Venice Biennale 2026 opens: In Minor Keys, and what 130 years of exhibitions teach us about art that eventually ends up in an attic

On Saturday 9 May 2026 the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale opens, with previews for press and trade visitors from 6 May. Until 22 November, the world’s largest international art event is expected to draw between 500,000 and 800,000 visitors to the Giardini and the Arsenale.

For a Belgian antiques and art authentication platform, this is not distant news. The Biennale, together with the older Paris Salon tradition, is the mechanism by which the art world has been deciding for centuries which painters, sculptors and graphic artists will still be known a hundred years from now. What hangs in Venice moves prices, reputations and collections for two years afterward. And a fraction of that, often in the form of signed lithographs or smaller works on paper, eventually ends up in a Belgian living room, in an attic, in a box no one has opened since an aunt left it ten years ago.

This article is about that bridge. Between the stage of Venice and the quiet corners of your own house.

The Venice Biennale: a century and three decades old

The first Biennale opened in 1895, organised by the city of Venice as a tribute to the silver jubilee of King Umberto I of Italy. The ambition was great. Venice wanted to position itself as the capital of modern art, at a time when modern museums as we know them today barely existed. The Museum of Modern Art in New York would not open until 1929, the Centre Pompidou in 1977. Venice was thirty to eighty years ahead.

In 1895 the exhibition counted 285 artworks and drew about 200,000 visitors, an unprecedented draw for a city of that size. The Biennale quickly became a fixed appointment, with later expansions to architecture, dance, theatre, music and cinema. Today the Biennale Arte is the mother of all art biennials worldwide. Sao Paulo, Whitney, Documenta, Manifesta, all have found their model in what Venice did.

The Biennale was set up in 1895 as a biennial appointment, but two world wars interrupted the cycle. The 1916 and 1918 editions were cancelled because of the First World War. The 1944 and 1946 editions because of the Second, with the next edition resuming only in 1948. In addition, the 1974 exhibition, organised in solidarity with Chile after the Pinochet coup, was not given an official edition number. As a result, 2026 marks the 61st edition across 131 years of history.

130 years of exhibiting yields something special: a continuous archive of who was considered important at any given moment in history. James Ensor exhibited in Venice in 1900 and 1907. Constant Permeke participated in 1922, 1932 and 1934, with a major retrospective in 1948. Marc Chagall, Henry Moore, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, all were celebrated in Venice in the post-war period, often with a Golden Lion that definitively cemented their international reputation.

The Golden Lion is the most important distinction in contemporary art. Two categories carry weight: the Golden Lion for best pavilion and the Golden Lion for best artist in the central exhibition. Whoever wins one sees attention turn within 24 hours. For a living artist it often means that prices for his or her work double or quintuple within a year.

For 2026, that schedule has changed exceptionally. On 30 April 2026 the international jury of the 61st edition resigned collectively, a week before the opening, after disagreement over the treatment of pavilions of countries whose leaders are subject to International Criminal Court charges. La Biennale di Venezia has decided not to award the classical jury prizes for this edition. Instead, there will be a public vote, the so-called “Visitors’ Lions”, with the result announced on Sunday 22 November 2026, the closing day. The traditional jury scheme is expected to return from 2028.

The Salon tradition: older than Venice

The Biennale is young compared to what preceded it. The modern exhibition finds its foundation in Paris, where the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was founded in 1648. The academy held its first public exhibition in 1667 in the Louvre, in the Salon Carré. That is where the word “Salon” comes from that we still use today.

The Paris Salon was held annually from the eighteenth century onward and constituted the heaviest verdict in the art world until the 1880s. Those who were admitted could live from their work. Those who were rejected fought for their bread.

In 1863 the Salon jury rejected so many works that Emperor Napoleon III had a separate exhibition arranged for the rejected artists: the Salon des Refusés. There hung, among other works, Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The scandal that followed turned out, in retrospect, to be a pivotal moment in modern art history. From that rejection grew alternative venues in the decades that followed: the Salon des Indépendants in 1884, where Seurat, Signac, Cézanne and Van Gogh exhibited. The Salon d’Automne in 1903, where the Fauves broke through.

So between the founding of the Salon in Paris and the first Biennale in Venice lies 228 years. A centuries-long chain of public exhibitions that gradually modernised the art world. Each of those salons and biennials brought thousands of artists onto the stage who have since largely vanished from collective memory, but whose work still circulates. In museums, in private collections, and, for the accessible segment, also in attics.

Belgium’s place in this story

Belgium has been present at the Biennale since the very first edition in 1895. The Belgian pavilion in the Giardini has stood there since 1907, making it one of the oldest permanent pavilions on the grounds. Through Belgian participation, numerous artists from our country have come onto the Venetian stage who today are part of the Belgian canon: Théo Van Rysselberghe, James Ensor, Constant Permeke, Léon Spilliaert, Rik Wouters, and in later decades Pierre Alechinsky, Marcel Broodthaers, Jan Fabre, Luc Tuymans and Michaël Borremans.

This continuity matters. It means that a Belgian who today finds a work in a family home by an artist from, say, the interwar period has a reasonable chance that the artist once stood at the Biennale. Not necessarily in the central exhibition, but in the Belgian pavilion, or in another national pavilion, or in one of the side exhibitions always organised around the Biennale.

Belgian collectors and connoisseurs also have a long tradition of Biennale acquisitions. Several major private collections in our country were built up through attendance at the Biennale’s preview days, when works were released to the official audience. What those collectors bought in Venice in the 1960s and 1970s passed a generation later to heirs who sometimes did and sometimes did not know how to place it. Therein lies part of the answer to the question why an ordinary Belgian living room suddenly has a signed Calder or Miró on the wall.

In Minor Keys: the theme of 2026

The 61st edition of the Biennale carries the title “In Minor Keys”, a choice by curator Koyo Kouoh. Kouoh, originally from Cameroon, was director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. She was known for her work around African and diasporic artists and would have been the first female African curator of the central exhibition of the Biennale.

In October 2024 she was appointed by La Biennale di Venezia. On 10 May 2025 she died unexpectedly, a year before the opening she was preparing. With the consent of her family and the curatorial team, the Biennale has decided to carry out her plans unchanged. The theme “In Minor Keys” thus becomes a posthumous homage.

The theme itself is a statement. Kouoh deliberately chooses not the loud or the spectacular. She advocates attention for the soft, the underground, the unfinished. For artists who work in minor keys, who do not shout for attention, but whose work, precisely through that restrained tone, touches something lasting.

The spirit of the theme touches something fundamental. Most important works are not loud at the moment they come into being. They become so later.

What a curator does that the market does not

The fundamental power of the Biennale, and by extension of any major curatorial exhibition, is the transfer of authority. A work that hangs in Venice is seen by specialists around the world. The curator selects. The public discusses. Reviews follow. The market watches, wallet ready.

A work that hangs in Venice and is sold for 80,000 euros at Sotheby’s in 2027 receives, after the first sale, a second layer of authority: market authority. But the curatorial authority came first, and that is more durable.

For those who buy art, or inherit it, or find it: this nuance is essential. Price is not the same as authority. A work can be expensive because it is fashionable. A work can be cheap because the market has not yet caught up. Or because the artist has not yet been included in an important exhibition. Or because the provenance has not been sufficiently documented.

Making that distinction is the quiet discipline of the specialist. In an earlier blog we worked out the difference between appraisal value and market value for antiques, for those who want to understand more about how value comes into being outside the attention of curators.

Two stories from Venice to a Belgian living room

So much for the history. Now the concrete part. How does a work that once hung in Venice end up with ordinary Belgian families?

The pattern is almost always the same. The original paintings and sculptures of Biennale veterans have long been in museums, in protected private collections, or in the hands of a handful of European families where they have been preserved for generations. What circulates in attics and inheritances are mainly prints, lithographs, etchings, smaller works on paper, and signed editions. That is where the real discovery potential lies.

Two stories help to see how it works.

The Permeke story

Constant Permeke participated in the Biennale in 1922, 1932 and 1934. In 1948 he was given a major retrospective in Venice that confirmed his international reputation. At the same time, from the 1930s onwards Permeke also produced woodcuts and lithographs, often in limited editions of 50 to 200 pieces, signed in pencil and numbered.

Such a woodcut from an edition of 100 was sold in the 1950s and 1960s through Flemish galleries, auctions and associations of art friends. A large part of those editions, after the death of the original buyers in the 1980s and 1990s, passed on to children and grandchildren, often without the heirs knowing exactly what they had.

Today these pieces still appear regularly at flea markets in West and East Flanders. A signed Permeke woodcut in good condition typically lies between 400 and 2,500 euros, depending on the motif and the edition. The original paintings range between 5,000 and 100,000 euros or more.

The Chagall story

Marc Chagall exhibited several times at the Biennale. From the 1950s onwards he worked intensively with the Paris publisher Aimé Maeght and printer Mourlot. There the lithographs were created that we know today as the “classic” Chagalls: the circus series, the biblical stories, the annual posters for the exhibitions at Maeght. Editions between 50 and 250 pieces, signed in pencil, with a blind stamp from Maeght or Mourlot.

In the 1960s and 1970s several Belgian galleries had subscriptions to these editions. Vandenberghe in Bruges, Patrick Derom in Brussels, smaller regional galleries in Antwerp and Ghent. For a fixed annual fee, a subscriber received one to three signed lithographs per year, framed.

That custom has largely disappeared after the 1980s. But the lithographs remained. They now hang in halls, living rooms, bedrooms of children who inherited them from their parents. A signed, numbered Chagall lithograph from such an edition lies today between 1,500 and 6,000 euros, depending on the motif and edition.

Other names, mentioned briefly

Besides Permeke and Chagall, on your possible attic also stand: James Ensor (etchings, 1,500 to 8,000 euros), Léon Spilliaert (watercolours and drawings, prices have risen sharply in recent years), Pierre Alechinsky (lithographs and silkscreens, 600 to 4,000 euros), Joan Miró (lithographs via Maeght, 800 to 4,500 euros), Alexander Calder (lithographs with the typical primary colour fields, 1,200 to 5,000 euros), Henry Moore (etchings and lithographs, 800 to 4,000 euros). And further the Salon veterans we encountered above: Signac, Cézanne and Van Gogh have all left works on paper that still circulate, although rarer and more expensive than the post-war lithograph makers.

How to recognise what you have

Suppose that now, after reading this article, you look in your hall or attic and think: maybe something like that hangs there. What should you do?

Three characteristics make the difference between a worthless reproduction and a signed edition.

• The signature. A signed lithograph has a handwritten signature by the artist in pencil, usually in the lower right. Not printed. A pencil signature is always slightly irregular and has the typical sheen of graphite. A printed signature is flat and uniform.
• The edition number. In the lower left there is usually a fraction such as 47/100 or 23/250. That means this specific copy is the 47th of an edition of 100. Lower editions are more valuable. Some editions have separate designations such as “EA” (Épreuve d’Artiste, artist’s proof), “HC” (Hors Commerce, not for sale), or roman numerals I/X (the first ten proof prints).
• The blind stamp. Many galleries and publishers applied a pressed blind stamp in the margin of the paper. Maeght (Paris, for Miró and Chagall), Mourlot (Paris, printer of Picasso, Chagall and Miró), Galerie Vandenberghe (Bruges), Patrick Derom (Brussels). A blind stamp considerably increases the reliability of an edition.

What you preferably do not do: take the work out of the frame to examine the back without the right tools. Old paper works are fragile, especially at the edges. Better take photos of the front, a close-up of the signature, a close-up of the edition number, and, if possible, a photo of the work in its frame from a distance. That is enough for a first reading.

For those who inherit something instead of finding something, the whole process is somewhat different. A good introduction to that is inheriting antiques: first steps.

What AntiqBot does when you have a work in your hands at home

AntiqBot is not a replacement for a curator or a specialised appraiser. It is a first filter. You upload photos of a work and the system proposes an attribution with a substantiated confidence rating, plus a value range based on comparable sales.

What the system does not do, and deliberately does not do, is issue a verdict of authenticity that holds up legally. Authentication remains human work, often with physical inspection, paper analysis, signature comparison with the catalogue raisonné, and sometimes even UV or infrared photography of the work.

But for the first question, the question of whether this is even worth investigating further, there was long no good intermediate step. That is where AntiqBot sits.

In that respect, the spirit of In Minor Keys also fits this work. Not all art is loud. Not all attention is deserved. Sometimes the most important work sits in silence, in a corner, in a box, in a forgotten inheritance. A first correct reading is the key there.

Enjoy the art

Finally this. We write this article from a double motive.

One is professional. AntiqBot exists to help people discover what they have at home. But the other motive is more personal.

The Venice Biennale 2026 is an event of international scale, with hundreds of artists from hundreds of countries. Most readers of this article will not travel there, and that is perfectly fine. But there is something special about the thought that in the same week that Venice calibrates the names of the future grand masters, somewhere in a Belgian home a grandchild takes a painting of a great-grandparent out of the cellar and starts wondering what it actually is.

Both experiences, however different in scale, are about the same thing: attention to what is older than ourselves, made by someone who took the trouble to record something, and which we now have in our hands.

Enjoy the pavilions, the Italian sun, the fact that for 130 years people have come together to look at what contemporaries make. Enjoy, if you happen to pass through in November, the announcement of the Visitors’ Lions, and the discussions that follow.

And when you come home, take a real look around your own house. At the painting that has been hanging somewhere for twenty years without you really seeing it. At the box in the attic you have wanted to clear out for years. At the inheritance that is still waiting for someone to give it attention.

The chance that there is a Rembrandt among them is small. The chance that there is something that was once at a Biennale or Salon is greater than you think.

The 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, runs from 9 May to 22 November 2026. Enjoy the art. The rest comes later.