November brings several significant new exhibitions to London. A major exhibition featuring two of the most celebrated British artists of the twentieth century, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, will open at Tate Britain. The Hayward Gallery is hosting the first UK institutional exhibition of Nan Goldin’s photographs since 2002. The National Gallery is holding the first-ever exhibition of portraits by Netherlandish Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck, and the Royal Academy celebrates the pioneering gallery, run by Peggy Guggenheim in Cork Street. Meanwhile, the London Museum is set to open in Smithfield.
Left: Duncan Grant, Self-portrait c.1920, Scottish National Portrait Gallery Purchased 1980 © Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved. DACS, London, 2025
Right: Vanessa Bell, Self-Portrait c.1915, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund B1982.16.2 © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant : Inside Bloomsbury
Tate Britain
12 November 2026 – 11 April 2027
This major exhibition features the work of two of the most celebrated British artists of the twentieth century. Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant delves into the extraordinary relationship between the artists, while tracing their remarkable creative partnership that spanned more than 50 years. The exhibition explores Bell and Grant’s legacy as core members of the famed Bloomsbury Group. The group’s commitment to living lives centred around freedom and radical experimentation had a significant influence on the course of art, literature, and societal thought in Britain. The exhibition features over 250 works, including vivid portraits, still lives, landscape paintings, decorative works on furniture, ceramics, textiles, and much more. A once-in-a-lifetime restaging of Duncan Grant’s studio, relocated for the exhibition from their Sussex home, Charleston, is an unmissable highlight.
£20
Visit Here
Jan van Eyck, Margaret, the Artist’s Wife, 1439
© Municipal Museums Bruges, Groeningemuseum. Photo: The National Gallery, London
Van Eyck: The Portraits 21 November 2026 – 11 April 2027 National Gallery
The first-ever exhibition of portraits by the Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck (active 1422–1441) will open at the National Gallery in winter 2026. Van Eyck was an artist who not only changed the genre of portraiture but also redefined who got to be portrayed. Exceptional reunions will see among others the Gallery’s own Arnolfini Portrait (1434) displayed for the first time ever with a panel showing the same sitter, Portrait of a Man (Giovanni? Arnolfini)(c.1440, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and van Eyck’s newly conserved Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?)(1433, the National Gallery) shown next to the portrait of his enterprising wife Margaret (1439, Groeningemuseum, Bruges), the first known portrait of a woman who was not a member of the aristocracy.
£18
Visit Here
Vasily Kandinsky, Dominant Curve, 1936. Oil on canvas, 129.2 x 194.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection
Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector
Royal Academy of Arts, The Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries
21 November 2026 – 14 March 2027
This exhibition celebrates the groundbreaking gallery, the Guggenheim Jeune, run by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 Cork Street, London between January 1938 and June 1939. It will explore the wide range of pioneering exhibitions she staged there, the gallery’s central contribution to the development of the London art scene, and the genesis of Guggenheim’s world-famous art collection, now housed in Venice. Guggenheim was a key figure in London in the late 1930s, and Guggenheim Jeune, her first gallery, quickly became a central venue for the latest developments in surrealism and abstraction. During a short period, she organised over 20 exhibitions and many curatorial firsts, including the first UK solo show dedicated to Vasily Kandinsky, the first UK show of collage, and a contemporary sculpture exhibition that caused a scandal. This exhibition will reunite highlights from these shows, as well as similar works from the period, by artists including Eileen Agar, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Vasily Kandinsky, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Henry Moore, Piet Mondrian, Cedric Morris, Grace Pailthorpe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Yves Tanguy amongst others. Exhibition organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
£17
Visit Here
Nan Goldin, Gravestone in pet cemetery, Lisbon, 1998. Copyright Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong
Hayward Gallery
24 November 2026 – 14 March 2027
Over the past five decades, Nan Goldin has photographed personal relationships, addiction and queer subcultures, forming an episodic autobiography she calls ‘a record of my life that no one can revise.’ These unflinching images transformed photography by closing the distance between the observer and the observed – snapshots that capture the intimacies of her own life and those of her community. This exhibition highlights four of Goldin’s recent films plus a series of photographic stills and images from Goldin’s archive.
£19
Visit Here
photo credit: London Museum ©Secchi Smith
Opening of the London Museum, Smithfield
28 November
One of Europe’s largest cultural infrastructure projects, the opening completes a decade-long restoration of the Victorian General Market, returning the disused historic building to public use for the first time in over 30 years. Over 100,000 people from London and beyond have contributed to the creation of the new museum, which will tell the story of one of the world’s greatest cities in all its grit and glitter, showcasing iconic objects and never-before-seen items.
Drawing on the market’s unique structure, the museum’s Our Time space will be a vibrant social hub, anchored by 13 large installations featuring eclectic objects from London in living memory, including the Lord Mayor’s Coach and East End icon Syd’s Coffee Stall. A restaurant, shop, and show space for families and schools will sit around its perimeter, with a day-to-night programme of activities, delivered in partnership with Sainsbury’s, fabric nightclub, Morley’s chicken shop, Punchdrunk Enrichment, and Hive Curates, animating its centre.
In the museum’s evocative underground permanent galleries – known as Past Time – visitors will encounter the stories and people that have shaped London through time, from the lives of the earliest prehistoric inhabitants and rare artefacts from the city’s Roman origins nearly 2000 years ago to transformative events including the Great Fire and the Blitz, and cultural milestones like the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Visit Here
Closing in November
Winston Churchill: The Painter
The Wallace Collection
closes 29 November
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) was one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century – the UK’s Prime Minister during the Second World War, and a Member of Parliament for 62 years. He was also a passionate and prolific painter. In painting, he found respite from public pressures, and a lifelong source of joy.
The first major retrospective of Sir Winston Churchill’s paintings since his death brings together more than 50 of his works. More than half are from private collections, rarely accessible to the public.
Encounter sombre wartime scenes and radiant Mediterranean views, carefully composed still-lifes and portraits, luminous Moroccan cityscapes, and deeply personal paintings of Chartwell, Churchill’s beloved home and garden.
During Churchill’s lifetime, some were exhibited at the Royal Academy, or given as tokens of friendship or diplomatic gifts. But most were painted purely for the pleasure and challenge of the creative process.
£18 (£20 including donation)
Visit Here