This autumn, the Albertina Museum is mounting Austria’s first broad-based presentation of works by Claude Monet (1840–1926) in over 20 years. The 100 paintings being shown include important loan works from over 40 international museums and private collections such as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the National Gallery London, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. This retrospective presentation, realized with generous support from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, illuminates Monet’s development from realism to impressionism and onward to a mode of painting in which colors and light gradually separate from the subjects that reflect them, with the motif as such breaking free from the mere observation of nature. As a consequence, the artist’s late works would come to pave the way for abstract expressionism in painting.

The Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main presents a comprehensive solo exhibition with works by the painter Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993). Laserstein’s oeuvre is one of the great recent art historical rediscoveries and features sensitive and compelling portraits from the final years of the Weimar Republic. The exhibition builds upon works from the collection of the Städel Museum, which in the past few years was successful in acquiring important works by the artist, including the paintings Russian Girl with Compact from 1928 and Boy with Kasper Puppet (Wolfgang Karger) from 1933. With approximately forty paintings and drawings, the exhibition focusses on Laserstein’s artistic development. Emphasis is placed on works from the 1920s and 30s, which mark the peak of her artistic work. “Lotte Laserstein. Face to Face” is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Germany outside of Berlin. “The child portra

A barge built secretly for Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810 to inspect his imperial fleet had its crown removed in a delicate museum operation Tuesday ahead of the vessel’s move to a new home on the coast of Brittany. Since World War II the 18-metre (60-foot) craft has held pride of place at the National Naval Museum in Paris, its ornate crown topped by a cross and supported by four cherubim perched on the vessels roof. Using chains attached to scaffolding, workers carefully lifted the crown and placed it on a cross of wooden beams, before slowly depositing it on the floor of the museum, just across the Seine river from the Eiffel Tower. The imperial canoe, as it is called on the museum’s website, is set to undergo a full restoration before going on display in Brest on France’s western coast in late 2019. A huge hole will have to be knocked through one of the museum’s outer walls to remove the vessel — the same procedure used to get it inside in 1943 when it was brought from Brest. “To keep

More than 300 works from two key periods in Pablo Picasso’s early years go on display in Paris on Tuesday, the first time they have been brought together in the city where the Spanish master took his first steps toward revolutionary new territories of modern art. “Picasso: Blue and Rose” delves into the formative days from 1900 to 1906 when the young artist was living the Bohemian life in a Montmartre studio, at times burning his works to ward off the cold. “The strongest walls would open before me,” he would proudly write while absorbing the influence of Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh. The exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay was conceived with the Picasso and Orangerie museums in Paris as well as the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, which will also show the works early next year. Curators managed to secure exceptional loans of works from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and institutions in the US, Switzerland and Russia as well as from private collections rarely open