From the March 2026 issue of Apollo.

From seascapes by Monet in Frankfurt to Ovidian visions in Amsterdam, there is a host of shows across the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany within easy reach of Maastricht.

Metamorphoses
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Until 25 May

Devoting an entire volume of his influential Schilderboek (1604) to the subject, the Flemish artist Karel van Mander declared Ovid’s Metamorphoses a ‘Painter’s Bible’: an inexhaustible treasury of myths for artists to conjure with. This display explores the Roman poet’s ubiquity throughout the early modern period, with major paintings by Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens and Arcimboldo, while also considering Ovid’s influence on more recent artists, including Rodin, Magritte and Louise Bourgeois.

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark
Bundeskunsthalle Bonn
Until 23 August

Peter Hujar is best known for his photographic portraits: essential records of the downtown New York scene of the 1970s and ’80s in which he was a key participant until his death from Aids-related pneumonia in 1987. Curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar and his friend and printer Gary Schneider, this exhibition was widely acclaimed during its first run at Raven Row in London last year for revealing the true breadth of Hujar’s vision. Portraits of friends and collaborators including Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, P aul Thek and William S. Burroughs, ranging from the tender to the provocative, are on display alongside less well-known compositions, including Hujar’s studies of the glittering waters of the Hudson.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: They have always been here
Kunsthal Rotterdam
Until 12 April

Born in Zimbabwe, raised partly in South Africa and based in the UK since she was 17, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami has made her name over the past decade with densely layered paintings, often drawing on family photographs and combining painterly realism with cacophonous compositions that evoke the fragmentary nature of identity in a globalised world. In this exhibition, alongside a new series of her vivid paintings Hwami presents two bronzes: her first foray into sculpture.

Monet on the Normandy Coast: The Discovery of Étretat
Städel Museum, Frankfurt
19 March–5 July

In the 1850s, the remote fishing village of Étretat became a tourist hotspot, the Parisian bourgeoisie lured to the Normandy coast each summer by dramatic chalk cliffs and sea stacks. At the heart of this display are 24 paintings by Claude Monet – but with some 170 works in total, the exhibition is at pains to place Monet alongside many other painters and writers who have exemplified an ongoing cultural fascination with Étretat, including Delacroix, Courbet, Guy de Maupassant and Maurice Leblanc, author of the Arsène Lupin stories.

Saul Steinberg: The Americans, Part 2
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
Until 19 April

In 1958, Saul Steinberg – best known for the drawings he contributed to the New Yorker for nearly 60 years – created a monumental frieze for the American Pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels. More than 70 metres long, the colossal collage comprises eight vignettes of mid-century American life – from upmarket cocktail parties to downtown office workers in their trilbies – in Steinberg’s distinctive graphic style. Rarely shown, because of its scale and fragility, the work made headlines last spring when three of its scenes were displayed at Paris Fashion Week; now, the Royal Museums present a second selection of the newly restored panels.

Bellezza e bruttezza: Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance
Bozar, Brussels
Until 14 June

Renaissance artists were inspired by examples from antiquity in striving to depict ideal beauty – yet this exhibition contends that they were just as energetic in their pursuit of beauty’s opposite. Whether in grotesque caricatures by Leonardo or social satires by Matsys, both the visual and moral dimensions of ugliness were redefined in the period from the late 15th to the late 16th century. Artists also revisited what it meant to be beautiful; pictured is a portrait by Titian in three-quarter profile, a way for painters to represent a more real, less schematised notion of feminine beauty.

Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral
Kunstmuseum den Haag
Until 6 April

Now 98 years old (and still painting almost every day), Lois Dodd worked alongside Willem de Kooning and Alex Katz in mid-century New York but had to wait until 2012 for her first major museum retrospective. Since then, her crisp, cool figurative style has gained wide recognition, underscored by this first European survey. Some 120 works, spanning eight decades, make plain both the intensity with which Dodd observes her immediate surroundings, and the subtlety with which she translates them into paint.

Ellen von Unwerth: My Circus
Fotomuseum aan het Vrijthof, Maastricht
Until 13 September

Ellen von Unwerth spent three years in her youth working as a knife-thrower’s assistant at Circus Roncalli in Munich – an experience, this exhibition suggests, that continues to exert an influence on her work, which has long brought a note of the carnivalesque into fashion photography. Around 160 works are on show, including her breakthrough portraits of Claudia Schiffer from the late 1980s, black-and-white depictions of celebrities such as Naomi Campbell, and more colourful recent works.

From the March 2026 issue of Apollo.