Gabrielle Munter | Contours of the World at The Guggenheim

Gabriele Münter was at the forefront of modern art in early 20th-century Europe. Constantly experimenting, she revitalized landscape, still life, and portrait painting, transforming everyday subjects into bold, original works. Rather than imitating reality, she sought to “convey an essence,” offering an alternative to modernist movements that favored pure abstraction. The artist was a key figure of Der Blaue Reiter, the network of progressive artists, writers, and musicians who probed in diverse ways the expressive potential of color and the symbolic—and often spiritual—resonance of forms.

She later spent the years of World War I in Scandinavia, prompting a rich exchange with Nordic modernisms that brought shifts in her artistic practice and allegiances. With her bold planes of vibrant colors, Münter reimagined the traditional genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture, forging a compelling alternative to concurrent innovations in radical abstraction. The artist later explained, “When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim.”  

This landmark exhibition will also spotlight early photographs taken during Münter’s 1898–1900 travels in the United States, marking her first foray into the medium. Using a a commonplace Kodak box camera she captured family members, neighbors, and townsfolk. These photographs reveal a rich period of experimentation with light, shadow, and perspective. Pushing her practice beyond the expectations of snapshot photography, Münter generated portraits that are often composed and evocative of contemporary studio portraiture of the time. Together, they offer insight into a formative moment in the artist’s career. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive calendar of public programs.

Through April 26 at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Wilfredo Lam | When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream at MoMA

Over a career spanning six decades,  Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) radically expanded the purview of modernism. Born in Cuba of African and Chinese descent, Lam spent most of his life in Spain, France and Italy, and came to embody the figure of the transnational artist in the 20th century, forging a unique visual style at the confluence of European modernity and Caribbean and African diasporic cultures. The extent of his influence throughout the Black Atlantic is unrivaled as both a leading innovator and an anti-colonialist. Though Lam would break with his academic training, he stated that “in Spain I truly learned to admire painting. When I arrived, for the first time, I felt that everything belonged to me…. Spain gave me the strength and structure of painting.”  Above: La jungle (The Jungle, detail); below: La jungle (The Jungle)   

Lam would continue to elaborate on this new world when he returned to Cuba, entering a period of heightened experimentation. Arriving in the summer of 1941, he was disturbed by the conditions he encountered, confronting anew the racial and economic realities of a neocolonial Cuba. His return home forced him to relive “all the dramas of my family, all the dramas of my youth, all the images of the consciousness of colonial activity.” Right: Wilfredo Lam with La jungle (The Jungle) in 1943

Lam spent a decade in the Caribbean, enabling him to connect with other artists, poets, and intellectuals in the region. In Martinique, he befriended Aimé Césaire, the poet and founder of the Négritude movement. Césaire’s anticolonial writings—particularly his book-length poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) (1939)—resonated deeply with Lam’s worldview, bringing the artist “a great moral comfort.”

Lam permanently relocated to Europe in 1952, settling first in Paris and later in Albissola Marina, Italy. In the final, prolific decades of his life, he experimented with new mediums, including ceramics, printmaking, and sculpture. He also continued collaborating with artists and writers in the Caribbean, creating a series of lithographs for Édouard Glissant’s poetry collection La Terre inquiète (The Restless Earth) (1955) and, a decade later, helping organize the Salón de Mayo (May Salon) in Havana, a major exhibition featuring works by 100 international artists working in the 20th century. 

Through April 11 at Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53^rd Street, New York, NY Info 

Helene Schjerfbeck | Seeing Silence at The Met

Beloved in Nordic countries for her highly original style, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is relatively unknown to the rest of the world. Overcoming immense personal struggles and working in a remote location for decades, she produced a powerful body of work through sheer force of will. This exhibition affirms her rightful place in the story of modern art.

Following Schjerfbeck’s journey from art school in Paris to her final days in Sweden, the exhibition illustrates her shift from traditional and realistic subjects to a simplified, spare style. In the early 1900s, using her mother and neighbors as models, she painted abstractly, paring down her subjects in form and color and developing a bold, new language.

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is the first exhibition to showcase the work of the artist in a major United States museum. Featuring nearly 60 works—including generous loans from the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, other Finnish museums, and private collections in Finland and Sweden—Seeing Silence illuminates Schjerfbeck as a valuable voice of modernism.

Through April 5 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at Brooklyn Museum

Through May 17 at  Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY Info

The Studio Museum in Harlem Reopens

After seven years of construction, the Studio Museum of Harlem opened its new doors on Sunday, with an all-day celebration of artists who created this center for Black culture and the community that grew around it. Speaking at a press opening, Director and Curator Thelma Golden said, “We chose to build this completely new home on the same ground where we stood for so many years. We could’ve looked for a different site in Harlem. We could have relocated to a space in an existing building. But we knew, and our public knew, that this site, which the museum has occupied since the early ‘80s, is where we belong.” Above: Exterior of the Studio Museum in Harlem's new building. Photo: © Albert Vecerka/Esto; below: Interior of the Studio Museum in Harlem's new building, featuring Glenn Ligon's Give Us a Poem (2007), 2025. Photo: © Albert Vecerka/Esto More

Monet and Venice at Brooklyn Museum

During his 10-week visit to Venice in 1908, Claude Monet captured the city’s ethereal cityscape in close to 40 shimmering canvases, creating works unlike anything produced by the centuries of artists who painted the city before him. Upon arriving in this place of magical light, Monet remarked that Venice was “too beautiful to be painted.” While Monet visited this city only once, its fragile beauty and delicate interplay of land and sea had a profound impact on him. Venice became a site of both formal experimentation and symbolic resonance for the artist as he developed his nearly abstract approach to painting the Waterlilies series of his late career 

Unlike the bustling, populated scenes painted by artists like Canaletto, Monet’s Venice is, typically, almost devoid of human presence. His focus was as always on rendering the city’s architecture and waterways emerging through and dissolving in the encompassing and unifying color and light that he described as the enveloppe. Also included are key examples of Venetian imagery by artists who preceded or were contemporaneous with Monet, including Manet, Renoir, Singer Sargent, Turner, and others, situating Monet’s works within a rich tradition of Venice as a subject of artistic inquiry. More

Through February 1, Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY Info