A near-abstract Cézanne landscape, three wartime Picassos never before shown in the UK, and a Magritte shattered by a mountain view: a major new display of modern painting opens at the Courtauld Gallery this September, the first fruits of a landmark partnership with the Reuben Foundation.
Modern Painting from the Courtauld and Reuben Collections opens on 18 September 2026, made possible by the long-term partnership between the Courtauld Gallery and the Reuben Foundation. Featuring works by Cézanne, Modigliani, Léger, Picasso and Magritte, it explores radical new approaches to painting across the first half of the 20th century.
The partnership, launched in 2025, allows works from the Reuben Collection to go on public display alongside the Courtauld’s own holdings, extending the gallery’s celebrated run of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art into the modern period. In October 2025, the Courtauld announced the largest financial gift in its history from the Reuben Foundation, support that’s also funding the Courtauld’s new Strand campus, due to open in 2029 as one of the world’s most important centres for the study of art history.
From a near-abstract Cézanne to Cubism’s fractured forms
The display opens with early 20th-century paintings from the Courtauld’s own collection, among them Paul Cézanne’s Turning Road (c.1905), a landscape conjured almost entirely from patches of colour, and Amedeo Modigliani’s Nude (c.1916), a direct, expressive take on the subject that upended convention at the time. Together they set the stage for the Reuben Collection works that follow, by painters who pushed that same innovation further still.
Major Cubist paintings by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, made between 1914 and 1918 during a period of intense avant-garde experimentation, take Cézanne’s patchwork brushwork to new extremes, breaking their subjects into fragmented parts that look almost still in the process of forming. A highlight here is Man Ray’s monumental Black Widow (Nativity), painted in New York in 1915 and not exhibited in the UK for more than fifty years. Best known as a modernist photographer, Man Ray began as a painter, and this early work is a genuinely epic figure painting built from Cubism and painted collage.
Three wartime Picassos, none previously shown in the UK
A group of three Picasso paintings from the Second World War shows the artist reworking the traditions of portraiture and still life alike. Two portraits, of his partner Marie-Thérèse Walter (1937) and of photographer Dora Maar (1939), have never previously been exhibited in this country, the latter a genuinely raw, unsettling image of Maar made during the war. They’re shown alongside Still Life with Basket of Fruits and Flowers (1942), its spiky, fraught treatment of humble objects a fair reflection of wartime Paris.
Magritte’s elusive juxtapositions, from a sunlit night sky to a shattered window
The Reuben Collection also holds a significant group of works by the Surrealist René Magritte, several of which feature here, among them The Dominion of Light and The Intimate Friend, both from the 1950s and each a classic Magritte juxtaposition, a nocturnal street lit by daytime sky, and the artist’s recurring bowler-hatted man overlaid with a wine glass and baguette. La Domaine d’Arnheim (1949) is a further highlight, its mountain landscape glimpsed through a shattered windowpane a neat summary of everything modern painting had done to pictorial convention since Cézanne.
The Courtauld Gallery has grown historically through exactly this kind of generosity, a tradition that began with founder Samuel Courtauld’s own philanthropy in the 1930s and continues through loans from other collections, including the Oskar Reinhart Collection and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham.
The London x London Take: this is a genuinely strong addition to the Courtauld’s collection on a permanent-feeling basis, not a ticketed blockbuster you need to plan around, it’s included in general admission, so pair it with the Gallery’s Impressionist mainstays on the same visit. The Man Ray and the two unseen Picasso portraits are the real reason to make time for this one specifically.
Need to know
- Where: Katja and Nicolai Tangen 20th Century Gallery, Floor 3, Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
- When: Opens 18 September 2026
- Price: Weekday and weekend tickets from £12, Courtauld Members and under-18s free
- More info: Courtauld Gallery website
