Van Gogh MuseumOpens 16 October
Whistler. Dandy and Disruptor
The first retrospective in the Netherlands devoted to James McNeill Whistler, in all his roles: painter, printmaker, aesthete and, as the title promises, disruptor.
October 2026
Three painters in two weeks. On 3 October H'ART opens Chez Matisse, over eighty works from the Centre Pompidou, no train to Paris needed. The Rijksmuseum follows with Willem de Kooning at Work on the 9th; the Van Gogh Museum gives Whistler his first Dutch retrospective on the 16th. Game On, NEMO's playable video game show, closes on the 25th.
Van Gogh MuseumOpens 16 October
The first retrospective in the Netherlands devoted to James McNeill Whistler, in all his roles: painter, printmaker, aesthete and, as the title promises, disruptor.
RijksmuseumOpens 9 October
More than 120 drawings hung with celebrated paintings and sculptures: de Kooning at work, a century after he left the Netherlands for New York. Made with the Art Institute of Chicago.
H'ART MuseumOpens 3 October
Over eighty works lent by the Centre Pompidou follow Matisse's search for balance between colour, form and simplicity, with Picasso, Rothko and Barnett Newman hung alongside.
Amsterdam MuseumOpens 16 October
How Amsterdam's grand canal houses were paid for by colonial trade and plantation slavery, told through the people who lived in them and the descendants of the enslaved.
Wereldmuseum AmsterdamOpens 10 October
Disco traced back to the Black, Latino and queer underground clubs where it started, through tracks, videos, art, fashion and design. The origin story of every Amsterdam night out that ends at breakfast.
NEMO Science MuseumCloses 25 October
Playable consoles from the Super Nintendo to the PlayStation 5, in a show about how video games shape play, friendship and creativity. The one museum where fighting over the second controller counts as engagement.
Stedelijk Museum AmsterdamUntil 17 January
Painting, sculpture, installation, fashion, collage and the late-1960s happenings: seven decades of Yayoi Kusama, well beyond the pumpkins and polka dots. Best for anyone who knows her only from other people's photos.
Huis Marseille, Museum for PhotographyOpens 24 October
Seventy-five photographs Adolphe de Meyer took of his own life at Venice's Palazzo Balbi-Valier, a rediscovered set in a European museum for the first time. Vogue hired him later; this is the private world before the fashion.

Foam Fotografiemuseum AmsterdamFree
Two-part Foam project in Amsterdam-West: Yomna El Beyaly solo at Mercatorplein (to 29 Oct) and the group show Al Nisa / Women at MAQAM (to 20 Dec), curated by Romaisa Baddar.

Van Gogh Museum
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's print series 'One Hundred Aspects of the Moon' shown at the Van Gogh Museum for the first time: warriors, lovers and mythical beings in bold colour.

H'ART Museum
Over eighty works from the Centre Pompidou trace Matisse's hunt for balance between colour, form and simplicity, alongside Picasso, Rothko and Barnett Newman.

STRAAT Museum
Photographer Henry Chalfant's documentation of graffiti culture, curated by SUSO33 with archival material from the Dutch Graffiti Library linking his lens to the Dutch graffiti scene.

Rijksmuseum
A century after de Kooning left the Netherlands for New York, a retrospective of more than 120 drawings with celebrated paintings and sculptures, made with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rijksmuseum
Photographer and filmmaker Kadir van Lohuizen documents the Dutch energy transition: towering wind turbines, thick undersea cables and colossal platforms on the open sea.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Choreographer Sedrig Verwoert traces dance in the diaspora, pairing a travelogue of his research into Winti, Kawina and Tambu in Suriname and Curacao with the dance film Strange Fruit 2.0.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Pendleton's first museum exhibition in the Netherlands: eleven paintings and eight large-scale drawings exploring abstract form, most of them never shown before.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Five years of photographing the coastline from northern France to the southern Netherlands: Vanfleteren's sea shifts room by room from glassy calm through misty drift to storm.

Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
A tribute to disco's roots in Black, Latino and queer underground clubs, with tracks, videos, art, fashion and design celebrating freedom.

Amsterdam Museum
Stories of people and power: how Amsterdam's grand canal houses were financed through colonial trade and plantation slavery, told through residents and descendants of the enslaved.

Museum Willet-Holthuysen
Explores how two of the house's 18th-century residents built their wealth on plantation trade, with an audio tour guided by a descendant of an enslaved woman from Suriname's Jagtlust plantation.

Van Gogh Museum
The first retrospective in the Netherlands devoted to James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903): painter, printmaker, aesthete and enfant terrible.

Museum Van Loon
Four woven tapestries by Malaysian textile artist Marcos Kueh in the Red Bedroom, a last love letter to his father that echoes the canopy of the empty four-poster bed.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
First museum solo show of Lebanese photographer Myriam Boulos, 19th Foam Paul Huf Award winner: a collective diary centred on her series Sexual Fantasies, mostly made in Beirut.

Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)
Five years of acquisitions in the Art Gallery, from contemporary art to objects of Jewish firms and societies and personal mementoes of Holocaust victims.

Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
The first European museum show of a rediscovered set of 75 photographs by fashion pioneer Adolphe de Meyer, documenting his life in Venice's Palazzo Balbi-Valier between 1904 and 1909.

Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
A first Dutch introduction to Andrzej Steinbach's meticulously composed photography, treating seeing itself as an aesthetic problem across typologically organised series.

Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
The French-Algerian artist's first solo Dutch museum show, presenting digital collages built from hundreds of photographs that explore migration, motherhood and displacement.

Rembrandt House Museum
Tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher and his team set up studio inside Rembrandt's house, inking original Rembrandt-inspired designs on visitors — the tattoo as the affordable old master.

Wereldmuseum AmsterdamPast
Five outfits by artist Bas Kosters celebrating diversity and self-expression, created for the Dutch Museum Association's centenary and WorldPride.

Huis Marseille, Museum for PhotographyPast
A retrospective of Martine Gutierrez's self-portraiture and cinematic performance work, pairing never-before-seen childhood pieces with reinterpretations of Renaissance masterworks exploring identity.

Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)Past
Photographer Diana Blok's project "Time Tells" traces her father's hidden Jewish past, from escaping the Holocaust to Buenos Aires, in photos, texts and film.
Amsterdam MuseumFreePast
Free outdoor exhibition of 16 portraits and interviews with Amsterdam Moluccans, marking 75 years since their arrival and four centuries of ties to the Moluccas.

NEMO Science MuseumPast
Temporary exhibition on video games and their role in play, social connection and creativity, with playable consoles from the Super Nintendo to the PlayStation 5.

RijksmuseumFreePast
Thirteen monumental steel sculptures by Carel Visser (1928-2015), the most influential Dutch sculptor of the twentieth century, brought together for the first time in the museum's free-to-enter gardens.

Allard Pierson
Over 200 ancient glass objects from Egypt to Rome, paired with TU Delft research into production techniques from core-winding to glassblowing.

Oude Kerk
Climb Amsterdam's oldest church tower, 67 metres up, for a panoramic view over the city and a look at centuries of the tower's history.

H'ART Museum
Congolese collective CATPC shows 30 sculptures cast in cacao, palm oil and sugar, plus embroideries on cacao sacks, funding the buy-back of exhausted plantation land.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
The London-based photographer's first museum exhibition, portraying female bodybuilders in Kerala with equal strength and softness to unsettle regional ideas of gender and beauty.

STRAAT Museum
A show tracing graffiti's cultural roots through names, tags, lines and repetition — the building blocks of a visual language born from movement and marking presence.

Rembrandt House Museum
Over 80 works on paper, from Rembrandt to living artists, tracing how printmakers and draughtsmen kept pushing techniques and materials. Visitors can draw their own work in the gallery.

Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
Steps into the live restitution debate, exploring dilemmas and stories behind contested colonial-era objects.

Nxt Museum
An interactive digital-puppetry installation by The Hague studio YONK, where visitors use gestures to guide animated characters into shared stories.

Nxt Museum
A group show with LI-MA tracing the first years of MonteVideo, the Netherlands' pioneering video-art gallery, from 1970s electronic imagery to today's immersive artists.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Landmark retrospective spanning more than seven decades of Kusama's work — painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, fashion, collage and happenings.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
The Chinese photographer's first major solo show outside China: recent series on family, youth and daily style in Xinjiang, where fashion becomes a lens for social observation.

Allard Pierson
A World Pride show drawing on the archaeology, book and theatre collections to surface forgotten LGBTIQ+ stories across history.

Eye Filmmuseum
The first comprehensive Dutch exhibition on Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, gathering early, little-known and newly commissioned film works about ordinary lives in late-capitalist society.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
Four decades of Nadav Kander's photography, from his Prix Pictet-winning Yangtze River series to portraits of Obama and David Lynch, drawn together by fragility, time and quiet intensity.

Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam (Dutch Resistance Museum)
37 paintings and two sculptures by Hella de Jonge exploring war, family trauma and collective memory rooted in her Jewish family's history.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum
An installation of more than a thousand knitted strips in gold and crimson conjures the ghost of the East Indiaman Amsterdam: gold for trade and prosperity, red for colonialism and exploitation.

Rijksmuseum
Twenty-four worn, altered and reused garments dating from 1640 to 1930, from embroidered 17th-century mules to a dress passed down through generations of the Six family.

Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)
The golden age of magic through its Jewish illusionists, from Harry Houdini to Hans Klok, with tricks visitors can try themselves.

Allard PiersonFree
Free mini-show in the museum's Studio on Dutch DIY cassette culture, from VPRO's Radiola Improvisatie Salon to the Carcassettes label, with clips to listen to.

Allard Pierson
A theatre-history show on crossdressing, the Slingelandt theatre and revue star Louisette, exploring how costume and staging reshape identity.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Kexin Hao turns the corridor around the historic staircase into a body, with large anatomical drawings that read institutions as organisms, from lungs to kidney stones.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.