Artistic greats in the United States

Caravaggio comes to Chicago, Manet, Degas, Matisse and Derain to the New York Met, Lavinia Fontana, Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi to Boston and Keith Haring to Los Angeles. This autumn, the world’s finest painters are taking over the great museums of the United States.

1 Among Friends and Rivals: Caravaggio in Rome

This autumn, the Art Institute of Chicago offers the opportunity to visit late 16th-century Rome. Thanks to the loan of two of Caravaggio’s most important works – The Cardsharps (1595) and Martha and Mary Magdalene (1598) – visitors to Chicago will be able to enjoy the talent of the Milan-born painter. The exhibition includes the works of artists known as the Caravaggisti (followers of the painter who adopted his style and themes) and theatrically portrays the violence of Rome at the apex between the Renaissance and the Baroque. Visitors will also be able to see the oeuvre of Giovanni Baglione, famous for the deep enmity that pitted him against Caravaggio until the latter’s death in 1610. The exhibition Among Friends and Rivals: Caravaggio in Rome opens its doors on 8 September and can be visited until 31 December 2023.

The Cardsharps (around 1595), by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio / Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
2 Manet/Degas

Coming from Paris to New York is a dialogue between two of the most important painters of the 19th century, each in his own way a precursor to the movement that would forever change the course of art: Impressionism. At New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Manet and Degas have a ‘conversation’ via 150 paintings and drawings that share space in a way that identifies their stylistic, intellectual and social similarities and divergences. This exhibition, brought to life thanks to the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, explores how their brief friendship as young men and their acknowledged rivalry that later followed (softened only by Manet’s death), influenced the creation of a modern language of art. Manet/Degas can be visited from 24 September this year to 7 January 2024.

En bateau (1874), by Édouard Manet / © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
3 Vertigo of Color

In 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain spent their summer holiday together in the small French village of Collioure, creating one of the most radical and energetic avant-gardes of the 20th century. Painting one another and capturing the landscapes of this Mediterranean coastal town in a way that was almost savage, Derain and Matisse entered what was uncharted territory in the history of art. This is how Fauvism was born. This radical and iconic painting movement can be seen this autumn in the Met’s galleries. Thanks to 65 works from different parts of the world – from the Pompidou Museum in Paris to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – visitors will be whisked away to Paris’ Salon d’Automne 1906, where the French first experienced Vertigo of Color. This retrospective on Fauvism is open to the public from 13 October 2023 to 21 January 2024.

Conversation under the Olive Trees (1906), by Henry Matisse / © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
4 Strong Women in Renaissance Italy

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston pays tribute to the great masters of Renaissance and Baroque painting, forgotten for centuries but recently resurrected by some of the world’s leading artistic establishments. Following the lead of art museums such as the Prado, this exhibition brings together works by Italian masters such as Artemisia Gentileschi, heiress of Caravaggio’s dramatism, Lavinia Fontana, the official court painter of Pope Clement VIII, and Sofonisba Anguissola, Philip II’s most famous portraitist. With more than 100 pieces on display, this exhibition illuminates the work of female artists between the 14th and 17th centuries, delving into the way in which academic exclusion or gender discrimination did not prevent them from inscribing their names in the history of art. Strong Women in Renaissance Italy can be visited from 9 September 2023 to 7 January 2024.

Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child (1605-1610), by Lavinia Fontana / © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
5 Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody

With one of the world’s best collections of post-1945 art, The Broad presents a major retrospective on the work of Keith Haring, one of the leading figures in North American contemporary art. The museum, which has a permanent collection of iconic works by artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, offers a tour of Haring’s life and work through 120 pieces, both artistic and archival, whose common motto reflects one of the muralist’s maxims: art is for everyone. Focusing on the public orientation of Keith Haring, who began to attract attention in the early 1980s for his interventions on New York subway advertising murals, this exhibition also examines the injustices that the artist embodied in his works, such as his rejection of apartheid and his support for the nuclear disarmament movement, in addition to his work during the AIDS crisis. He died of AIDS at just 31. Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody, developed in collaboration with the Keith Haring Foundation, can be visited in downtown Los Angeles until 8 October 2023.

Untitled, 1985, by Keith Haring / © Keith Haring Foundation, The Broad Art Foundation