between celebrity and image, the growing importance of fashion photography, the rise of the artist as cultural personality and the increasing overlap between commercial and artistic environments — has since become part of the everyday visual landscape.

The exhibition therefore functions as more than a celebration of nostalgia. It asks what the 1990s actually changed, and why so many of its ideas continue to influence contemporary culture.

It is also an important reminder that art history does not exist separately from the wider cultural environment. Sometimes the most significant transformations happen precisely when painting, photography, fashion, music and popular culture begin speaking the same language.

The New Collectors perspective: for anyone interested in contemporary collecting, the exhibition provides a valuable historical framework for understanding many of the cultural dynamics that define today's art world.

04 Willem de Kooning at work

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

October 9, 2026 – January 17, 2027

One hundred years after Willem de Kooning left the Netherlands for New York, the Rijksmuseum brings him back home.

Willem de Kooning at work presents more than 120 works and places drawing at the centre of the artist's practice, alongside a selection of important paintings and sculptures.

The approach is significant because de Kooning's drawings have often been treated as secondary to his paintings. The Rijksmuseum instead presents drawing as a fundamental part of his artistic thinking: a process of sketching, correcting, repeating and experimenting.

This allows visitors to encounter de Kooning not simply through his finished masterpieces, but through the continuous process of becoming.

His career resisted easy categorisation. Although he is closely associated with Abstract Expressionism and the New York School, de Kooning repeatedly moved between abstraction and figuration, gesture and structure, control and spontaneity.

The exhibition follows this development across more than six decades, revealing how recurring subjects such as the human figure and landscape continued to transform throughout his career.

Two of his most celebrated paintings, Woman I and Woman and Bicycle, will also be displayed in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour, creating an extraordinary dialogue between one of the central figures of American modernism and the great tradition of Dutch painting.

There is something particularly appropriate about this exhibition taking place in the Netherlands.

De Kooning left Rotterdam in 1926 and eventually became one of the defining figures of post-war American art. A century later, his work returns to the country from which his journey began.

The New Collectors perspective: this is an exhibition about process as much as result and a powerful reminder that an artist's evolution can be as important as any individual masterpiece.

05 Chez Matisse: Masterpieces from Centre Pompidou

H’ART Museum, Amsterdam

October 3, 2026 – February 14, 2027

Few artists have transformed the possibilities of colour as radically as Henri Matisse.

Opening in Amsterdam in October, Chez Matisse – Masterpieces from Centre Pompidou brings together more than eighty works from the Centre Pompidou collection, creating one of the most significant presentations of Matisse's work in the Netherlands.

The exhibition follows the evolution of Matisse's practice across painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and his later experiments with cut-outs. Rather than presenting a single image of the artist, it reveals an oeuvre built through constant experimentation with colour, form, space and material.

The exhibition also places Matisse in dialogue with artists influenced by him, including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Pablo Picasso.

One of the highlights is La Blouse roumaine, a major work from 1940 that rarely leaves the Centre Pompidou. Its presence in Amsterdam gives the exhibition an additional significance, offering visitors the opportunity to encounter a work that is normally part of the Paris institution's collection.

The exhibition also explores one of Matisse's recurring motifs: the window.

For Matisse, the window could become a transition between interior and exterior, reality and painting, enclosure and openness. It is a deceptively simple motif that reveals one of the fundamental concerns running through his work: how an image can transform the experience of space.

That question remains remarkably relevant to contemporary art.

Matisse understood that colour does not simply describe the world. It can construct an environment, alter perception and change the emotional character of a space.

For today's collectors, that relationship between artwork, architecture and domestic space feels particularly resonant.

Five exhibitions, five ways of looking at art

What connects these exhibitions is not a single movement, generation or medium.

It is the idea that art history is never completely finished.

Krasner and Pollock reconsider the construction of artistic legacy. Lichtenstein asks us to think about how images acquire meaning as they circulate. Tate Britain looks at the decade in which art and popular culture became increasingly intertwined. De Kooning places artistic process at the centre of the story, while Matisse demonstrates how colour and space can continue to influence generations of artists.

Together, they also offer a particularly interesting map of the international art world in October 2026.

New York remains a crucial point of reference for the history of post-war American art. London looks back at one of the most influential cultural moments of the recent past. Amsterdam becomes the meeting point between European modernism and American abstraction, while also hosting one of the year's major presentations of Matisse.

For collectors, these exhibitions offer something beyond the opportunity to see important works in person.

They offer context.

And context remains one of the most valuable things an exhibition can provide: the possibility of understanding not only what we are looking at, but why it continues to matter.

This October, the art world is looking backwards in order to understand the present.

And that may be the most interesting exhibition of all.