1. Reopening of the National Portrait Gallery

London

The transformation of the once-fusty NPG into an engaging, spirited, must-see museum is London’s triumph of 2023, and about much more than a building restored to its original Victorian splendour. Old favourites shine, new arrivals stun: Reynolds’ lofty Polynesian youth “Mai”, Shirin Neshat’s “Malala” adorned in Arabic script, Michael Armitage’s flamboyant tapestry starring Hackney dustmen. The NPG was founded to collect portraits for “the person represented rather than the merit of the artist”, but director Nicholas Cullinan’s judicious acquisitions square that circle — biography and great art coexist here. As museums are increasingly, devastatingly, driven by politics (look no further than this year’s Tate Britain rehang), the NPG is a beacon, celebrating the individual and, in beautifully open, democratic displays, the connections between us. David Hockney’s current show (to January 21) is pure joy.

2. Vermeer

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The decade’s most anticipated exhibition, this unrepeatable, largest-ever gathering — 28 of Vermeer’s surviving 37 paintings — fulfilled every promise. Seeing the works together deepened the experience of each one, enclosing the viewer in the magic circle of a domestic world rooted in the real — opening from the crystalline panorama of Delft into light-flooded Dutch interiors, glistening pearls, the women in the yellow fur-trimmed jacket, their rapturous gazes filling the picture — yet transcendent. Amsterdam’s coup was not just assembling masterpieces but treating them reverently: 10 large galleries for this small oeuvre, allowing the paintings to breathe, and visitors too — a new bar for sensitive Old Master staging.

3. Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Musée d’Orsay, Paris (to February 4)

What a year for Dutch art: this too is an unprecedented, once-in-a-generation show. In Auvers for 10 weeks before his suicide, Van Gogh produced 70 paintings, the majority gathered here. Although united by a frenzied, simplified language and extreme colour, the miracle is their differences of emotional tone: the restless, trembling “Church at Auvers-sur-Oise”; fragmented space and the weighty black birds in “Wheatfield with Crows”; graceful arabesques in “Daubigny’s Garden”; the gleaming “Wheatfield with a Reaper”, where, Van Gogh insisted, death “takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold”.

4. Manet/Degas

Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Metropolitan Museum (to January 7)

The European art story of 2023 is the rise and rise of Paris. Its public museum shows, always stellar because they grow out of the city’s unique permanent collections of early Modernism, are the foundation on which commercial galleries, auctions and art fairs are building, as London’s appeal diminishes post-Brexit. This tremendous exhibition juxtaposing pioneers of the first Parisian avant-garde in the 1860s-80s demonstrated the Orsay in full force: Manet’s “The Balcony” and Degas’s “The Bellelli Family”, Manet’s “Olympia” and Degas’s “L’Absinthe”; “Monsieur and Madame Manet”, which Degas painted and Manet cut up in a rage; “The Execution of Maximilian”, which Manet painted, his heirs cut up and Degas reassembled. The show has moved to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, a now standard Paris-America joint venture; next year’s blockbuster, Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism, is an Orsay-Washington co-production.

5. Rothko

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (to April 2)

Paris’s second trump card is its lavish private museums, led by Bernard Arnault’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Frank Gehry’s irresistible cloudscape building in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Arnault can afford to borrow what he likes, and what he likes currently are the giants of 20th-century American abstraction. Rothko at full stretch, from surprising early figurative pieces to the mysterious late grey-black paintings, is sensuous, violent, scintillating, immersive. This follows last year’s landmark Joan Mitchell presentation; Ellsworth Kelly comes next spring.

6. Philip Guston

Tate Modern, London (to February 25)

For its violent Ku Klux Klan imagery, Philip Guston was postponed following George Floyd’s murder and the surge of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Guston is always timely, always dangerous. “What would it be like to be evil?” he asked, then painted cartoonish hooded Klansmen driving around in absurd little cars, terrorising towns, or making portraits, or malevolently asleep. Tracing the arc of a controversial career that mirrored the turmoil of postwar America, Tate’s show is pitch-perfect — the museum in finest form after feeble spring offerings (Hilma af Klint, minor next to Mondrian; Elizabeth Siddal, wretched alongside Rossetti) about forgettable female artists.

7. Lisetta Carmi

Estorick Collection, London (to december 17); Villa Bardini, Florence

And yet there remain magnificent women artists to seize from obscurity. Top of Art Review’s Power 100 list for 2023 is Nan Goldin, whose “Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, documenting LGBT+ subculture, shocked in New York back in 1985. Who knew that Lisetta Carmi had got there decades earlier — and in patriarchal Italy? In two excellent exhibitions, her lurid but loving 1960s colour photographs of Genoa’s transgender community, plus crystalline black-and-white chronicles of the port’s dockyard and steel workers, were revelations: for their formal brilliance, immediacy, humanity. Carmi died aged 98 last summer; for me she was the discovery of the year.

8. Spain and the Hispanic World

Royal Academy, London

How does a nation or a culture tell its story through art? This grand, fizzing, full show — Velázquez and Sorolla, polychrome Madonnas, fanciful mapmakers, medieval Alhambra silks — recalled the glory days in the 2000s-10s when the RA’s vast genre-crossing exhibitions (Bronze, From Russia) really lived up to Burlington House’s sumptuous galleries. More please.

9. Artists in a Time of War

Castello di Rivoli, Turin

This impossibly ambitious, haunting show opened a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and closed last month while war raged in Gaza. Inspired by working with Kyiv-based sculptor Nikita Kadan, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev explored how artists respond to war’s “horror and its inexplicability”, from Goya — the suggestion that war demands fantastical, grotesque art — and Dalí to Zoran Mušič, visual chronicler of Dachau, and Michael Rakowitz.

10. Picasso

Everywhere

Only a hermit could miss that 2023 is the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death. Among 50 exhibitions across Europe and America (none in the UK), no museum quite knew what to do: suspicion of mythmaking and fear-by-association with misogyny forestalled any complete retrospective. There were choice small ventures, the Minotaur memorably meeting the Farnese Bull at Picasso and Classical Antiquity at Naples’ National Archaeological Museum.

A nadir was Paris’s Musée Picasso removing most of his works for Sophie Calle’s pitifully pretentious exhibition À toi de faire, ma mignonne. The Centre Pompidou’s expansive show of works on paper Endlessly Drawing (to January 15) both goes to the source and liberates Picasso for the future, nailing him, apolitically, as one of the greatest draughtsmen ever — the impulse for an oeuvre so protean that we will still argue over it for the next half-century.

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