Museum openings not to miss in 2026

Plus: the art of sleep ͏‌

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Michael Delgado looks forward to the year's major museum openings

The United States had a big year for museum openings last year, with the Frick, the Studio Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, Princeton University and the Met's Rockefeller Wing all unveiling major transformations. In 2026, cultural institutions may be focusing their attention more on the country's semiquincentennial, but there are still significant institutions due to open. In early 2026, the New Museum – New York's preeminent museum dedicated to contemporary art – will unveil a major expansion by OMA's Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of its distinctive, Jenga-like Lower East Side building, doubling its exhibition space and providing more room for artist residencies. In April, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is opening a new home for its permanent collection. Named after the film producer David Geffen, who donated $150m to the museum, these galleries are housed in a vast, curving concrete structure designed by Peter Zumthor that provides more gallery space, a 300-seat theatre, restaurants and more.

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Arjun Sajip picks from a new crop of films with an artistic slant

The Chinese-born American film-maker Cathy Yan has an eye for the arty image: her breakthrough movie Dead Pigs (2018) featured occasional shots of hundreds of, er, dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River into Shanghai. Her new film stars Natalie Portman as a gallerist who grants an influencer named Dalton Hardberry (played, in an amusingly improbable turn, by Zach Galifianakis) a sneak preview of work by one of her artists in the run-up to Art Basel Miami. Hardberry finds himself smitten by one piece in particular, and the work promptly draws media attention – and the eye of a much bigger gallerist, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Though the action revolves around Art Basel Miami, the film was partly shot in Paris: does this mean we can also expect a satirical take on Art Basel's Paris edition? Will the leaky ceilings of the Grand Palais make a cameo? Watch this space.

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Christina J. Faraday explores the ghostly world of M.R. James

'Ask any curator, particularly if they work in an old building, and they often have strange stories to tell. Objects that move around of their own accord; maintenance men, working late, hearing footsteps when nobody is there; unexplained disturbances on CCTV. Haunted houses are a staple of the English tourist industry and many history lovers might fantasise about a direct encounter with the past. But there is something about art history and archaeology that makes previous ages seem especially immediate. No wonder so many scholars of those disciplines have turned to writing ghost stories – chief among them M.R. (Montague Rhodes) James (1862–1936).

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Juliet Jacques observes some sleeping beauties in Paris

'The Empire of Sleep' at the Musée Marmottan Monet claims to be the first exhibition in France to explore 'the various representations of sleep and its mysteries'. This sounds surprising coming from the country that gave us Surrealism, but this is a show less concerned with what happens inside people's heads and more with how sleep looks to those who are awake. Full of portrayals of domesticity and rest, it stretches back to the Renaissance and reaches the present but focuses on 'the long 19th century' from 'the Enlightenment to the Great War'. While it acknowledges the seismic effect of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899), the ideas it tangles with are often ancient; it looks at how Greek mythology cast dreams as prophecies rather than personal reflections and explores parallels between sleep and death, waking and resurrection that are central to Christian theology.

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Will Wiles on Marie Laurencin and a case of mistaken identity

My mother assumed it was a portrait of my grandmother. The date in the corner fitted that assumption: 1936, when my grandmother was 18 years old. And the resemblance to her, as a young woman, was convincing enough, if rather idealised. But it's clear that no one was looking that closely. They were a well-to-do family, well connected with artists, and there were a few portraits around, among many other paintings. This one hung in the dining room, unremarked upon.

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In the current issue…

Edward Behrens introduces the Apollo 40: a list of artists, thinkers, businesspeople and patrons to watch in 2026

The Apollo 40 Under 40 maintained a tradition of talent spotting for more than 10 years. In terms of identifying the talents of a generation and finding leaders in their field, it has been unusually successful. Yet recently the idea of a list dictated by something as arbitrary as age has begun to feel unhelpful. Not everyone flourishes before they hit that landmark number. For many, as the saying goes, life begins at 40. Which is why this year, we're renaming the programme the Apollo 40. Its original purpose was to point readers in the direction of interesting artists, thinkers, curators and patrons who were changing the way things happened in the art world. This aim still holds.

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Museum openings not to miss in 2026

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